Kansas City Lightning (11 page)

In Kansas City, one of the most prominent of these music teachers was Major N. Clark Smith. A former military band leader and instructor at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, Smith had composed the music for the school's anthem, “The Tuskegee Song,” at the request of Booker T. Washington before moving west to Kansas City. At Lincoln High School, he soon gained a reputation as a taskmaster who took no stuff, and he put down discipline rough enough to produce first-class players. Smith taught and inspired Walter Page, the innovative bassist who led the legendary Oklahoma City Blue Devils, and whose pulse animated the new feeling of big band swing that was nationalized by the Count Basie Orchestra, itself a fusion of the Blue Devils and the rival Bennie Moten's Kansas City Orchestra.

Saxophonist Harlan Leonard, who was a member of Moten's reed section from 1923 to 1931 and later led his own big band, Harlan Leonard and His Rockets, described Smith to Ross Russell in the book
Jazz Style in Kansas City and the Southwest
. “When I knew Major Smith he was a man past middle age,” Leonard recalled. “He was supposed to have served in the Spanish-American War. After leaving the service I believe he was in show business for a while and had toured Australia with a musical group. Major Smith had a vivid and commanding personality. He was short, chubby, gruff, military in bearing, wore glasses, and was never seen without his full uniform and decorations. His language was rather rough and occasionally slightly shocking to the few young ladies who were taking music classes, though never offen
sive.”

According to Leonard, Major Smith “
was
the music tradition at Lincoln High School. He discouraged dilettantes and time wasters and encouraged talent.” Though “not an outstanding player himself,” he was a skilled instructor, and “drilled the Lincoln marching bands until they were the best in the area, some said the best of their kind in the Middle West. He made music seem exciting and important, and over the years Lincoln High won a reputation for turning out a steady stream of well-prepared musicians who succeeded in the profession.”

Smith was succeeded by Alonzo Davis, who “carried on the tradition,” and “Lincoln High continued to turn out professional musicians. In fact, some of them were to serve in the Rockets—Jimmy Keith, Jimmy Ross, and Charlie Parker.”

CHARLIE'S MOTHER HAD
bought him that saxophone a few years earlier, but back then he had been so disengaged that he loaned it to a musician friend, content to fill his extra time with aimless lounging around, sometimes heading out to the railroad tracks and throwing stones at bums with an accuracy that startled his buddies. He spent most of his days eating, sleeping, pranking, brooding, and living the well-kept life of a reddish-brown prince who had no specific kingdom in sight. But sometime after he switched to alto in the Lincoln High School orchestra, probably in the summer of 1935, Charlie decided to test his mettle in another venue: the bandstand of tenor saxophonist Jimmy Keith.

All the players in Keith's band were young men; Charlie had seen them around. At least two of them, Keith and Ross, he knew personally. Like him, they were from the Lincoln band. They were a little ahead of him in this action, but that didn't matter. He intended to get in on what they were doing. Why shouldn't he? Music was everywhere: on the radio, on phonograph records, on parlor pianos, in the clubs all over town, advertised on posters showing guys dressed up in fine clothes and posing with the jovial dignity of a homemade aristocracy soaked in
confidence. It may have been his first time out, he figured, but he was doing all right playing in the Lincoln orchestra; he'd just take his horn up and get some respect the same way he'd done with anything else—back when he ran with Edward Reeves and the boys over in Kansas, or that time he stood his ground with Sterling Bryant when they took those dangerous trips into strange neighborhoods and sometimes had to fight. He figured he'd find a way to get comfortable, just as he had with the Ruffins when they moved into his house, fitting right in with the kids and becoming one of the family. A bandstand at the High Hat Club couldn't be that different from anything else. Sure of himself, Charlie Parker the alto saxophonist walked toward his next victory.

In 1950, he recalled for Marshall Stearns and Jim Maher what happened next. “I knew how to play, I figured. I had learned the scale and I'd learned how to play two tunes in a certain key—the key of D on the saxophone, F concert. And I had learned how to play the first eight bars of ‘Lazy River' and I knew the complete tune of ‘Honeysuckle Rose.' I didn't never stop to think about there was other keys or nothing like that. So I took my horn out to this joint where a bunch of guys I had seen around were. The first thing they started playing was ‘Body and Soul.' Long meter, you know? So I got to playing my ‘Honeysuckle Rose.' . . . They laughed me off the bandstand. They laughed so hard it broke my heart.”

