Kansas City’s jazz museum taps into community to revitalize historic Gem Theater, 18th & Vine
- Matti Gellman
- Mar 1, 2022
- 7 min read
Regina Goodwin of Raytown has spent the first Saturday of every month practicing her Kansas City two-step in the American Jazz Museum’s atrium. On a recent Saturday night, the 50-year-old danced across the tiled floor, cloaked in dark blue and purple light, swaying with her partner to the groove of ’90s R&B.
“I don’t even know who I was dancing with earlier,” Goodwin said after retreating from the dance floor. “It’s one of the places I can go where I feel safe. We might know the person, we might not, but that’s not important… I came alone here tonight but I still don’t feel alone. There’s a difference. It’s family here.” The event has been a regular offering from the American Jazz Museum since August 2021, when it held the first two-step class in the Gem Theater. It began as an effort to attract more people to the art and music offered in the historic 18th & Vine Jazz District and its venues. One of the venues, operated by the museum, the Gem Theater, has been a central fixture in the historically Black neighborhood since its days as a movie theater in the 1920s. Built in 1912, and originally named the Star Theater, the venue is on the African American Heritage Trail of Kansas City. But keeping the century-old Gem Theater, and the museum’s other venue relevant has been a struggle for decades. Once the theater stopped showing movies in the 1960s it slowly faded from the limelight. In the 1980’s, Mayor Richard Berkley and then City Councilman Emanuel Cleaver spearheaded an 18th & Vine revitalization effort with the Gem Theater as the fulcrum.
Since the venue was restored, turned into a 500-seat performing arts center, its journey, tied to the American Jazz Museum and the Blue Room, has been arduous: In 2017 there was a proposed takeover by the city, then it was recommended the museum shut down and undergo a complete rethinking in 2018.
The museum in 2019 appointed a new executive director, and not long after, tapped James McGee to serve as Sr. Manager of Visual and Virtual Experience, charged with using community partnerships to bring people back to the Gem and the Blue Room across the way. McGee, 45, has spent most of his life jamming with musicians around Kansas City, and developing connections within the industry. His family has deep ties to 18th & Vine through the Mutual Musicians Foundation, one of the oldest unions for Black musicians in the country. “The Gem Theater, the museum, it’s crucial to preserving our narrative. And I want to make sure that everyone can come here and be a part of that,” McGee said at the museum’s Kansas City two-step lounge event, which he helped organize. Despite the challenges, he sees this role, building connections within the community to put together events that highlight the jazz district and its venues, as his “next big break.” According to Rashida Phillips, the museum’s new executive director, McGee’s networking and passion for 18th & Vine has already left indelible marks. “James has been able to help expand partnerships that we had in place and bring some new ones to the table,” Phillips said. “He understands so many different sides of the community.”
Connecting to community Since being hired in 2020, McGee has brought the museum partnerships with Band of Angels, an Overland Park foundation that provides instruments and music lessons to kids in need, and he’s coordinated events and field trips with Kansas City Public Schools, Phillips said. Partners with the museum run programming for events at one of its venues, like the Gem Theater. Phillips and McGee use the events to help keep the historic sites relevant while also offering support to the community. A recent partnership with University Health, formerly Truman Medical Center, called the Health Alliance, allowed the museum to help connect musicians in the neighborhood with health care during the pandemic. “Anytime you’re working with a community, It’s about the service to the community and celebrating the culture,” Phillips said. McGee said they’re “getting calls about new partnerships constantly.” Phillips could not provide a full list of current community partnerships, however, or say whether they’ve seen a significant increase. ‘Lineage between the music’ McGee, born in the San Francisco Bay area of the 1970s, fell in love with gospel music early.
His great grandfather was a pastor and he grew up in what he described as a very musical family. “There was some type of poetic thing about you,” he said. “You were a musician or an artist, a vocalist, or played an instrument.” At home he explored everything from the blues to soul. When he visited his friends he entered new worlds with Filipino, African and Spanish music bursting through stereo as his friends’ mothers cooked dinner. The diversity, he said, helped him learn to acclimate to different cultures and customs. That proved useful when he moved to Kansas City at age 13. In 1989, Kansas City’s Ivanhoe South East neighborhood, where he moved with his mother, felt like a war zone, he said. “I took a lot of punches and I learned to be a brawler when it comes to making my place in the community,” McGee said. Ultimately it was his ears not his fists that earned him his place. He would DJ for his friends, fusing his mother’s records with hip-hop.
