Kansas City jazz Kansas City jazz Kansas City jazz is a style of jazz that developed in Kansas City during the 1920s and 1930s, which marked the transition from the structured big band style to the musical improvisation style of Bebop. The hard-swinging, bluesy transition style is bracketed by Count Basie who in 1929 signed with the Bennie Moten's Kansas City Orchestra and Kansas City native Charlie Parker who ushered in the Bebop style in America. "While New Orleans was the birthplace of jazz, America's music grew up in Kansas City". Kansas City is known as one of the most popular "cradles of
Jazz the 1950s and 1960s, Dixieland was one of the most commercially popular jazz styles in the US, Europe, and Japan, although critics paid little attention to it. In 1944, jazz impresario Norman Granz organized the first Jazz at the Philharmonic concert in Los Angeles, which helped make a star of Nat "King" Cole and Les Paul. In 1946, he founded Clef, discovering Canadian jazz pianist Oscar Peterson in 1949 and merging Clef with his new label Verve in 1956, which advanced the career of Ella Fitzgerald. By the end of the 1940s, the nervous energy and tension of bebop was