Crossroads & Jazz Walk

Welcome to Kansas City, and to 18th and Vine. This neighborhood is internationally recognized as a historic point of origin of jazz, and as the historic center of African American business and culture in Kansas City. Kansas City jazz is a riff-based, blues-influenced sound, developed during jam sessions in the neighborhood's crowded clubs. Many jazz musicians of the 1930s and 1940s lived or got their start here, including Charlie Parker.

Congressman Emanuel Cleaver once called 18th and Vine America's third most recognized street, after Broadway and Hollywood Boulevard. In 1991, a historic district of 35 buildings here was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Around you are the Gem Theater, the longtime offices of the African American newspaper The Call and the historic Lincoln Building. Six blocks north was 12th and Vine, the corner made famous by the 1952 Leiber and Stoller song Kansas City, later recorded by the Beatles.

This is the American Jazz Museum, which preserves the history of American jazz, and especially Kansas City jazz. It opened on September 5, 1997, and it shares its building with the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. Inside are exhibits on Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Big Joe Turner, Thelonious Monk and Etta James, along with listening stations where you can learn the styles and rhythms of jazz. The museum is a Smithsonian Affiliate.

One treasure is the Graphon alto saxophone Charlie Parker played at the famous January 1953 concert at Massey Hall in Toronto, alongside Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Charles Mingus and Max Roach. The museum's jazz club, the Blue Room, has its entrance right at the corner of 18th and Vine. It's modeled on the Blue Room of the Street Hotel, which hosted players like Charlie Parker and Bennie Moten in the 1930s, and it still has live music several nights a week. The Gem Theater, built in 1912, is also part of the museum, directly across 18th Street.