Kansas City Lightning (29 page)

There was a certain majesty to this young man, but also a delicate misery, a flitting turmoil in his eyes, an ache and terror that he managed almost to hide in the variety of voices he used to express himself and to amuse or surprise his listeners. With his natural gift for mimicry, he was starting to take on a hint of the theatrical, an attempt to sound absolutely unwounded by experience. He waxed rhapsodic about the voices of British actors like Charles Laughton and Ronald Colman, who had the ability to spike a sentence with subtle venom, to declaim exasperation in the face of clumsiness, to create a scalloped rhythm of lyric hope or stoic heartbreak. Friends recall Charlie mocking the minstrel coonery of popular entertainment. And he laughed with an intensity that drained anything less than joy from a situation. Yet his reputation still pushed away as many as it attracted.

To Junior Williams, the attraction was Charlie Parker's music. Charlie favored the younger man with the fatherly smile he would give with increasing authority throughout his career. The saxophone prince stayed out all night, Williams by his side, and in the morning they went to the younger guy's house, where his mother would fix them pancakes and eggs. Charlie talked about becoming a father, and how proud he was of his son, but he also confessed to Williams that he was having problems with his wife. He loved her, but she didn't understand what he was doing. She wanted him to get a job and work for the family like the people who went to bed at night. Charlie had other things going on in his head. Music was everything. And at that point in Charlie Parker's development, the musician who meant everything to him was Chu Berry.

Charlie was overwhelmed by Chu Berry. He told Williams that Berry was the greatest saxophonist who ever lived, that his first inspiration to play the saxophone had been Berry.

Berry was one of the first
fast
tenor saxophone players. He loved to sprint across his instrument, kicking clouds of harmonically rich notes at his listeners and executing difficult passages with a cautionary fire, a tip to potential adversaries that was a measure of grace. With Coleman Hawkins in Europe and many skull-cracking jam sessions in Washington, DC, under his belt, Berry was the stateside tenor saxophone man of the hour—at least on the East Coast. He was a large guy with a large horn, but his mustache and metal-rimmed glasses gave him the look of a college professor, maybe a dean partial to swatting discipline into place. He looked like a man who settled things. A veteran of Fletcher Henderson's band, he learned quickly that the bandleader wouldn't stick to those friendly keys jazz musicians preferred—B flat, C, F, and G—and learned to play in all the hard keys.

It's easy to understand, then, how Berry must have impressed Charlie Parker. The tenor man's work had the hard sheen of virtuosity; it was focused on logical musical statements, and there was something in his sound that answered the industrial clamor of the times with the same sort of human power that had conceived and built the machines making all the noise. In that sense, he was kindred to Roy Eldridge. His strength never apologized for itself.

Charlie may have been introduced to Berry through his recordings with Hender
son and Eldridge, or through his broadcasts with Cab Calloway. If he wasn't there himself, he probably heard Buster Smith's story of what had happened in 1935, when Berry came through Kansas City with Fletcher Henderson and went out jamming his horn up against Lester Young, Herschel Evans, and the other locals who were always in the mood to rough up some eastern star eager to gamble his reputation and possibly the suit on his back. According to Smith, Berry stomped off a medium-fast ride through “Body and Soul,” blowing combative chord changes with such sudden ferocity that Lester Young started heading for one door and Herschel Evans another, leaving a handful of lesser saxophonists to close their horn cases and creep out behind them. Smith stood up, laughing, and shouted, “I
told
you not to mess with that man!”

WHENEVER CHARLIE WAS
having musical problems in those early years, some figure seems to have stepped up to help, recognizing his talent and reckoning that the music he could produce was worth the expense of keeping him in line. Charlie might bring disorder to your border, but then he could turn around with disheveled grace and pull a mother lode of what everybody was looking for right out of the air. That was how it was, and the bandleaders of Kansas City had to decide if they could put up with it. Many would not; many would.

Gene Ramey, McShann's bassist, kept after the leader to hire Charlie. McShann could tell what was on Ramey's mind by the way he walked—could tell what he was going to ask, and what he thought Charlie could do for the unit. No matter where they were, what time it was, that damn jet-black Ramey would not let his bandleader rest until he went ahead and hired that boy from Olive Street. Finally, McShann made his bassist an offer: he would hire Charlie Parker, but Ramey would have to take responsibility for his friend the bad but irrepressibly shiny penny. McShann didn't need an alto saxophonist who showed up at a job without a horn, making the situation worse by telling one of the endless sad stories that had led to his being fired all over Kansas City.

