Kansas City: Jazz, BBQ & the Crossroads Arts District

Kansas City built two of America's most distinctive cultural identities within a few blocks of each other: a jazz tradition that predates and fed into New York's swing era, and a barbecue style the rest of the country has spent a century trying to replicate. The 18th and Vine Historic Jazz District — where Charlie Parker, Count Basie, and Jay McShann all came of age — anchors the morning at the American Jazz Museum, one of only two museums in the US dedicated entirely to jazz history. Lunch is Arthur Bryant's on Brooklyn Avenue, smoking brisket over hickory since 1908 and still the standard against which all other KC barbecue is measured. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art draws the afternoon: 35,000 objects across one of the most rigorous permanent collections in the Midwest, with Henry Moore bronzes on the grounds and the iconic shuttlecock sculptures out front. The Crossroads Arts District closes the day — a converted warehouse neighborhood along West 18th Street that is the center of Kansas City's working visual arts scene.