Kansas City Lightning

by Stanley Crouch

  Moten’s bands, starting with three pieces and moving up to twelve, detailed the evolution of Kansas City dance music and the arrival of blues as an element strong enough to supplant the sentimental foam of sweet hotel tunes commonly served up for audiences who weren’t yet attuned to the swing, humor, and stark feeling basic to Negro art. Yet Moten admired the sophisticated arrangements that characterized the best of sweet music, and he was intent on combining that skill with the sound shaped in the streets and at the Negro gatherings where musicians were starting to adapt the blues shadings they heard in the work of singers like Bessie Smith.

  In Jazz Style in Kansas City and the Southwest, Ross Russell writes of the kind of instrumental insights that Moten—like all serious bandleaders thinking about jazz—derived from his players:

  The golden link that bound the jazzmen to the blues tradition was the concept of vocalization. When the jazz musician understudied the blues man, observing the great variety of devices at the disposal of his model—vibrato, variable pitch, microtones, fast turns, and the many sliding, slurring, leaping effects—he found it only natural to try to reproduce these efforts on the instrument of his choice, whether it was a trumpet or trombone, or a member of the articulate reed family, the clarinets, alto or tenor saxophones. . . . If the experiments were favorably starred and a right road had been stumbled onto, the jazz musician might arrive at an interesting personal style and one reflecting an accumulation of Afro-American vocal procedures.

  Moten’s ambition was to assemble a band whose music made it larger than the provinces where it played. At the start of his recording career, his ensembles were clearly influenced by King Oliver, including references to some of the trumpeter’s famous improvisations. By the end of the twenties, Moten was reflecting the influence of Duke Ellington, in one case even lifting a riff directly from the Eastern bandleader. This was not unusual: the Midwestern musicians measured themselves against the sounds coming first from the Chicago work of Oliver, and then from the bands in New York, which everyone rightly considered the jewel in the crown of jazz. It was in New York that the complexities and subtleties of show music were combined with the instrumental and compositional innovations of Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, and Jelly Roll Morton.

  Yet the musicians of the Midwest were doing more than merely aping either the New Orleans musicians or the Easterners. They were nurturing ideas that would reshape the very thrust of the music. Moten was in the middle of it all, struggling upward as his reputation grew, and he became ever more ambitious. In almost every photograph one sees of him, Moten is dressed beautifully; he has the look of a well-fed man enjoying the elevator ride and dreaming of the view from the penthouse.

  Moten’s archrival was Walter Page, whose band, the Oklahoma City Blue Devils, had developed a reputation by the late 1920s for musically removing the scalps of the opposition and leaving their bodies for the buzzards. Page’s background touches on nearly every element in the story of pre-bebop jazz. He studied under Major N. Clark Smith at Charlie Parker’s Lincoln High School; Ross Russell reports that Page switched from bass drum and bass horn to string bass at Smith’s suggestion. Russell also says that it was after hearing Wellman Braud’s powerful bass tone, during an engagement of the Elks and Shriners Circus in Kansas City, that Page had a kind of epiphany about the instrument’s potential. He went on to gain a degree in music from the University of Kansas in Lawrence, a city that had been burned to the ground by Quantrill’s Raiders during the days of the Civil War renegade. Page was a student not only of the bass fiddle but also of piano, voice, violin, composition, and arranging.

  By the time Page got to Oklahoma City, he had already spent time on the road, alternating between tuba and bass but also playing baritone saxophone and sousaphone. Intrigued by the challenge of how to use the lower reaches of sound in a jazz band, he was working on a beat that would change the pace of jazz time, one removed from the windblown percussion of the brass band yet capable of bringing fresh harmony to the percussive thump so fundamental to jazz.

  When he joined the band that eventually became Walter Page’s Blue Devils, the bassist’s conception began to crystallize. Supplementing the band with an array of talented players—Buster Smith on alto sax, Hot Lips Page on trumpet, Eddie Durham on guitar, Jimmy Rushing on vocals, and Bill Basie at the piano—Page surrounded himself with musicians who were both trained and natural talents, players whose experience included blues bands, theater bands, tent shows, minstrel units, circuses, and every possible situation where music, dance, humor, the exotic, and the mysterious were welcomed, south to north, east to west. Basie told Jo Jones that he had prepared as a straight man for Jelly Roll Morton in a vaudeville number. It was like that.

  With the Blue Devils, Page managed to close in on what he had to work out on his own, since there wasn’t yet any tradition of using the bass the way he wanted to play it. He knew that the percussive qualities of the usually strummed banjos suggested a blend of percussion and harmony; big enough to handle the string bass, Page had an ingenious sense of the new beat needed to melt the pulse from, perhaps, a fervent stiffness into what would be known as the relaxed heat of Kansas City swing. That would come once he had taught enough players what he was hearing. The man had a vision of the rhythm section as a unit whose capacity went beyond what the piano, banjo, tuba, and drums contributed to the New Orleans sound. The rhythm section had to be balanced. It had to phrase with an even feeling that simultaneously anchored the tempo while creating a forward pulsation. Then the swing of the horns would be coordinated with the percussion and the percussive harmony of the rhythm section. A sound like that would be a good weapon in the dance-band battles of the 1920s. Slick, big-boned Bennie Moten knew that was the way to go if he had the choice and the luck to find the musicians who felt what he knew would work, what would lift the bandstand through the roof.