McShann wasn't alone in his contempt for Charlie's raggedy excuses. Kansas City jazz musicians were accustomed to counting on one another, to being able to
take a man's word, and they were galled by the lies Charlie told in order to get drug money or to laugh off the tardiness that came naturally to the addict. Of course, Charlie's world was constrained by a simple imperative: he either got the money he needed or suffered the pain of withdrawal, which terrified him. McShann would take a chance on him only if Ramey was willing to deal with that knucklehead and his habit, so that he could keep his attention on developing the band. If Ramey was willing to babysit, he could go right ahead.

Ramey accepted McShann's terms. He picked Parker up every evening before the job, took him home, and kept his alto until the next day to make sure he didn't sell it in a moment of weakness. Parker always implored the bassist to let him play just a little before taking the saxophone. Ramey usually agreed, which meant that he had to stay out with Charlie on many nights, waiting for him to blow himself out. Sometimes he drove Charlie down to the Missouri River, where marijuana grew tall, and waited while the saxophonist picked what he needed before bounding back to the car. When he got Charlie home, his mother always seemed relieved to see him strolling up to the door. “Take care of my baby,” she urged Ramey before they left every night. “Don't let him get hurt. Please watch over him.”

Despite Ramey's precautions, Charlie kept finding ways to get his morphine high. By this point small glass vials of morphine were starting to be available for two or three dollars, stolen pure from some warehouse, hospital, or drugstore and making their way into the hands of local dealers, who were beginning to multiply. Yet the trouble McShann expected didn't materialize, at least at first. “When Bird came in my band, Bird was making time,” the bandleader remembered. “I did notice a few sleepy symptoms sometimes. As a rule, the cat sitting next to him would tug him. He stayed happy, and he was moving all the time when he was with the small group.”

Charlie and the rest of the band were still studying what Count Basie and Lester Young were serving up from the East Coast—live, when they could get it. “We'd always keep up when Basie and them was on the broadcast so he could hear Lester Young,” McShann remembered. “He'd say, ‘Man, what time are you going to take intermission tonight? Basie and them are coming on at such and such a time. Why don't you take intermission so we can hear this?' I'd say, ‘Okay.' We'd switch the
intermissions around so we could run out to the car and tune Basie and them in. . . . He loved Lester Young, boy.”

When Young did something new or exciting, Charlie either memorized it or remembered enough to filter it back through his alto when the McShann Orchestra returned to the bandstand. There Parker would toy with Young's phrases, bending them, stretching them, stripping certain things away, and mixing the compressed version with bold ideas of his own. But even when it was almost recitation, Charlie could tell his story with a shrill savagery you never heard in Young. That squawling side of Charlie's sensibility became part of the excitement for the rest of the band. No one ever knew what Lester Young was going to play when that radio knob was turned, and neither did any of McShann's men have a clue what Charlie Parker was going to do when he returned to the bandstand after the latest radio master class.

Those Basie broadcasts seemed to get Charlie thinking about broader horizons. “He decided then what he wanted to do,” Ramey recalled. “He told me he wanted to go to New York, that he was going to look over New York. Just wanted to go there and look.”

Charlie told Gene Ramey his troubles, just as he had back when he was still Charlie Parker the laughingstock. He told Ramey that Rebecca had called the police on him through the courts, that she had him charged with lack of child support, that he was arrested and had served time in jail. That seems implausible. Rebecca was living with the Parkers. Neither she nor Leon was suffering, except perhaps from loneliness. Charlie did get into some kind of jam with the police during this period, but Addie Parker described it to Robert Reisner quite differently: “Charles got into serious trouble one night when he kept a taxi for six or seven hours and ran up a ten-dollar bill, which he couldn't pay. The taxi driver tried to snatch his horn, and Charles stabbed him with a dagger. They took him off to the farm. I told the police, ‘How dare you treat my son like that? Bring him back!' He came home the next day.”

