Rifftides reader Charlton Price alerts us to an article that provides detail about Bruce Ricker’s days in Kansas City (see the post below) and the genesis of his film The Last of the Blue Devils. The piece is by Steve Paul in The Kansas City Star. It begins:
Some of the details remain hazy, but it was 1975 in a small midtown supper club where a crowd of serious jazz people gathered to celebrate the past.
Bruce Ricker, an attorney turned local activist and filmmaker, had been spending time here with a graying generation of musicians, recording their memories, stories and music from the heyday of Kansas City jazz.And now he and his fellow filmmakers, John Arnoldy and Eric Menn, were showing a sprawling rough cut of the film…
To read the whole thing, go here.