A concert at Westport Coffee House on Sunday, July 10, felt consequential even though fewer than two dozen people paid the $10 cover charge. A quartet led by trumpeter Dave Scott and Arnold Young’s RoughTet shared the bill in a rare confluence of exceptional homegrown talent.
Scott, a New York based trumpeter raised in the Kansas City area, and the Kansas City drummer Young made waves in the region’s jazz scene alongside their eminent peer Pat Metheny several decades ago. On Sunday, the bandleaders were joined by representatives of several generations of Kansas City jazz musicians. Each participant responded to the momentous summit with inspired playing.
A rambunctious couple sitting near the bandstand hooted and hollered throughout Young’s freewheeling 45-minute opening set. They had the right idea. Assisted by his longtime compatriot John Nichols on bass and Gary Cardile on percussion, the veteran drummer acted as an irreverent version of Art Blakey as he mentored the youthful tandem of saxophonist Jacob Schwartzberg and trumpeter Quin Wallace.
Renditions of selections from their new album Fear Is the Mind Killer were gloriously raucous. Scott sat in with the RoughTet before playing a 70-minute set with the New York based Michael Eaton (the saxophonist is from nearby Liberty), bassist Jeff Harshbarger and drummer Marty Morrison.
Eaton took several Coltrane-esque solos and a few of Scott’s distinctive statements resembled variations on “Flight of the Bumblebee.” Yet the ensemble mostly shifted between the proto-harmolodics of early Ornette Coleman, ominous post-bop and joyful Kansas City swing. Such transcendent displays of left-of-center artistic excellence in the face of public indifference are a hallmark of Kansas City’s jazz scene.