KC Quarantine: Keeping Jazz Alive During A Pandemic By Rob Scheps
of time. These are unpredictable and scary times for all, to put it mildly. I experienced disappointment, sadness, anger, and anxiety like many people. I was stuck in Kansas City, one of my favorite places and a pretty good place to be stuck. But I had to find some alternatives. Fortunately, I was staying with good friends in Kansas. I was hired to write two big band charts for guitarist John Stowell. Taking a deep breath, I told myself, “This is your job, right now.”
In March of 2020, I was busy touring, performing jazz in various places. After a string of gigs in Hawaii, Seattle, and Portland, I was traveling East in March as the pandemic worsened and spread. Following my itinerary that was set months beforehand, I went to Denver CO to play a weekend at a club with a great quartet that I’ve been working with for about two years with world class trumpeter Greg Gisbert. The COVID-19 spread was getting bad nationally, but to my surprise, the Denver shows were not canceled and went off without a hitch and with a lot of sanitizer. Dutifully following my schedule, I drove from Denver to Kansas City, MO. I arrived in KC Sunday night, ready to record over the next four days. Virus news was coming in, but the recording studio was in a private home, so we went recorded a quintet cd and a septet cd, featuring KC jazz star Bobby Watson on alto saxophonist. We recorded some exciting, swinging music and basked in the satisfaction of a job well done. Then, in a flash, Kansas and Missouri went into lockdown and we all went into quarantine, immediately. This was mid-March, and my bookings in Kansas City, New York, Memphis, Indiana, and Massachusetts were canceled. The gigs fell like dominos, nationally, in rapid succession, for all of us.
I promised John one arrangement by Memorial Day. Both arrangements were done by April 10th! I threw myself into the writing without knowing what would occur later. After finishing the charts and feeling proud of my work, I felt depressed. Now that these arrangements were done, what would I do? This was a crossroads for me, as it was for many musicians. During the lockdown, I became friends with Herschel McWilliams, a local saxophonist and webmaster who had started a site, Live Jazz KC, which provided a thorough calendar of live jazz in Kansas City. We discussed interviewing Bobby Watson live on the site. Bobby is a singular alto player and one of jazz’s most memorable and prolific composers. We’ve been friends for ages and I had been wanting to interview him for a while. This seemed like a good time to bring that idea to fruition. So, we set a date to stream a live Zoom interview on Facebook through LiveJazzKC.com. I had planned to cover Bobby’s whole life and career in 90 minutes. However, at the end of the allotted time, Bobby was still in college and hadn’t even joined Art Blakey yet! The solution, was to do Par 2 at the same time, same Bat channel, the following week. Before the live broadcast, I quickly named the show Convo Improvvo, a silly title that implies an enlightening, yet casual interview about jazz and life between friends. The shows with Bobby Watson were successful and fun. We modulated, as improvisers do, into a mode of presenting weekly shows with a panoply of jazz greats. We stuck with Convo Improvvo as the series title. I curated and conducted the interviews, while Herschel or drummer Jim Lower operated the sound and video, remotely.
Shock set in and I realized two simple but unfortunate facts: I wasn’t going to be working for quite a while and I needed to stay put for an unspecified amount Once the ball was rolling, we realized how many
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