Category: Articles
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As the American Jazz Museum turns 20, ‘The Legacy Plays On’
Before the American Jazz Museum opened in 1997, it could be difficult for jazz lovers to connect with the golden era of Kansas City jazz in the 1920s and 1930s. In the late 1990s, outstanding local musicians performed regularly at clubs around town — just as they do today — providing proof plenty of how lively the jazz scene is here for a metropolitan area as small as ours.
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Kansas City’s Quiet Virtuoso
Close your eyes and imagine a musical virtuoso. Who are you seeing? Mozart, with his powdered wigs? Liszt, with his aquiline nose? The Beatles, with their mop haircuts? Prince, with his velvet jackets? Toscanini? Bach? Elvis? Pavarotti? Sting? You probably didn’t see a middle-aged man in a pullover sweater named Robert Pherigo. But if you ask a musician in Kansas City to name a virtuoso, Robert’s name usually tops the list.
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Aspiring Inventors Gather at KCAI for Make48 Inventathon
From September 28-30, the Kansas City Art Institute will play host to the fifth Make48 Inventathon, reprising their role last year as host to the fourth Inventathon, when 17 teams crowded into the David T. Beals III Studios for Art and Technology, the school’s new high-tech digital fabrication shop. They were there to compete for a chance to star in a reality TV show and get their inventions to market.
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Mid America Freedom Band Offers “Programming Diversity, with Some Guts”
The Mid America Freedom Band has planned an adventurous 15th season. Themed “Pioneers and Frontiers,” the upcoming concerts will celebrate historic revolutionaries, musical mavericks and civil rights pioneers, as well as new frontiers in sound and space, with the American expansion of the West and the exploration of the universe. MAFB is Kansas City’s only LGBTQIA + ally community band.
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Cool Tools
As the current sex symbol of cool tools, 3D printers easily attract ogling eyes by producing a virtually endless variety of objects seemingly out of thin air. It almost makes you feel sorry for the robots and other gadgets operating at the heady confluence of art and science — many of them accessible to the public, others well out of the spotlight — that also serve Kansas City’s cutting-edge tool scene.