That was the watershed. From that moment on, Parker started practicing the alto with obsessive seriousness. He played from morning to night, as he told fellow alto saxophonist Paul Desmond in a 1953 radio interview. “I put quite a bit of study into the horn. . . . In fact, the neighbors threatened to ask my mother to move once when I was living out west. They said I was driving them crazy with the horn. I used to put in at least from eleven to fifteen hours a day. I did that over a period of three to four years.”

That must have been the time when people claimed you could hear the saxophone coming out of Addie Parker's house any time you passed it. Either you got yourself some discipline, Charlie had learned, or humiliation would follow. No matter how sincere the would-be musician was, technical demands were what they were. True mastery involved
learning
, not just emoting. His feelings were smacked hard that night on the bandstand—hard enough that he went home cry
ing—but he later told trumpeter Oliver Todd that he'd decided there and then to become “the greatest in the world.”

Charlie was still spending plenty of time with Rebecca, and with boyhood friends like Sterling Bryant, now Lincoln High's drum major. But it was with another friend, an aspiring trombonist named Robert Simpson, that he would pursue his musical ambitions.

The son of a union official, Simpson became something of an older brother to Charlie, a friend who was ready to suffer with him as they learned to negotiate the tempos, keys, and chords of the blues and popular songs. Charlie admired Simpson in a way that struck others as very intense in its attention and affection. Together constantly, the two worked hard at trying to get good enough to be accepted into the Kansas City jam session scene. They often went to Lawrence Keyes's house for ear-training classes, Charlie toting his horn in a blue terrycloth drawstring bag Addie had made for him. They were even thrown off one bandstand together, Addie Parker later told Reisner.

Charlie's involvements and horizons were expanding at an express clip. He had Rebecca loving him so much she almost couldn't stand it, had her female siblings as his play-sisters, and in Simpson had a musician buddy he could run with the way he'd passed his childhood with Sterling Bryant. Birdy Ruffin may still have been looking upon him with suspicion and contempt, but otherwise things were slowly coming his way.

In September 1935, Charlie and Robert Simpson started working every Sunday in the Deans of Swing, a group led by Lawrence Keyes, at Lincoln Hall on Eighteenth and Vine. The band played teen dances there from four in the afternoon until eight in the evening. At first Charlie was just a supporting player, recalled Oliver Todd, who played Lincoln Hall with his own band, Oliver Todd and His Hot-Ten-Tots. Fred Dooley, another local transplant from Kansas, remembered Parker playing with the Deans of Swing. “He would just be sitting there by the Lincoln Hall, where he played when I would see him. I was going to high school in Kansas and was playing the clarinet. It cost thirty-five cents at the Lincoln Hall, but the place would usually be empty, or almost empty, because everybody was across the street listening to the blues.

“At that time,” Dooley recalled, “he wasn't blowing that much, and he wasn't an outgoing guy. He wouldn't seek you out. If you talked with him, he would talk with you. That was it. No overtures. That's the way he was, just a pretty quiet average guy.”

To Dooley, Charlie Parker still seemed to be playing in the shadows of two of his young peers. “Everybody liked John Jackson and Ben Kynard the most of the young fellows playing music then. John was much farther along than Charlie at this time. Charlie was playing more or less on the same kick as Johnny Hodges or Willie Smith, or somebody more along the conventional line. He wasn't a good reader at all.” But Dooley and his gang knew that Charlie meant business. “We would be hanging out on the main drag, which was Fifth Street, out in front of the pool hall or the barbershop or what have you, just talking and messing around. Then we would see Charlie on the way to John's house, which was on Fourth Street. Sometimes we would talk briefly but the thing on his mind was getting over to John's house to work on that music.”

