Kansas City Lightning

by Stanley Crouch

  From Langston Hughes came “I, Too”:

  I, too, sing America.

  I am the darker brother.

  They send me to eat in the kitchen

  When company comes,

  But I laugh,

  And eat well,

  And grow strong.

  Tomorrow,

  I’ll be at the table

  When company comes.

  Nobody’ll dare

  Say to me,

  “Eat in the kitchen,”

  Then.

  Besides,

  They’ll see how beautiful I am

  And be ashamed—

  I, too, am America.

  And from Gwendolyn Bennett came “To a Dark Girl,” a battle cry of the spirit:

  I love you for your brownness

  And the rounded darkness of your breast.

  I love you for the breaking sadness in your voice

  And shadows where your wayward eye-lids rest.

  Something of old forgotten queens

  Lurks in the lithe abandon of your walk,

  And something of your shackled slave

  Sobs in the rhythm of your talk.

  Oh, little brown girl, born for sorrow’s mate,

  Keep all you have of queenliness,

  Forgetting that you once were slave,

  And let your full lips laugh at Fate!

  Ralph Ellison, who was born in 1914 and played a Conn trumpet in Oklahoma City’s Frederick Douglass High School Band under the direction of Mrs. Zelia N. Breaux, recalled his similar high school experience with awe. “Those Negroes who taught us were both idealistic and optimistic. Theirs was a social world of segregation, of course. I emphasize the word social because they had taken it upon themselves to make sure that we never became segregated in our minds. We were prepared as though we were cadets fated to go into battle, battle which we might lose as easily on the basis of poor preparation and lack of will as we might lose on the basis of bad luck.”

  Ellison recognized in his teachers an example of forward-looking education. “We must remember that the human mind is integrative by nature, that it makes use of everything that comes before it, judging some things as more important than others, but never failing to perceive. We know that culture is at least partially about the way in which we are taught to perceive, and those Negroes were determined to prepare us to understand as much about the world as we could. They understood perfectly the challenges of our democracy, and they were up to those challenges because they were not about to allow us to have segregated visions of human possibility. They had a mission, and their mission was to make sure that we never became provincial about our own race or about anything else.”

  In particular, Ellison recalled, the teachers at Frederick Douglass High School “made sure that we were accountable to the rich diversity of America and the world at large. We grew up hearing all kinds of music, Negroes singing the classics, Negroes singing spirituals, Negroes performing classical piano pieces in the Negro churches, and so on. We did European folk dances, and we observed jazz musicians broadening the identities of the instruments they were playing.” Everything was open to adaptation. “Hell, you could learn a lot from listening to the white cornet players in the circus bands, and Negroes did learn a lot from them. Our world may have been segregated, but our objectives were not. . . .

  “And that is one of the reasons why the music that came out of those territory bands had such a lilt,” Ellison recalled. “It brought together all of the idealism, the humor, the tragedy, the eroticism, and just about anything human that could fit into music. Those Negro musicians had so much to choose from, and they didn’t avoid sampling whatever they found worthwhile whenever and wherever they could.”

  It was in that atmosphere—of optimism and opportunity—that Rebecca Ruffin sat through the recitations, sat and listened as Charlie Parker performed with the band. Rebecca had seen Charlie at practice. “You could go and watch them in the auditorium,” she recalled. “So you know it had to be that some girls would sneak around and look at the boys with their instruments. Like other girls was with their young men, I was interested in everything Charlie Parker did. He excited me. I was in love with him. . . . So there I was happy to watch him doing something.

  “I was surprised, too. Charlie played every instrument. One time he was blowing the bugle, another time he blowed the same one Dizzy Gillespie blows—the trumpet. He beat the drum. He beat it good, too. You know Charlie had rhythm. Charlie played that big thing you pluck and set on the floor—the bass fiddle. I was wondering what he was doing going from one instrument a little to the next and then another one after that. Charlie was looking for what he wanted to play. He needed a feeling of what he had to do. Charlie was looking for that feeling from his heart, what he couldn’t express in words.”

  At some point, Charlie must have played the sousaphone, because Addie Parker told Robert Reisner she didn’t like the way her son looked with that big thing twisted around his head. She was glad when he finally got moved to saxophone, and bought him a beat-up alto that cost more to repair than it did to buy. He really seemed to like music, she recalled, and he was always going over to see Lawrence Keyes, a local piano player he was close to at the time, to get more knowledge. As Rebecca recalled, “Sooner or later he settled for the saxophone. That saxophone did it for him. It let him speak his heart. But he didn’t start with it.”

