Published in 2018 as part of the University of Nebraska’s Expanding Frontiers: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Series, Queering Kansas City Jazz: Gender, Performance and the History of a Scene possesses an admirably confrontational perspective.
Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone, also the author of the 2015 study Queerness in Heavy Metal Music: Metal Bent, argues that the established canon of scholarship by the likes of Terry Teachout, Nathan Pearson, Frank Driggs, Chuck Haddix and Stanley Crouch is marred by conscious or unconscious “heteronormative” and/or race-related biases.
Insisting an essential component of Kansas City’s jazz history has been unjustifiably marginalized by incomplete analyses, Clifford-Napoleone makes a case for overlooked entertainers including Edna Jacobs. She suggests “sex tourism…(was) an integral part of the jazz scene” in her investigation of Pendergast-era jazz-adjacent nightclubs like Dante’s Inferno and blues-fueled brothels.
Unfortunately, Queering Kansas City Jazz is written in the jargon associated with contemporary academia. Clifford-Napoleone’s disruptive ideas are often expressed in dense passages complicated by words and phrases such as intersectionality, reterritorialization and non-normative gender performance.
The occasionally baffling idiom doesn’t negate Clifford-Napoleone’s healthy skepticism. In decrying the institutional “disciplinary monotony” that inhibits artistic vitality and diminishes public enthusiasm for jazz in Kansas City, the author’s rejection of accepted wisdom points to new possibilities.