  By the way, Mr. Moten declined to be bloodied by those damn Blue Devils in a battle of music. Oh, no. Instead, he acted on an old show-business adage: If you can’t beat ’em, hire ’em. His efforts to lure musicians away from the Blue Devils were helped along by the downward economic rush of the Great Depression, which led to the collapse of many venues. As with the fall of the manor system that led to the rise of the city-states in Europe when the serfs and the vassals left, taking their skills to town, the Depression intensified the overall quality of music in Kansas City. Many of those who’d been whipped down by the road, and by the lack of money in so many other towns, came to Kansas City, where there was plenty of work and the party refused to stop. Bennie Moten was proof of that. He had engagements, fine clothes, and recording contracts galore. All you needed to do was let old Bennie know you were ready to step into some success, and if he liked the way you played, you had it made.

  Once the Blue Devils started to defect, an important fusion took place. It would remake Kansas City jazz. Basie told Albert Murray about what he, Rushing, and Durham were looking to transplant into Moten’s band:

  After Jimmy had been in the band for a little while, he and Eddie Durham and I started a little more larceny [trying] to get Lips Page in that trumpet section. We wanted somebody in there to play the kind of get-off stuff we felt we needed for the new things we were adding to the book. Of course, before Eddie and I began bringing in our arrangements, that band had its original Kansas City stomp style. It had a special beat, and it really had something going. . . . I really don’t know how you would define stomp in strict musical terms. But it was a real thing. If you were on the first floor and the dance hall was upstairs, that was what you would hear, that steady rump, rump, rump, rump in that medium tempo. It was never fast. And you could also feel it. . . .

  But it was not the kind of jump band or swing band that the Blue Devils band was. The Blue Devils’ style was snappier. They were two different things, and we wanted some of that bluesy hot stuff in there, too. So we needed Lips, and Bennie brought him in for us. . . .

  With that four/four b
eat undergirding it all, Moten’s latest band started developing a new approach based on spontaneously generated riffs. One player—often it was the dependably inventive Hot Lips Page—would initiate a propulsive, memorable phrase, which would then be picked up by the entire trumpet, trombone, or reed section. That, in turn, would be countered by riffs from the other two sections. This layering of riffs gave the music a polyrhythmic quality, as if the entire band were one big set of tuned drums. It was something like a large ensemble version of the old New Orleans front line of trumpet, clarinet, and trombone, with the phrasing stripped down for another kind of thrust and momentum. Because the riffs were so often improvised, they functioned as spontaneous elements of support—spur and saddle alike for the cantering or galloping improviser.

  Oliver Todd remembered the thrilling effect of a riff, the incremental power it took on as a simple set of notes traveled from one person to the next at an early morning jam session, changing gradually with each new chorus. “It is a feeling that you build,” he said. “You build and keep building. Guys coming in from one o’clock and building that riff, drummers changing, and that riff still goes on. It might hit some moments where it might diminish, but then there’s a certain surge and that starts it up again. Just along about two o’clock, it’s still winding up and it’s still going strong. It’s more of a true feeling of music. It’s simple. It’s just whole, natural, spiritual, building up—jam, flow, and somebody is always supporting it.”

  Then there was the innovative style of bass that Walter Page finally pioneered. Page jettisoned the tuba that was still often heard in bands of the time, replacing it with his string bass and working out a two-bar, eight-beat rhythm cycle in four/four (1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8) that gave the time a flow that bass players use to this very day. This new rhythm removed the earlier music’s feeling of choppiness, allowing the pulse of the rhythm section to breathe every two bars, switching gears on the ninth beat to start the cycle again. Along with Basie, drummer Jo Jones, and eventually guitarist Freddie Green, Page forged the self-orchestrating ensemble-within-an-ensemble that is the jazz rhythm section. The development of the improvising rhythm section separates jazz from both African and European music, because the form demands that the players individually interpret the harmony, the beat, and the timbre while responding to one another and the featured improviser. To play such music demands superfast hearing—a component of genius that is one of the greatest stands against the mechanization of pop music, in which the players send in their parts to be mixed by producers and engineers.

