Kansas City Boulevard Big Band

- By Joe klopus for the Kansas City Star, August 24, 2001

The band is hot. The brass is roaring. The saxes are stinging. Yet the man out front, Michael McGraw, is modest about his trumpet playing. "If I wasn't running the band, I probably wouldn't get to play in it," he says.

But after more than a decade, he's still making this Boulevard Big Band jump and raor. And it's still giving some of the area's best musicians a vital creative outlet.

McGraw understates his role: "I'm the guy who makes the phone calls and keeps the wheels from falling off. I'm the one who calls the tunes and keeps things organized."

Keeping an 18-piece band organized and polished, even through periods when there aren't many chances for it to play in public, is no small feat. Clearly, McGraw and his cohorts are in it for the musical kicks.

"These guys are not getting a lot of money from this," he says. "It's like bowling night for us. It's a chance to play big band jazz, as opposed to Glen Miller dance music. That's boring, man.

"People talk about the 'big band era', quote-unquote, in the '30s and '40s," McGraw says — but in his view, that's not when big bands were at their artistic height.

"The really great big bands started in the '60s, after it stopped being dance music... The writers started doing things to challenge the players. Listen to Woody Herman, Stan Kenton, Buddy Rich, their stuff from the '60s. That's what I would call contemporary big-band music. Those bands blew me away."

McGraw grew up in Wisconsin, then headed to California to study acting. The Boulevard band's roots stretch back to the mid-1980s, after he moved to Kansas City to further his studies.

"I was a graduate student at UMKC, playing in the jazz band there, and I wanted to keep playing some. I started a Monday night rehearsal band." He convinced the Actors Ensemble to let the band perform in their space on Southwest Boulevard (hence the name) near Broadway.

The band built a reputation that has sustained it since. "We've had some up times and down times... but the last four or five years we've been performing pretty much every week."

Naturally, there's been turnover in the band. But there's also a loyal core of players. "Some of the guys have been there since it started, some have been there a long time, and some guys are there every week no matter what. But it's not always the same people."

McGraw, who makes a living teaching the trumpet, likes to find seats in the band for promising young players. "I make a point of that, to get some of those guys who haven't had the experience a chance to play. That's really one of the purposes of this band, to get people to hear this kind of music. To keep it going, we need a generation of people who love it — and can play it."

The band has two CDs on the Sea Breeze label from California, and a third is on the way. The coming disc has guest artists tenor saxophonist Pete Christlieb, trumpter Tom Harrell and arrranger Frank Mantooth. And, for the first time on a Boulevard Big Band recording, there's a trumpet solo by McGraw.

For two years, the band has been at Harling's where, "we get a lot of young people. Who knows why they come in? Maybe they just want a beer. But they stay, and they dig it."