Marvin Leon Achyutan Pattillo grew up in Kansas City but now lives in Oakland. He’s played with “a lot of beautiful people,” he says, including John Coltrane. Achyutan joined Local 627 of the AFM, the Kansas City black musicians union, when he was 13, after getting a gig at the famous Orchid Room at 12th and Vine – his band played on Sunday nights, when the venue didn’t sell alcohol so youngsters could play. As he got older, Pattillo played in Frank Smith’s legendary Kansas City trio and toured with Texas bluesman Eddie Cleanhead Vinson. “But,” he says, “you couldn’t go in the hotels and play. There was Johnny Baker’s, where I played with Jay McShann, out on Troost. That was a white club but had a black band in it. After we would take our intermissions we would have to go down in the basement. But the people who loved the music, they would come down and socialize with us anyway.”