In the beginning he was drawn to James Brown when searching for hooks for his next beat, but his mother encouraged him to explore jazz. He rejected the idea at first, until he noticed that many of the musicians he idolized began using jazz and blues samples in their hip-hop records.
“I just started to understand that there’s this lineage between the music. Hip-hop didn’t just emerge out of nowhere,” McGee said. By the time he was 18, after graduating from Grandview Missouri High School, McGee was spending weekends passing out CDs of his music in front of gas stations and at college parties across the metro. He started helping friends promote their music and book events at venues. It wasn’t easy then, he said. Business owners struggled to pay employees and were reluctant to take a chance on new talent. McGee helped bridge the gap between the two, using the relationships he had built over years in the Kansas City music scene. Sacred ground Music took McGee all across the country, but when he returned to Kansas City in 2001 he couldn’t get the venues in 18th & Vine to give him the time of day, he said. “It was like a ‘no go.’ You’re not doing any rap down there. Don’t even worry about performing at the Gem Theater,” he said. Much of Kansas City’s reputation as a jazz capital of America resulted from the contributions of legends like Andy Kirk, Mary Lou Williams, and Bennie Moten, who perfected their instruments along 18th & Vine.
Jazz icons like Count Basie and Charlie “Bird” Parker, a Kansas City native, also spent time in the city’s jazz scene — a sculpture of Parker’s head, above a stone engraving, “Bird Lives,” now stands in the district. The neighborhood was sacred ground, McGee said. It was not a place for people like him and his friends in music who were looking to create new iterations of jazz and hip-hop. But from McGee’s point of view, stifled tourism and foot traffic made the district feel past its prime.
What was once a booming center of the Black community in Kansas City had by that point faded from glory. The 18th & Vine district paled in comparison to the city’s other entertainment districts, and was largely ignored by the city west of Troost.
Former Mayor Emanuel Cleaver had pumped millions into funding a revitalization of the neighborhood, which led to the Gem Theater getting a makeover. That was in 1996 — the jazz museum opened its doors in 1997. When McGee returned to Kansas City a few years later, his cousin convinced him to come down to Vine Street and help drum up business for his barber shop and chicken restaurant. On Tuesday nights he helped his cousin in the restaurant and the rest of the week he brought the artists he managed to hang out on 18th & Vine, where they’d occasionally play impromptu performances. It helped show people around the entertainment district that there was an audience willing to hear new music, McGee said. A new direction In 2018, McGee partnered with the American Jazz Museum and the Mutual Musicians Foundation to put on an event called “Bata to the Banjo,” which combined country and Nigerian folk music. It was a new sound for jazz district. At the same time, the museum was in need of a new direction. In a report released in November 2018, a consultant for a third party-firm assessing the museum said it was ridden with “stale exhibit offerings, poor financial management and low staff morale.”
The report came a little more than a year after the museum’s board proposed moving oversight of it, the Blue Room and the Gem Theater to the city’s parks department. The proposed takeover was in part the result of operating losses and bounced checks to musicians. It underscored the continued struggles to bring 18th & Vine and its premier institutions back to the forefront and make it a self-sustaining center for music and culture. Less than two years after the report, which painted a bleak picture of the future of the museum and its venues, Phillips and McGee were brought on board. Like many venues across the city, however, the museum, the Gem and the Blue Room were impacted by the pandemic, which have made the plans for growth difficult. The Blue Room was limited to 50% occupancy to deter the spread of COVID-19 and the Gem Theater about 70% occupancy. Many of the Gem Theaters events were virtual in 2021. Budget restrictions resulting from the pandemic also led to the museum having to limit what partners are able to present a program in their venues, Phillips said. McGee said he’s confident the work they’re now doing will help revitalize not only the Gem Theater but 18th & Vine as a whole.
To him that’s not only about growth, but first getting people to walk through the doors again. “When you say revitalize that means you’re bringing something back to the state from what it was before,” McGee said. “What was it before? This was a social economic center for the Black community. It had barbershops, grocery stores, banks, restaurants, hotels.” Earlier this month, after nearly two years of conversations, the Kansas City City Council approved a proposal for apartments and retail space in 18th & Vine. The move was a promising outlook for the revitalization of the historic district. “I do believe that we have the potential to be probably the most sought after district and area in Kansas City,” McGee said. “We were able to hold on just enough of the history and the authentic culture, that if we can build off of that, I mean, we’d rival, any district in any city.”
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