Kansas City Lightning

by Stanley Crouch

  When they returned to the Woodside, McShann’s men were met by a spontaneous delegation of musicians from Kansas City, there to set them straight on the ways of New York: the best eating places, the most efficient repair shops for their instruments, the cleaners who did the best and fastest work. The musicians were warned to avoid pickpockets—to carry their wallets in the breast pockets of their shirts, hidden under their jackets—and to avoid crowds, because New York was full of barracudas looking for country boys to separate from their money. “If you look like a square, they’re going to converge on you,” one band member remembered being told. “They sit back and watch for a few minutes, analyze your activities and your characteristics, and then they fly into you with some old kind of persuasion. The next thing you know is you’re either beating off an assault or you have succumbed as a victim.”

  The men who greeted them with advice in the lobby that Thursday afternoon were old friends, veterans of the nightlong Kansas City jam sessions and the territory bands. They were also part of an artistic tradition, one that had been eroding stereotypes for years by using music to express emotion in terms that were both brand-new and continually evolving. Though the music was filled with references to inside stuff—a particular person, a street corner, a club, a nickname—the penetration of the rhythm, the swing, the harmony, and the melody made it one with the external world. Once there were physical replies to the music in the form of dance, the beat had such irresistible vigor that it transcended all lines.

  Travel was one of the many complications in the jazz musician’s life. Performing in town after town, city after city, state after state, had taught these Kansas City players that the world wore many faces after dark and in private. They had seen the high and mighty get low-down and dirty, the low-down and dirty get high and mighty. They learned a great deal about what music did to women and what those women might do for the excitement of experiences with men of the world, these colored fellows who appeared free and drifting on a cloud of glamour, gifted with the ability to shape moods with sound. There was always a lot to find out when people gathered to pursue happiness—dancing, romancing, soaking up the atmosphere of joy.

  The Woodside welcoming committee that day included some very important Kansas City musicians. There was Oran “Hot Lips” Page, a master setter of riffs on his trumpet; Walter Page, who had invented the modern way of phrasing a bass line and had almost single-handedly organized the jazz rhythm section for ultimate swing; Pete Johnson, perhaps the king of boogie-woogie piano; Eddie Durham, one of the greatest Kansas City arrangers; and members of Andy Kirk’s band, an organization that had gotten national attention in 1936 with the hit song “Until the Real Thing Comes Along,” one of the first recordings of a Negro using the romantic ballad tradition, as opposed to blues. But the musician who was probably given the most respect happened to be Count Basie’s tenor saxophonist, Lester Young, known in Kansas City as “Red,” a Negro nickname for those light-skinned enough to change color when the blood rushed to their faces. In New York, Young had made a series of inspiring recordings with the singer Billie Holiday, and she had given him another name, one that expressed her equal admiration for Young and for President Franklin Roosevelt, who was as popular among colored musicians as he was among Negroes in general (though his wife, Eleanor, was appreciated even more for speaking out against racism). Now Young was known as “Pres,” for president, and his smooth yet determined air was a bit more refined than it had been ten years earlier.

  The McShann men, who were as far from fantasy as they were from Kansas City, knew they wouldn’t have two years to whip their listeners into shape the way Basie had. They would either make it or break it, collapsing in defeat the way Harlan Leonard’s band had when it came to New York in 1940, cow-flopping at the Golden Gate Ballroom on the corner opposite the Savoy. Yes, they were told, New York was a big town and different from Kansas City. The corruption wasn’t as obvious here as it had been under Pendergast back home, but the gangsters walked softly and carried big guns. And there were other differences: integrated couples walked in the streets during the day, for instance, and it wasn’t unusual to find Lana Turner, Greta Garbo, and other movie stars at the Savoy, dancing or enthralled by the motion on the floor. As they relaxed in their rooms, drinking or smoking joints rolled from the red Prince Albert can of marijuana Pete Johnson had brought, they all wondered how they would do out there on the bandstands at the end of that shining maple floor, soon to be covered by hundreds and hundreds of Negro feet.

