Could a girl growing up in a Kansas City boarding house in the 1940s and 1950s walk up the road to the jazz clubs at 18th and Vine to hear Myra Taylor singing My Night to Dream, Mary Lou Williams swinging the band and Melba Liston on trombone?
In the mid-20th century, Kansas City was growing as a center of jazz and Black community, and musicians were influencing currents across the country. Urban Bush Women will hold the living beat of their spirit this week in the Ted Shawn Theatre at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival (July 1 to 5), as they perform SCAT! — a new dance musical with live music.
The company’s founder, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, has set a new work inspired by the brilliance of women jazz vocalists, Billie Holliday and Betty Carter and Ella Fitzgerald and many more, and the improvisations they gloried in — and by the lives of her mother and father, Dot and Al Zollar.
Her parents grew up in Kansas City, she said, in a community surging with the Great Migration. Families were coming from the segregated South, looking for work in St. Louis and Detroit and Milwaukee…