#stevepaul

I revisited one of the great jazz albums this morning: "King Pleasure Sings/Annie Ross Sings." King Pleasure's version of "Parker's Mood" is a high point of the Kansas City ethos in jazz. This record also includes "Red Top," a tune written by KC sax player Ben Kynard, who was in the Lionel Hampton band in the early 1950s.

That sent me back to a moment in my music-writing life. A dozen years ago I did a group portrait of The Scamps, a jazz vocal outfit with origins in the 1940s and something of a complicated, though much loved history, even into the early years of the 21st century.

So I dug the story out -- it was first published in The Kansas City Star on Feb. 24, 2002 -- and present again:

After half a century, Scamps still can swing

By Steve Paul

If you were a Kansas City hepcat out on the town in the early 1950s, you might have ended up at one of the late-night watering holes that thrived along U.S. 40 east of the city limits: Tootie's Mayfair, the Half-a-Hill, the Plantation Club.

You might have danced with your sweetheart. Or somebody else's sweetheart. If you were lucky, you would've been energized by one of the hippest groups of the day - the Red Hot Scamps.

They sang four-part harmonies. They did skits. And at every show they cranked it up and played their hit recording.

Called "Red Hot" for good reason, it burned fast. In that moment there was nothing hotter and nothing cooler. You were moving to Rudy Massingale's long saxophone solo, a honking performance of major proportions: muscular and urgent, protorock 'n' roll with a jazz-and-blues chaser.

Half a century later, Massingale is still a Scamp, or, more accurately, he's a Scamp again. And although no longer Red Hot, the Scamps are something even bigger than their music.

In a city that pays not much more than lip service to the jazz of its heritage, the Scamps have become a symbol, an institution, a repository of what many people think of as the spectrum of Kansas City jazz.

And this spring a recording that the Scamps made 17 years ago, a disc that captures the heart and history of the Kansas City sound, will be dusted off and released for the first time.

"We're just about the last of that era, " says Lucky Wesley, the Scamps' bassist and nasal-voiced tenor.

They're Kansas City's version of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, without the hallowed headquarters and without that New Orleans group's international reputation.

"In a way it's a very spiritual thing, " local pianist and club owner Tim Whitmer says of the Scamps. "Being in this band for these guys is to carry on a tradition. Not just the band's tradition, but the tradition of the music."

Crowd pleasers

It's late afternoon, a recent Saturday, at the Phoenix Piano Bar & Grill, a brick-walled place in downtown Kansas City.

The Scamps - four members comprise the core of the group today - are squeezed between the grand piano and the club's front windows.

"If you've got a request, we'll play it, " Lucky Wesley informs the crowd between numbers. "And if we don't know it, we'll play it anyway, although you might not recognize it."

Marty and Judy Hughes are sitting at the piano bar, a handshake away from Rudy Massingale, the founding pianist who long ago gave up the saxophone. The Hugheses have driven from St. Louis.

"It's our 40th trip in nine years, " Marty Hughes says.

"We need a new car, " Judy Hughes adds.

All so they can hear the Scamps play a crowd-pleasing "Kansas City" or a swinging "Sweet Lorraine."

"I was born in 1942, " Marty Hughes says. "I'll be 60 in March. I remember the music of the 1940s. ... It's the greatest music the world has ever known. So we keep coming back."

As Kansas City jazz originals such as Jay McShann and Claude "Fiddler" Williams slow down - their careers began before World War II, after all - such relative youngsters as Massingale, 76, and fellow Scamp Art Jackson, 82, have become the music's default torchbearers.

The music of the '40s. The music of the '50s.

The Scamps these days even do "The Girl From Ipanema" and "What a Wonderful World, " Louis Armstrong's invincible pop anthem of the 1960s.

Always adaptable to what audiences want to hear, the Scamps long have been known for radiating good-time entertainment. They don't go way out on improvisational limbs like a Charlie Parker or a Bobby Watson. They're not chamber artists like the Modern Jazz Quartet or performers who require rapt attention.

They play the kind of music that doesn't suffer much from table clatter, flaring saute pans and mingling crowds. Their swing can penetrate all that. They feed off the audience and put on an infectious show that makes jazz safe for people who might otherwise avoid it.

"Music is a pleasing sound to the ear, " Wesley says. "We try to make our music pleasing to their ears."

Duke Ellington and Count Basie are big names in the Scamps' memory-lane playbook: "Satin Doll, " "Shiny Stockings, " "Take the A Train, " "Mood Indigo." Virtually every club gig begins with "Moonglow, " winds through a familiar terrain of sunny peaks and moonlit ballads, and ends with Basie's signature tune, "One O'Clock Jump."

Kathy Pittman-Gaspard was sold immediately when she first arrived in town from Florida six years ago and friends hauled her to the Phoenix to hear the Scamps.

"'Entrancing' would be the word, " she says today. 'What a great group'

It's the late 1940s. Lucky Wesley is leading a 17-piece Air Force band out of Salina, Kan.