  BUT THE THINGS his fellow band members were thinking about were of no consequence to Charlie Parker. He had his mind on other matters. Getting in touch with other musicians was high on his agenda, but first Parker had to deal with the condition of his body—to establish connections of another, more urgent kind. Then, and only then, would Charlie Parker the musician take over.

  At this critical point in his development, the twenty-one-year-old Parker was possessed by his music—by a ravenous need to improvise, to learn new tunes, to find new ways of getting through the harmonies with materials that would liberate him from clichés. Once he did, his new ideas so excited him that he would play around the clock, looking for another bandstand to test them on as soon as each night’s paying gig was done, and yet another if the after-hours players wrapped things up too soon to satisfy him. To McShann, Parker seemed to have a crying soul, a spirit as troubled by the nature of life as it was capable of almost unlimited celebration. But the saxophone was all he really had: it provided him with the one constantly honest relationship in his life. What he gave the horn, it gave back. What it gave him, he never forgot.

  But there were plenty of other things to forget. The world had constantly disappointed Charlie Parker. For all the satisfactions of his music, for all the light jokes and deep laughs on the road, he was basically a melancholy and suspicious man, a genius in search of a solution to a blues that wore razors for spurs. And, like a tight number of younger musicians, he found it so much easier to relax, to tame his perpetual restlessness and anxiety, when he rolled up his sleeve and pushed a needle into his vein. That winter afternoon, Parker likely walked the few blocks from the Woodside to Monroe’s Uptown House on 133rd Street and Seventh Avenue, where he knew he could always taste from a big pot of food on the stove—and find his old friend Clark Monroe, who knew all the hustlers, who knew who had the dope, how much it cost, and how dependable they were.

  By the time Parker turned up at the Woodside, he was ready, relaxed, and prepared to show off his wares. Those wares hadn’t come easily, but through will, discipline, and his massive talent, he was approaching a point of almost absolute flexibility. Parker had worked hard for what he had; decades later, his Kansas City neighbors still remembered how the night wind used to come past his mother’s house on Olive Street, pushing before it the notes of the struggling young saxophonist. Parker had spent thousands of hours listening to, thinking about, and playing music. “If there was something he wanted to work out,” said Orville Minor, “he did. Sometimes you could hear him practicing when everybody else was asleep. He’d pull out his horn anytime—morning, noon, night—and the next day he’d have it together.”

  For Parker, as for all professional jazz musicians, the artistic problem of improvising had become clear over the years: how to create a consistent stream of musical phrases that had life of their own—phrases that were marked by fluidity and emotional power, and that were made even stronger by the surrounding environment in which they were placed. The real player invented his own line, his own melody, and orchestrated it within the ensemble so that he was in effect playing every instrument. Only a few did that. But Parker wanted to be one of the few.

  Like most jazz musicians, he had started by training his reflexes. When he heard a certain chord, or a certain phrase, he knew exactly what his body had to do to relate. But that was the primitive, almost Pavlovian aspect of playing. What the improvising artist did was something different: he experienced time at the
tempo of emergency, when the consciousness understood that in order to survive—as in an accident, or when facing the threat of death—your perception had to be sharp enough to recognize every significant detail and put it to use. In that condition, everything slowed to a dreamlike pace and all was made available: the color and shape of things, the temperature, the angle from which you were looking, and a calm that transcended panic in favor of mobile decisions. It could be seen, often, in the glazing of the eyes, felt as a chill or a flash of heat, a humming in the blood.

  Whether or not they thought about it, all good improvisers called upon those resources. But Charlie Parker wanted to be more than good; he wanted to be different. Part of your statement was your sound, and the one he was developing struck some more conventional musicians as brittle or harsh. Parker didn’t care. He didn’t want the kind of rich vibrato that characterized the sound of older players—Coleman Hawkins, Johnny Hodges—that would almost force each note in his compulsively swift phrases to seep into the next. He needed pitches that came out of the horn quicker, that were as blunt as snapping fingers when the inspiration demanded. His tone was absolutely unorthodox, as much like a snare drum or a bongo as a voice. It was assertive, at times comic or cavalier, and though often sweet, it could also sound almost devoid of pity. One trumpeter thought it sounded like knives being thrown into the audience.