Charlie was starting to fall in love with that alto saxophone, and as winter gave way to spring, and he slowly became a featured soloist, there were those who fell in love with him. And it wasn't just his fellow players who were taking note. “The interesting thing about Charlie even back then was that a lot of girls liked him, but we couldn't understand why.” The Deans of Swing weren't a big draw, exactly: “Ten or twelve people usually, sometimes a good crowd. We would come into town with our Kansas girls, and it was strange the way they took to him. There was a rivalry with the guys in Missouri, you know, high schools, women, that sort of thing. For some reason,
our
girls would say, ‘Charlie Parker is blowing. Let's go to the Lincoln Hall.' Whatever they could hear, we couldn't. But they sure did love to go over there and listen to him.”

O
ne day in April 1936, almost exactly two years after the Ruffins moved in, Ophelia went looking for Rebecca upstairs. She was probably with Charlie. By now, Charlie had stopped going to school; he wanted only to be a musician. Anxious to find her sister, Ophelia looked all over the house. Where could Rebecca be? No one had seen her. Oh, perhaps there. Ophelia ran up to the middle bedroom and opened the door.

“I will never forget that,” she recalled. “Charlie and Becky was in there. I had never seen anything like that before. It was my first encounter. It shocked the daylights out of me. Charlie told me to come in and close the door behind me. Charlie says, ‘Don't say nothing to Ma. Don't say nothing about it.' I was standing there staring.”

Somehow, that evening or soon afterward, Birdy Ruffin found out and wanted to kill Rebecca very nearly. To this writer, Rebecca denied that Ophelia had seen anything more than Charlie and her doing some kissing. She also said that Ophelia told their mother. Ophelia demurred, saying that if they weren't having sex, she did not know what it was. She also remembered a fiery confrontation, with Birdy Ruffin shouting down from upstairs and Rebecca looking up from below, standing next to Charlie and his mother: “Rebecca is stubborn and tears are in her eyes. Mama
wants to beat her to the ground. Miss Parker is defending the both of them. She says they was in love and can live right here in the house. ‘Everything will be all right, dearie.' Mama didn't have no time for none of that.”

Winfrey Ruffin interceded, saying that his sisters would be ruined if they kept getting such harsh whippings. And so Birdy Ruffin decided to move. Soon they were off to Sixteenth and Olive, leaving Addie Parker's house behind. Birdy Ruffin made it very clear to Rebecca that she didn't want her setting eyes on that Charlie Parker ever again. Her daughter, whom she still called Beckerie, was grounded, not to be trusted. Rebecca knew that she was no big-busted Zephyr, sneaking up under houses to teach boys the female things they wanted to know. She wasn't trying to act grown, or be mistaken for a street woman. But her mother would not have her falling in love with that “alley rat” Charlie. Instead, she'd keep her in a cage like a parakeet, force her to sit down and listen to her mother's admonitions—and never “cut her eyes” at her mother, for one look of insolence or indifference could get any of the girls knocked to the floor with instant fury, Birdy standing over them until the offending daughter begged for mercy.

Rebecca could only pout within, feeling as though she were breathing air through a straw, trying to figure out how to penetrate the glacier of misunderstanding her mother had about her relationship with Charlie. She knew her mother loved her, remembered the radiant pride Mama Birdy showed as she put her daughter into the organdy dress and gleaming shoes for Lincoln High graduation, even told her she was beautiful. She could still see her mama sitting there in the auditorium, happy that the girl had shown all of Kansas City that she was good enough to get her certificate of education, her diploma.

Rebecca had clearly represented herself well; she had no intention of remaining in the mud unfair people always wanted to push the Negroes into. Birdy's daughter was clean and neat, and she had respect for people, wanting no more in return than what she gave. But she was head over heels in love with Charlie—and she could do nothing about it, because her mother refused to understand that kind of pure love.

Rebecca's older sister, Octavia, liked Charlie, and she knew how the young couple felt about each other. And, after the Ruffins flew the Parker coop, she
became a willing coconspirator in the cause of their romance.

Mama Ruffin may not have trusted Rebecca, but she never worried about Octavia doing wrong or getting messed up with any lazy, spoiled, low-class Negroes. With Octavia acting as Beckerie's chaperone, Mama Ruffin could relax into a placid confidence, could shake the anxiety that overtook her to the point of terrifying violence whenever she began to suspect that one of her daughters was at risk of becoming a misled, loose, and vulnerable street woman. As a religious woman, she was grateful to be able to trust her oldest daughter to look out for her middle daughter.