Kansas City Lightning (14 page)

EARL COLEMAN      

A
s the young Charlie Parker practiced and practiced, his life began to dovetail with the long story of Negroes in American music, dance, and show business. More and more often, even though it wasn't working for him yet, he was going out there into the night of the professionals, where there were joys and dangers, potential regrets and moments of imperishable triumph. As he packed up his horn and left Olive Street looking for music—showing up to play with Oliver Todd or to attempt a jam session victory, never sure whether or not he was going to be laughed at again—Charlie was beginning to hear the call of a world that respectable parents worried might chew up their children and spit them out as drunkards, hopheads, perverts marked up by venereal disease. Even if their health wasn't destroyed by wild living, those who aspired to be performers were always at risk of joining the ledger of statistics documenting the violence of ruthless police or jealous locals—or of being mutilated or burned to death in some cheese box of a dance hall as an evening of drunken revelry turned calamitous.

Even if he'd been warned, though, there was no stopping Charlie. The nightlife of those Kansas City joints he and Rebecca used to stare into, and the feeling he got from the men who collaborated and competed on the bandstands there, were too far and wonderfully removed from the regular world for him to ignore. Charlie, no matter his faltering, was on the verge of becoming a Kansas City mu
sician, one more young man drawn from the straight and narrow into a universe of nearly mythic sensation and extraordinary invention.

It is understandable that Charlie Parker would find himself awed by all this, for though a good number of myths are as porous as Swiss cheese, there is no more deservedly mythic city in the jazz story than Kansas City, Missouri. After the smoke and dust storms of exaggeration and outright lies blow away or settle down, the facts of Kansas City rise so high in the national artistic pantheon that it proves the wisdom of Hermann Broch's axiom: “The civilization of an epoch is its myth in action.”

In jazz, the myth in action was the discovery of how to use improvisation to make music in which the individual and the collective took on a balanced, symbiotic relationship, one that enriched the experience without distracting from it or descending into anarchy.

As the youthful Charlie Parker absorbed the performances he saw in the clubs every night, he was watching his hometown in the process of becoming the swing capital of the land. Kansas City was a kind of experimental laboratory where the collective possibilities of American rhythm were being refined and expanded on a nightly basis. Musicians were learning to navigate a constantly shifting context of complex harmony and propulsive rhythm, to absorb and respond to it within split seconds. This was long before the digital age; before technology revealed how the mind and body could serve the sensitized aesthetic response at such high velocity—in seconds and milliseconds—allowing musicians to create high-quality jazz, an improvised creation of form and response. But it was happening. In Kansas City, in the 1930s, the blues got shouted, purred, whispered, and cried in such inventive style that the city became the third great spawning ground for jazz, after New Orleans and Chicago.

THE FIRST MOVEMENT
in that revolution had occurred a few decades before, down in the tropical southern nexus of superstition, panache, gumbo, street beats, and cultural complexity known as New Orleans. From roughly the turn of the century up through World War I, New Orleans musicians initiated the most revolutionary
conception of ensemble music in the twentieth century. After the red-light district of Storyville was closed down in 1917, the first generation of New Orleans jazzmen moved north to Chicago, the midwestern home of a harsh wind that was as legendary as the city's favorite thug, Al Capone. In Chicago the substance of the new ensemble style was made most obvious by King Oliver, whose cornet playing was considered golden and full of light.

Oliver had been a triumphant local hero in New Orleans from 1910 to 1917, but his most influential band was formed when he sent home for Louis Armstrong to join him in Chicago in 1922. With the arrival of young Armstrong on second cornet and Baby Dodds on drums, Oliver had seven pieces, and the circle of charismatic effect was complete. The band's performances at the Lincoln Gardens dance hall were the recipes of legend, sparking and romancing the dancers while drawing musicians from all aspects of the business, each come to hear that marvelous ensemble swing one tune after another.

In 1923, King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band went into the studio and recorded the material that would largely determine Oliver's reputation. As a blues player of seminal eloquence, Oliver brought to his music a melodic sense, and an expressive clarity, that captured the elements of mood and feeling that were central to blues: contemplation, celebration, lament, wit, eroticism, and ambivalence. Those blues phrases, and the heroic dignity they served, influenced the young Louis Armstrong, and others, in elemental ways. Oliver's innovative uses of mutes provided the template for timbres that would later become signatures of the Ellington brass section and were then passed on through Cootie Williams to Jay McShann's trumpet player, Piggy Minor, for use when McShann and his men were dropping coals of fire down the pants of Lucky Millinder and his fellow victims.

But what contributed most to Oliver's position in the music was his authority as a bandleader. In Chicago, where the partnership of the mob and Mayor Big Bill Thompson made sure there was a hot time in the old town every night, King Oliver brought everything he had learned in New Orleans—in the years he'd spent amid the city's marching bands, funeral processions, street-level musical battles (often conducted from dueling horse-drawn wagons), and bandstands in Storyville, where the soundtrack of the tenderloin had a drive that satisfied the
musicians and drove the customers to peaks of excitement. Oliver possessed a brilliant understanding of how to make improvisation and composition work in the balanced way that became the foundation of jazz. His recordings were exquisite collages of polyphony and solo statement, punctuated by shifts of rhythm and stings of percussion so well coordinated that they never give the impression of anarchy.