  When he arrived at the Woodside that night, Charlie smiled. “The sap is flowing,” he said—code for “I’m going to blow my ass off tonight.”

  “Yeah, Bird,” McShann responded, “I’m sure it is.”

  AS THE MCSHANN band walked the short distance from the Woodside to the Savoy, the tension began to hit them even if they didn’t show it. This was the big time: Harlem, the capital of black America, a world already immortalized by musicians like Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, Jimmie Lunceford, and Count Basie. The Savoy was the Madison Square Garden of the battles of the bands, and the instrumentalists who played there—Negro paragons of glamour—fought with the verve and the swashbuckling charm of matinee idols on the silver screen.

  Though those Kansas City men had relaxed and ready faces, their uniforms inspired immediate derision from the dancers as they arrived and made their way toward the bandstand, under the watchful eye of the immaculate Lucky Millinder Orchestra, there to get a glimpse of the competition—or what was supposed to be the competition.

  “Back in those days,” said drummer Panama Francis, who was then with Millinder’s band, “music was like sports. It was very competitive. People used to make bets. And when we were going to have a battle of music, we would rehearse

  every day, from Monday through Friday. So when McShann came in there, we was waiting for ’em. We were the big boys. We figure, Who are these sumbitches?. . .

  “Lucky was a showman,” Francis recalled. “He wasn’t a musician. But he knew more about a band than most musicians did. He could rehearse a band for one week, and when he got through with them those sumbitches sounded like they had been playing together for years. He was a master at that. And what a showman! He would spin around and throw his arms up in the air as the trumpets popped their accents, or jump up on the piano, or do any damn thing that looked as good as the band sounded and made things more exciting. He was something.

  “James Brown is the Lucky Millinder of today,” Francis remembered in the 1980s. “And, believe me, Lucky had some bombs lined up for the McShann band that night.”

  McShann’s gang must have trembled at the sight of those Millinder musicians, with their hair parted just so, their formal wing-collared shirts dressed up with white bowties and dickies, their blue coats and tuxedo pants, and the leader confident to the point of smirking, the tails of his white tuxedo swaying beneath the buttons at the split as he jauntily headed for the dressing room downstairs. Lucky Millinder couldn’t read a note of music or play a musical instrument. But to him, these McShann clowns looked like nothing but a light breakfast for champions, their raggedy old uniforms so stiff they could have stood by themselves in the corner.

  It hadn’t always been that way. A few years before, McShann’s band had had fine uniforms: formal black coats, cross ties, and gray pants with a shiny “gambler’s stripe down the side,” as Gene Ramey described it. When that wore out, though, it was on to a brown uniform tailored so badly that Ramey had to lean against McShann’s piano in a group photograph so his pants wouldn’t fall down. Then Les Hite, a California leader whose band was backed by a rich white woman, sold them his blue uniforms secondhand. But the long weeks of road wear finally reduced half the men to wearing their blue coats with brown pants, the others to brown coats with blue pants. None of the mismatched uniforms had been to the cleaners before the Savoy gig; putting them in the day before a job, after all, risked not getting them back in time. Still, their appearance seemed to suit the McShann band, which had turned its habit of looking and acting just a little wild into a kind of informal code.