Trumpet in one hand, he's playing the intro to Louis Jordan's wartime hit "Ration Blues." With the other hand he reaches for a microphone to start singing. The mic won't budge out of its stand, so Wesley bends over slowly to meet it. An observant band mate gets there at the same time - and yanks the microphone into Wesley's teeth.

So much for the trumpet, Wesley concludes six months later when his embouchure - a horn player's pucker power - still hasn't returned.

Then again, what he really wants to play is the stand-up bass, just like his idol Walter Page of Basie's band.

Fifty-five years later, Wesley is talking about his music career in the living room of his Grandview home. Around the room are musical bric-a-brac, a plaque honoring Wesley's 40 years of service as choir director at his church and a piano on which his now-grown daughter learned to play.

Wesley remembers the first time he heard the Scamps. He was still in the service in Salina. It must have been early 1948. A song came on the radio, and he was hooked. It was a radiant ballad, a version of Ellington's "Solitude, " sung in a rich baritone by Earl Robinson, who was the Scamps' featured vocalist. "Oh, my gosh, " Wesley says, "what a great group."

Being from Kansas City, Wesley was proud to learn that Robinson and the Scamps came from Kansas City, Kan. He loved "Solitude" so much that he vowed to return to Kansas City and play music just like it.

A recording hit

Creation stories are always subjective. Rudy Massingale has long asserted that he and a guitar player named Wyatt Griffin are responsible for forming the group he calls the "original recording Scamps." It was 1946. Massingale was back home after graduating from college in Virginia.

Griffin brought along Earl Robinson and James Whitcomb, two singers he'd accompanied in the late 1930s and early '40s in a gospel and blues group at the Civilian Conservation Corps camp in Parsons, Kan.

By November 1946 the Scamps were playing regularly at the Sherman Tavern, Ninth and Locust streets. "This was our first union job, " Massingale says, pointing to a photograph of the group on the Sherman's low stage. It paid $32.50 a week.

The Scamps soon landed in a recording studio, and they came out with a short string of 78s for the Modern Music label, beginning with "Don't Cry Baby" and "More Than You Know." "Solitude, " the song that caught Lucky Wesley's ear, appeared in December 1947.

And by March 1949 they had a bona fide hit, their Columbia recording of "Red Hot."

This is where the genealogy of the Scamps gets confusing - and interesting - because soon there were two groups using the name and three playing the same music.

Massingale, Robinson and company went on an extended tour of the region, playing six and seven nights a week. At some point Wyatt Griffin got homesick, Massingale says, and returned to Kansas City.

After the rest of the Scamps returned, they found that Griffin had regrouped and was calling his new band the Five Scamps.

Massingale, Whitcomb and Robinson weren't about to give up the glory of "Red Hot." So they called their group the Red Hot Scamps.

It was around this time that Wesley got out of the service and returned to Kansas City. He got together with some of his musician friends and formed a group called the Five Aces.

The Aces listened to the Scamps intently, and, although they wrote their own tunes, they worked on duplicating the Scamps' sound. "They were our idols, " Wesley says.

The Five Aces played "Red Hot" so often and convincingly that a lot of people thought it was theirs.

All three of the bands dressed in matching, immaculate uniforms, and they played many of the same tunes. They drew their inspiration from the same wells, including songs made famous by the Ink Spots and the Mills Brothers, the big-name, black harmonizing groups who had cultivated large white audiences.

And all played at some of the same spots around town - the Half-a-Hill, the Twin City, the Zombie Club. White clubs, black clubs. Private parties and frat-house dances.

Along with the harmonies, they devised dancing shticks - "antics, " Massingale calls them. "We were multitalented, " Wesley says.

In May 1950, Bob Hope came to town to emcee a benefit show at Municipal Auditorium featuring a lineup of local entertainers. Among those on the bill were the Red Hot Scamps and the Five Aces. More than 8,000 people attended. "I was honking my horn trying to make my name, " Massingale says.

Back in session

Dec. 10, 1984. The five members of the Scamps, even then representing nearly 200 years of collective musical experience, settle into position at the SoundTrek recording studio on Broadway. The idea is to make a record that feels like a club date. Run through a dozen tunes in one take. No overdubs, no redos. Raw and real.

Later, they'll go on to the Sni-Blue Lounge, where they've been holding court four or five nights a week for nearly eight years. The Scamps already were being recognized as ambassadors of Kansas City jazz - and, at the Sni-Blue, they have one of the steadiest jazz gigs in town.

But now they have a record to make. From the first chords of Ellington's "In a Mellow Tone" to a loose and spirited "Kansas City, " the Scamps work through a tour of the defining sounds of the city's musical reputation. Bluesy ballads featuring Earl Robinson's deep, laconic voice. Upbeat, jump tunes. Straightforward swing.

Three and four-part harmonies shimmer with life - even when the melody occasionally seems more a goal than an achievement.

After the session, the recording date's producers, local jazz enthusiasts Steve Irwin and John Jessup, put the tape in the can.

They hope some day to raise the money to release it, but it sits untouched for 17 years.

