Jazz Musicians outside the Orchid Room at 12th and Vine

Transcribed article: Twelfth and Vine, once the focal point of Kansas City jazz, can be this bleak at 10 p.m., when this photograph was taken. The darkened neon sign of the old Orchid Room, where jazz greats once played, looms above two musicians and a friend relaxing on the corner. Eddie Saunders (left), who played saxophone in bands in New York, Chicago and Washington, and Abdul Hameed (right), who played the trombone four years in the Count Basie band, tell Jimmy Smith, Saunders's cousin, that they don't work regularly because their is no place left to play. Kansas City Star, November 07, 1966. Tom Stites, a retired Star reporter who was present when this photograph was captured provided the following information:

This photo ran with a story I wrote when I was a young reporter
for The Kansas City Star. It was a cover feature for The Sunday
Star's broadsheet “magazine” of that era, published November
7, 1965 (I have a clip). The topic, which Wes Lyle's great photo
captures vividly, was how Kansas City jazz had faded away since
its heyday.

The night Wes made the image, I’d rounded up the musicians with
their horn cases and we all converged at the iconic intersection
of Twelfth and Vine. I’d not been aware that Vine had been
made into a dead end street when the Charlie Parker Homes public
housing project was built, but a Dead End sign was affixed to the
pole that held up the street sign. Suddenly the possibilities
for this photo got bigger.

Then Wes walked over to group the musicians on the corner —
right next to the Dead End sign — and spied the tumbleweed in
the Vine street gutter about 15 feet to the south; who knows how
it had found this desolate resting place or how long it had been
there. Wes said he debated with himself for about a nanosecond
and moved it into the frame. The tumbleweed added so much to the
meaning of the image.

Wes was the top photographer on the nightside staff in the era
when the Star company published two dailies, the afternoon Star
and the morning Times. He was famous for his artistic eye, and
that night I learned how much he knew about the technical end of
photography.

He set up a tripod on the corner across Vine street from the
musicians, the tumbleweed and the Dead End sign. He attached his
Nikon to the tripod with a 135-mm telephoto lens, looking west on
Twelfth street along a row of sad storefronts with weatherbeaten
signs, including the a sign for the defunct Orchid Room, which
had been a major nightclub in the jazz heyday.

It was 10 PM. Wes pressed me into service. He gave me his flash
gun and instructed me to walk along Twelfth street firing the
flash, staring with a flash right at the tumbleweed and the
musicians. He opened the lens and told me to get going. I did.
When I got back he refined his instructions and had me do it
again. And again. And again. We made 7 or 8 exposures. When
Wes developed the film back at the office, I was amazed how much
the negatives differed. He made a 10x12 print from the best one
and that’s what ran in the paper -- and the print you have in
your archuve is the print the engraving was made from.

I was 23 when Wes and I teamed up. I'm 79 as I write this, and
I've had a good run in journalism.