But Ramey's story suggests a deeper truth: that Charlie was starting to think ill of Rebecca, enough that he would fabricate a story about a jail term in which he was a victim at her behest. The air on Olive Street was starting to lie heavily against his skin.

Buster Smith, too, had become interested in the possibility of doing more than he was doing in Kansas City. Since that Halloween dance in 1936, when Basie's band had said farewell to Tom's Town, Smith was shocked to realize that they'd actually made it big. It seemed as though they were just as strong now in New York as they had been at the Reno Club. They'd added new members, and you could hear over the radio that the boys had gotten smoothed up without losing that Kansas City beat; they still had that lope and punch in place, swinging the blues. Some of that stuff was his. And now they were playing his tune—“One O'Clock Jump”—and people were eating it up. But nobody knew Buster Smith wrote it.

Now that there was a piece of bad luck. The original title was “Blue Balls,” but that was a little too raw for the radio in those years. They had to change the name so it could get announced. The professor couldn't believe it. Basie was a hell of a musician—newly recognized as a master of the introduction, the vamp, the setup, and the groove—but he couldn't read a note. Still, New York had wrapped him in success. Maybe New York wasn't as bad as it had been in 1932. It had to be different from the way it was back when Bennie Moten's band had suffered through that starvation tour and the Blue Devils had folded the year after, before they'd even made it up there to see what it was like. Whatever the circumstances, sometimes a musician had to travel. He had to get up and dust his broom, move on farther down the road. Trying was better than sitting around wondering what might happen.

So in the summer of 1938 Buster Smith decided to move to Manhattan. Why not? Plenty of time had passed since John Hammond and those white fellows had come through, signing this one and that, and no one had come running home with his tail between his legs. It was time for Buster Smith to see how much hell he could raise in New York. He was the same man he had always been, only a year older and knowing a year's more stuff, which made him ready to get back with those boys and bring the swing up a notch. That was it. He told Charlie he would be back in town soon, that he was only scouting the place out. If things got right, he wouldn't mind sending for Charlie, if the boy thought he could handle himself. For now, though, he was gone.

This didn't make Charlie happy. Charlie wanted to go with him. He told Smith he wouldn't be any trouble. He'd earn his keep. Smith said no; all he could take was his wife, his saxophone, and his clarinet. But he assured Charlie that he would be back.

New York wasn't as easy as Smith had expected. There were musicians all over the place, and he didn't blend in the way he expected to, the way he had when he first came to Kansas City. People didn't really know who he was. Basie and the guys were doing fine; Buster Smith met him every afternoon at the Woodside, going out back to talk music and drink gin, cigar smoke floating up to the sky. They were two aristocrats, one brown, the other as dark as an eggplant. But Basie was at home in New York; he was from New Jersey, after all, down the road in Red Bank. Once upon a time, Bill Basie had left the East a wide-eyed novice besotted by Fats Waller. He returned home a conqueror, sporting a style that stripped stride piano down to its poetic essences and fronting a band that many thought had no rivals in swing. He had the feel of a man who had done something and knew it, but he was still the same warm guy, no walls standing between him and Buster. They could have been hanging out behind the Reno. Basie didn't have any open chairs in the band, but he did what he could for his old buddy, asking him to write him some new tunes and arrangements.

Every day, as he and Buster were having their white liquor, the same peculiar thing happened. A rich-looking white woman drove up, took a wad of money from her purse, and gave it to Basie before driving back downtown. Basie gave a wink and smiled, put the loot in his pocket, and carried on. Buster Smith was learning that there were things going on in the East that he hadn't seen in the West—and he'd seen a good number of things in that wild Pendergast town. The white woman wasn't what she looked like. She was the madam of a whorehouse, a fancy one, and Basie was her pet—though she handled the tricks. This was another kind of town all right. Negroes could get away with more than they could out west—that is, if living like a freeman whenever one could was defined as “getting away” with something. Bill Basie wasn't a particularly aggressive type; he was known for going with the flow, not against it. His good judgment was always convincing. He had a good nose for freedom and could always get a whiff if any liberation
was lurking nearby, advertised or not. If he had figured out how to become the pet of a white madam who hired a limousine every day to bring him money uptown at the Woodside, well, it must have been all right.