A musical medley

The Scamps today are a product of a kind of musical cell biology. They've formed and reformed in countless ways through the years. The number of local players who could call themselves Scamps runs into the dozens.

By the mid-1950s the Scamps were down to one group, and the Five Aces disbanded and went their own ways.

Lucky Wesley, for example, joined pianist Jay McShann's band. But it wasn't long before the grind of the road, of one-night gigs and sleeping in the car, took its toll on Wesley, and he came back to Kansas City. He never wanted to play another gig that caused him to cross a state line, he says.

Wesley also focused on the steady paycheck of a day job and ended up working for the U.S. Postal Service more than 30 years. Music became a second job, but when the chance came in 1971 to join the Scamps - the group he had idolized so many years before - he jumped at it.

The three other core Scamps of today - Massingale, Jackson and Rusty Tucker, the gregarious singer, drummer and trumpeter who joined the group in the late '70s - also are retired from other work. They live off pensions and investments more than their music.

Massingale once had the chance to join Lionel Hampton's band, but something, maybe a lack of confidence, held him back. He played awhile with Big Bob Doherty, a local screaming-saxophone showman, but when he left the Scamps in the 1960s, it was mainly for the insurance business.

Tucker, a native of Birmingham, Ala., was a trumpeter just out of high school when he played variety shows that made the rounds of state fairs. He eventually landed in Kansas City and joined the house band at the Orchid Room, a lively jazz spot at 12th and Vine streets. He switched to drums, because he discovered that drummers worked more steadily than trumpeters.

He also got a job in construction and operated cranes for 35 years.

Creating a new take

Dec. 7, 2001. Seventeen years - almost to the day - after recording the Scamps at SoundTrek, John Jessup, Steve Irwin and audio engineer Craig Rettmer are back in the studio. They're remixing the 1984 session, editing it for a planned release in a few months.

Irwin and Jessup had had a remember-that-Scamps-record? conversation after Rettmer warned them if they didn't do something with it soon, the original tape would deteriorate irretrievably. Jessup, Irwin and Irwin's wife, Jo Boehr, had produced the Kansas City International Jazz Festival for its four-year run. Now Irwin was in a position to pitch the Scamps' disc as a benefit for the Marillac Center, a psychiatric treatment facility for children. The recording, titled "Timeless, " is scheduled to be out by May.

Much has changed in the 17 years since the Scamps first laid down the tunes. Among other things, Earl Robinson left the group in the mid-1980s and retired; longtime pianist Coots Dye died; and Rudy Massingale returned to the Scamps' fold.

Given all that, the 1984 recording captures that era's Scamps at something of a peak. It's a throwback sound that evokes cabaret elegance, unabashed fun and a sense of what Lucky Wesley means when he says, "We've always been gentlemen of music."

Three voices reaching for "How High the Moon." Robinson sounding plush and plaintive on "September in the Rain" and "Solitude." Dye taking a sweet and husky vocal turn on "L.O.V.E." - a fetching ballad lately appropriated for a car commercial.

"This, " says Irwin, "is some of the very best stuff they've recorded."

Dedication prevails

February 2002, at the Phoenix. Art Jackson has a round face and gold-rim glasses. He wears a navy-blue beret on stage and, these days, after a stroke, he plays sitting down.

Jackson holds the distinction of being the longest continuous Scamp, beginning with the breakaway Five Scamps in 1949. Jackson might not blow with the power of his youth - he worries about his upper plate and whether his fingers have the feeling they once did - but he still sounds sweet on a ballad.

His understated ebbs and flows recall his early influences, Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster, two pillars of the Kansas City sound of the 1930s.

And right there in the middle of "Satin Doll, " he might blurt out a ditty like "Pop Goes the Weasel" just to mix it up and spark a few smiles.

It's a nod to the "silly idiosyncrasies" of the earliest Scamps, as Massingale says later.

Jackson went to the old Lincoln High School with Charlie Parker and is the age the trailblazing alto saxophonist would have been today had he not died at 34.

The scrapbook he keeps in his south Kansas City apartment holds a collection of autographed photos, including a young and curvaceous Della Reese, who stopped at the Orchid Room when Jackson played in the house band.

Jackson says he misses the days when the Scamps focused on vocal harmonies. "Nobody has time to rehearse anymore, " he says.

Tucker, almost always sporting a cavernous smile, handles many of the vocal duties whenever the group plays the Phoenix. He's a Louis Armstrong soundalike on "What a Wonderful World, " and he brings along no small amount of impromptu ham.

When the Scamps play elsewhere, the vocals are a mixed bag. Lucky Wesley wraps his airy voice around "Mood Indigo" and other songs. Alternate drummer Wallace Jones also sings. And some jazz classics live on in the Scamps repertoire only as instrumentals.

The Scamps may not be the group they once were, but they "maintain the music of their day, " says Sam Johnson Jr., president of the Elder Statesmen of Kansas City Jazz.

"The Scamps should be called the premier group in the city, " says Johnson, a drummer who, as his father before him, has played Scamps gigs. "They've outlasted everybody."

And some things don't ever change.