At once an adoring portrait, a tribute to a bygone era, and an invaluable document, Kansas City lawyer-turned-documentarian Bruce Ricker's 1979 film The Last Of The Blue Devils captures a reunion of famed Kansas City musicians 40 years after they helped create the sound that defined the town. The only city to escape the Great Depression in the 1930s (at least according to one of Ricker's interview subjects), Kansas City was a hotbed of licentiousness, drunkenness, and great music, thanks to its lax enforcement of vice laws. A traveling act featuring some of the best of the countless musicians plying their trade in town, The Oklahoma City Blue Devils included Count Basie, Lester Young, Ernie Williams, Hot Lips Page, and Buster Smith, among others. Significantly, the Blue Devils existed before music became an almost wholly national phenomenon. Even with that lineup, the group never achieved national fame until giving way to the Bennie Moten Orchestra, which in turn gave way to the Count Basie Orchestra, whose national breakthrough (thanks to some interested parties in the East) assured that the Kansas City sound would no longer remain a secret. Ricker's interests lie in the time before. Gathering together surviving Blue Devils alumni in their old union hall, and bringing in other Kansas City vets like Jay McShann and Big Joe Turner, Ricker mostly lets his subjects' work summon up their past. The result is, unsurprisingly, some pretty great music. At a separate concert date, Basie's big band shows off the skills that made it legendary, while demonstrating why it remained a viable entity well past the golden age of swing. But the union-hall footage forms the heart of the film, with informal jams recreating music that precedes the fault lines now separating jazz, blues, and R&B. As a film, Blue Devils might have benefited from a better sense of historical context, but Ricker's audio commentary goes a long way toward correcting that deficiency. The DVD's other bonus features are of the best type: more music. Occasionally, Ricker's camera captures one of the lucky few in attendance at the historic jam session. Any sense of envy is partially alleviated by the feeling that Ricker's film could hardly get closer to being the next best thing.