  John Tumino, the manager of the McShann band, was there that night, talking to the Savoy’s Charlie Buchanan. “He had already looked at me when we first came in, and he said, ‘That’s the scrongiest bunch of guys I ever saw in my life. Raunchy-looking outfit.’ I say, ‘Well, Jesus Christ, if you rode the goddam automobile all the way from Detroit overnight for two days, you’d be scrongy-looking, too.’ ”

  “Our outlook was,” Ramey recalled, “you were never supposed to be one of those walking into a place looking hankty or dicty. You got to go in there wild-like. Think wild, play wild. You see a guy so wrapped up in intellect and you wonder, ‘Why don’t this guy let himself go? Loosen that collar. Drop that shoulder a little bit. Relax.’ That was our attitude: don’t go in there and try to appear like Imperial Potentates of the Domestic Orders of the Shrine. Although music is serious, we don’t want to make it so serious that we appear stiff-necked. Music is like, you see somebody you know wants to talk to you, but they’re afraid to approach you. You let them know you’re down there with everybody else, and before you know it, the whole dance floor is full of people cutting rugs. A stiff band will never shake the pillars of a dance hall. And we intended to tear the Savoy down.”

  The goal was the groove, which felt like effortless perfection, a rhythm so right it was a refuge from mistakes. The groove was the jazzman’s definition of absolute grace: shit, grit, and the highest imaginable level of mother wit. The groove could start anywhere—one brass phrase, a drum beat, a couple of commanding chords from the piano, some notes that the boss of the saxophone unit started conspiratorially whispering through his horn and that soon swelled to take over the reed section, which attracted a counterstatement from the brass, making for a seesaw effect that insinuated itself up the spines of the musicians and the listeners. Then a deliberate and confident intensity crisscrossed the pulsation as the band started to seduce the audience, moving at a perfect pace all the way from the tart delicacy of one moment to a passage pawing and snorting with bullish intensity in the next.

  But before the McShann men could start looking for a groove, they had to get past the verbal mud pies thrown by the well-dressed and cologned Negroes who covered the dance floor, homespun and haughty in their array of styles.

  That’s a funny-looking cat up there.

  He ain’t got nothin’ on that one over there. That one’s real strange-looking.

  Look at him: he got a scoop head.

  What about the one with that head like a freight train?

  Goddam! Where you tore-tail sumbitches from?

  You all better keep your suitcases packed.

  The second stage was occupied by Al Cooper and his infamous Savoy Sultans, who gave everybody playing the Savoy trouble. Oh, McShann’s men remembered the Sultans, a notoriously powerful unit they’d encountered back in 1940, when Coleman Hawkins brought a big band to Kansas City and the Savoy Sultans came to play opposite them. That night, McShann had been the warm-up band. When Hootie and his men took the stage, the Hawkins musicians were paying them
no attention, too busy straightening their ties, patting their pomade in place, screwing around with their horns. After one tune or so, though, they stopped doing anything but listening. Razz Mitchell, the drummer for the Sultans, came into the hall ostentatiously, rolling his drums before him and making noise as though only the radio were playing. When he got near the bandstand, however, Mitchell stopped, and his head snapped up in the direction of the musicians onstage.

  “We sent them home with their assholes blown out,” Ramey laughed. “Man, they were wringing their fingers and sorry that they ever stopped in Kansas City.”

  SO WHEN JAY McShann takes his seat at the piano bench, he isn’t worried. Tonight is serious business. He knows his boys can blow, and he knows how to motivate them. McShann knows just what to do with his musicians. He will frustrate them, make them feel upset. How high and mighty these New York spooks think they are.

  Said the novelist Ralph Ellison, who once held down the first trumpet chair with the estimable Blue Devils at rehearsals in Oklahoma City, “We didn’t care about the big bands in the East because they didn’t have that Southwestern swing, which we then called ‘stomp music.’ It was dance music first and foremost. The Southwestern musicians were from many different places, from the Southwest, from the Deep South, some, like Basie, from places as far removed as New Jersey. But wherever they came from, they all developed a way to lope through the rhythm. It was fanciful and it had fervor. I remember hearing Fletcher Henderson when he came through Oklahoma City in the early thirties. He had Rex Stewart and he had the young Coleman Hawkins and they were all fine musicians—but that band did not stomp.”