Pianist and bandleader, Bennie Moten (November 13, 1894 – April 2, 1935) helped to establish what is called the Kansas City Jazz style. In 1922 he formed the B. B. & D. Trio (Beenie, Bailey and Dude, although they were popularly referred to as Big, Black and Dirty) and made his recording debut in 1923, when his band accompanied Blues singer Ada Brown on the song “Evil Mama Blues“. In 1926, Bennie Moten’s Kansas City Orchestra began recording for Victor.Moten had several bands touring under his name in the 1920s. Moten started “raiding” another Kansas City band, The Blue Devils for musicians. Count Basie left the Blue Devils in 1929 and was followed by Jimmy Rushing, Hot Lips Page, Eddie Durham and Ben Webster, thus forming the nucleus of the future Count Basie Orchestra. When Moten died in 1935 from a botched tonsillectomy, Basie took over the band. Under his leadership the band emerged as one of the greatest of all Jazz bands.
| Bennie Moten’s Kansas City Orchestra |
| Goin’ To Kansas City, by Nathan W. Pearson, Jr, University of Illinois Press, 1994 |
| Jazz Style in Kansas City and the Southwest, by Ross Russell, University of California Press, 1971 |
Redhotjazz.com was a pioneering website during the "Information wants to be Free" era of the 1990s. In that spirit we are recovering the lost data from the now defunct site and sharing it with you.
Most of the music in the archive is in the form of MP3s hosted on Archive.org or the French servers of Jazz-on-line.com where this music is all in the public domain.
Files unavailable from those sources we host ourselves. They were made from original 78 RPM records in the hands of private collectors in the 1990s who contributed to the original redhotjazz.com. They were hosted as .ra files originally and we have converted them into the more modern MP3 format. They are of inferior quality to what is available commercially and are intended for reference purposes only. In some cases a Real Audio (.ra) file from Archive.org will download. Don't be scared! Those files will play in many music programs, but not Windows Media Player.