And those achievements affected the players themselves, created among them a feeling of elite identity, however down-home and greasy that identity was. That elite feeling existed behind all the public masks—even those of comedy—and was central to the way black show-business performers came to see themselves, especially as their achievements were captured and confirmed in objective recordings. In
Jazz from the Beginning
, reedman Garvin Bushell remembered talking to clarinetist Johnny Dodds and drummer Baby Dodds, who were working with King Oliver and Louis Armstrong, about the place their work had earned them in the jazz landscape: “They felt very highly about what they were playing, as though they knew they were doing something new that nobody else could do. I'd say they regarded themselves as artists, in the sense we use the term today.”

Bob Redcross, who later became a friend of Charlie Parker's, also perceived how surely the performers of the time were driven by that appetite for recognition. Born in 1913, Redcross grew up in Chicago, where his mother worked as a hat-check girl in a club where King Oliver and Louis Armstrong played. As a child he would sit in the coat room, draped inside his mother's coat, as the musicians and customers filed in and out every night, and his ears were filled with music from the bandstand. Seeing, meeting, and listening to so many performers—veteran and upcoming comics, dancers, singers, and instrumentalists—from such an early age, Redcross learned how the musicians saw themselves and the world in which they lived:

As they pursued their craft, of course, the black show-business people weren't confined to friendly towns like New Orleans and Chicago. Their work took them into the redneck South, and as they traveled through that unfamiliar territory, they must have felt much like their counterparts in the unsettled West of the nineteenth century. As the onetime minstrel performer Tom Fletcher noted in his impeccably informative
100 Years of the Negro in Show Business
, in those early days “a colored man with a banjo would draw almost as big a crowd as an elephant in a circus”—and the Negro professionals often saw their audiences as dangerous hicks who might be elevated above their barbarous ways by the experience of black entertainment. “The old saying that music hath charms to soothe the savage beast worked fine for us,” notes Fletcher, who was born in 1873 and was on the road with Negro minstrel shows by his adolescence. “In our minds most of these people did everything the savages did except eat humans. We also found that they had the same weaknesses as savages. . . . I have never quite figured out whether it was the music or the shows which made the people gradually get a little more civilized.” To Fletcher, that question was “central to understanding the difference in the thinking of committed minstrel figures
from all contemporary stereotypes,” often “men who were up to passing on the kind of insights inspired aspirants were looking for.”

One of the talents these wise men passed on was a knack for registering subtle cues of danger. Negroes learned to read such signals as soon as they began to enjoy freedom of movement, and they learned to protect themselves the best they could. Those who showed even a playful contempt for such constraints—like Jack Johnson, always willing to break the speed limit and thereby break the bigot's rules of order—became true symbols of sedition. Black Jack became the most overt and imposing Negro variation on rebellion since the American Revolution.

The men young Charlie Parker was starting to admire as he became more and more serious about the saxophone, seeing them as local legends or watching them as they arrived from out of town to play a dance, to thrill the local ladies, and to sip or guzzle the flowing good times of Kansas City nightlife, had learned well the savage ways of their own patrons, the Italian and Jewish and Irish gangsters who paid them for their services. Those musicians also knew the parallel dangers of white police who became progressively more irritated by the attention given these horn-tooting coons—and even the anger of local wallflower Negroes, who could grow sullen and dangerous as their sisters and girlfriends stared with mounting admiration at the men on the bandstand.

“They didn't like seeing those Negroes looking so good,” as fellow musician Gene Ramey recalled. “Guys would be on the road in their new cars, and they would stop outside to take out rags and wipe off that dust, change their clothes, and come on in looking like they ruled the world. That's one of the reasons they smoked marijuana, some of them anyway. The police would be looking for something to bring you down, any excuse to show you were no more to them than one of the local niggers. Prohibition was going on, and you didn't want any alcohol on your breath. Then they could get you. Arrested for drunk driving or drunk and disorderly or drunk and drunk! You couldn't have that. And then at those dances you had to stay on your p's and q's to keep some local lug from going crazy over the idea of losing his girl.”

The implications of a muttered comment or gesture; the way a voice rose, lowered, or broke; the look on a powerful gangster's face as he entered a room;
the way a policeman adjusted his hat or cap, pulled up his gun belt, or put one foot up on the car's running board; the way a rowdy Negro surveyed the dance hall from one end to the other: these were all signals the musicians learned to recognize and accommodate as seamlessly as a silent cue from the bandleader. As professionals, the jazz players learned that the friendly and the hostile live next door to each other, that they stand shoulder to shoulder and sometimes even dance together.

KANSAS CITY TOOK
its position in the development of jazz for the same reasons New Orleans and Chicago had: there was a community crazy for the music and a regime that let the good times roll. The city provided plentiful and steady work for professional musicians and those aspirants who could learn and develop on the many jobs necessary to satisfy the party-hungry customers in various venues. Jazzmen combined the refinements of high-society instrumental music with the stronger stuff they employed in those cauldrons where the patrons came to boil the blues out of their flesh, to begin the ritual of courtship on the dance floor, to reduce every chaotic element in life to a series of elegant gestures, steps, turns, and embraces.

That democratic stretch of sources, always connected to dance, had been rising in the oven of the culture for some time, its ingredients reaching back much further than the young Charlie Parker knew or even sensed. As he went out into the Kansas City night, listening, sitting in, being thrown off bandstands, getting a little better, intensifying his resolve, and practicing even harder, Parker was preparing for the day when he would have it together enough to join the royalty of those bandstands where only the best playing was accepted. Yet everything he would do as a musician was the result of a long creative evolution that we must examine in some detail if we are to understand what happened in that moment when he became entranced by the activities inside the Cherry Blossom.