  Neither Rebecca nor Charlie knew what would happen to them after graduation, what the music would have to do with it all. All they knew was that they wanted to have some fun. The excitement blew into them like air into a balloon, and they swelled with it.

  Charlie had never been much of a dancer, but apparently that, too, had changed. “After graduation, we went downstairs in the gymnasium, the junior/senior reception,” Rebecca recalled. “We ballroomed all over the floor. He could really dance. I was surprised. Charlie Parker could surprise. You couldn’t be sure what he knowed and what he didn’t know. If he was interested, he would study. If there was information, Charlie would get it. I don’t know where he learned, but there he was at the reception dancing just as good as he wanted. He danced on his heels. Oh, he was so proper. He really did grow up. . . . The band was playing, and we were just out there on almost every dance, turning this way and turning that.

  “It was a perfect evening. We were so in love. Cupid had shot us good.”

  AT SCHOOL, CHARLIE was interested only in music; by the time Rebecca graduated, he was barely attending his other classes. “I went in as a freshman,” he later joked, “and I left as a freshman.” But it didn’t matter to Addie as long as he was staying home and letting her take care of him, and he was happy with Rebecca living right upstairs.

  Edward Mayfield Jr. remembered Charlie as a difficult character. “He was kind of a bully,” he told Robert Reisner. “He was kind of a mean boy. He pushed you aside and got his horn first out of the music closet in school. If you didn’t like it . . . you liked it anyway. He was larger than we were. He didn’t stand any kind of pushing around. He didn’t pick on you, but he would pop you in a minute.” But Charlie was serious about his music. “He was a good reader, both words and the dots. He managed to make his music classes pretty regular. He was that type of four-flusher. He mostly associated with older fellows. He was smoking and that sort of thing, and we didn’t smoke. He was just an older type guy.”

  Charlie was moved up to alto saxophone by the school’s demanding music instructor, Alonzo Davis. “Alonzo was really a good musician,” recalled Julian Hamilton, a classmate of Charlie’s. “If you didn’t want to do the music right, you stayed out of there.” Davis put Charlie on alto after he shifted all his other saxophone players to clarinet, on the theory that once they learned the clarinet, they could go back to saxophone and master it with greater ease. Hamilton, who had been playing the alto saxophone before Charlie, recalled him as a good baritone horn player but not as accomplished as Freddie Culliver, his predecessor. �
�Charlie was good, now. Charlie was good. But he wasn’t on the same level as Freddie.” Another player who studied at Davis’s knee was Lawrence Keyes. The young piano player “was coming in there still, even though he had graduated in 1933. He was playing orchestra vibes and learning as much as he could from Alonzo Davis.”

  Alonzo Davis was part of a tradition that dated back to the nineteenth century, when free black people started moving into the world of American entertainment after the fall of the Confederacy. While black show business was developing on the road and in rehearsals, usually in minstrel shows and circuses, another arena of preparation was coming into being that would influence the course of Negro talent after the Civil War. A legacy of photographs of serious-looking, uniformed young people holding instruments and surrounding a confident adult attests to the growth of thriving music departments at Negro colleges and public schools, headed by almost mythic figures who made sure their students learned to read, sing, or play in tune, and to negotiate material as different as Handel oratorios and Negro spirituals. Engaged in the expanding concentric circles of musical education that had begun in eastern universities early in the nineteenth century, they tattooed their knowledge on the brain cells of many young musicians who went on to shape the evolution of vernacular Negro American music. Known for rigorous discipline—they left behind many stories of thrown erasers, hands smacked with rulers, noggins thumped, backsides paddled, and knuckleheads verbally dressed down—those Negro teachers had been educated in conservatories and in apprenticeship situations, often taking over the departments at black colleges or returning home to make sure first-class instruction was available in the communities where they’d grown up. Some of these instructors were composers; others developed crack marching bands. Many also taught privately when they couldn’t find a school position; they were part of the reason that so many Negroes who were able purchased pianos and got lessons for their children.

  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 offensive.”

  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 crying—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 broth
er 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.