  And yet, as original as the Kansas City and Oklahoma City musicians were, they still drew on the basic model of New Orleans, just as countless works of Western literature have drawn on the complex situations and the search for home drawn so indelibly in the Iliad and the Odyssey. In Hot Lips Page, one heard King Oliver, Bubber Miley, and Armstrong clearly; in Lester Young, the Armstrong of “Mahogany Hall Stomp,” floating beat and all, was personalized and passed on to younger players—notably to Eddie Barefield, whose alto saxophone improvisation on the 1932 “Moten Swing” must surely have touched Charlie Parker. With its crooning and shouting, its speechlike phrases and unexpected runs up to wailing ends, Barefield’s feature sounds like a primitive version of what we would come to hear from the younger man. And Charlie Parker was also taken by Buster Smith, the alto saxophonist, clarinetist, and arranger, who was prominent in the Blue Devils when Young was there, and who eventually found himself in blues-based cahoots with Basie coleading a band at the Reno Club—after the shocking 1935 death of Bennie Moten that followed the collapse of the Blue Devils.

  IN 1936, WORD finally got out about Kansas City.

  By then, Tom’s Town was so thick with musicians it caught the fancy of one of the princes of the East Coast recording industry: professional jazz hound, record producer, critic, and promoter John Hammond. While driving through Chicago in a car whose radio had been wired to pick up waves from great distances, Hammond had heard Count Basie broadcasting from the Reno. The swing caught his ear as something unlike anything in New York. As he wrote in Down Beat that September, the experience flipped his Vanderbilt wig.

  In the article, headlined “Kansas City: A Hotbed for Fine Swing Musicians—Andy Kirk & Count Basie’s Elegant Music Spoils City for Out-of-Town Name Bands,” Hammond raved about the city and its musicians: “Descriptions of the place as the hotbed of American music are in every way justified, for there is no town in America, New Orleans perhaps excepted, that has produced so much excellent music—Negro, of course.” Hammond couldn’t believe that so much talent could be found swinging and shouting in one place outside New York. His public proclamations sent agents and producers scurrying to Kansas City the way oilmen had hit Oklahoma at the turn of the century. Suddenly, white men intent on finding new black stars for the sky of success were going from one joint to the next, collaring musicians, plying them with promises and watches and pulling out exclusive contracts.

  In 1936, Charlie Parker was working with Oliver Todd’s orchestra, but he wasn’t yet on anybody’s list of potential new stars—not Hammond’s, not even Kirk’s or Basie’s. His problem wasn’t weighing competing recording contracts but screwing up his big chance with a collapsing saxophone.

  Somehow, sixteen-year-old Charlie had lost the screw that held the neck of his saxophone in place atop the long, curving body of the horn, and for some reason he refused to replace it. While he was playing with Todd’s band at Frankie and Johnny’s, the neck would slip away from his mouth as soon as he finished a solo or a riff, the mouthpiece flapping back and forth like the waving tail of a moo cow. Kinky, the Italian who owned the joint, was infuriated by the spectacle and told Todd he should fire that guy—first because he couldn’t play, second because he didn’t have respect enough to fix his saxophone. When Todd passed on the complaint, Charlie replied, “You want to be my daddy? Well, why don’t you go and get it fixed?” The owner refused to pay Todd for the sorry saxophonist, so the bandleader had to split his salary with the young knucklehead.

  At first, Todd refused to fire Charlie over the missing screw, on the principle that no one should be able to tell a musician whom to hire and whom to fire. Eventually, though, Todd decided to let Parker go, caught between an angry club owner and a sideman who wouldn’t even help the situation by getting his horn fixed. If he was determined to play by his own rules, he would have to bear the consequences. Charlie’s friend Robert Simpson, who had been ill with pneumonia, rose from his sickbed and took a streetcar across Kansas City to reason with Todd. “Please don’t get rid of Charlie Parker,” said Simpson, shivering with his illness, his eyes shining and inflamed. “Charlie Parker is going to be a great musician. Charlie has an inferiority complex. He can play.”

  A few days later, Robert Simpson died.

  Charlie Parker had lost his closest friend. No longer would he have someone to talk with the way he and Robert did, to suffer the embarrassment of being thrown off bandstands together, to work out new chords at Lawrence Keyes’s house, to share experiences in the Deans of Swing like two peas in a pod, as they were frequently called. Simpson gave him the feeling of having an older brother, in spirit and ambition. Charlie was a pallbearer at Simpson’s funeral, which took place in the rain.

  For Charlie Parker, confronting Simpson’s death was like drinking a cup of blues made of razor blades. People who knew him at the time remembered Charlie suffering profound grief; for quite a while he seemed lost, alone out there with his ambition, struggling for recognition in a music world not yet hospitable to him. “That tore Charlie up,” Lawrence Keyes recalled. “He and Charlie took to each other, and Charlie had a lot of trouble getting over that, a lot of trouble.”

  Rebecca never even knew that Robert Simpson had died—not from Charlie. He was strange that way, closemouthed. No one knew what he was thinking, what he was feeling, not if he didn’t want them to know. And if what you were saying to him didn’t keep his interest, he would just walk away. Sometim
es, when he did that to Rebecca, she would follow him and ask why. “You ain’t saying nothing,” he would reply. “Why should I stand there and listen to it?” He could be nice to her, too. But he still slept downstairs, and at night he still went out with his saxophone, that same old raggedy Conn that Addie Parker had bought him at the pawnshop. Ma Parker may not have known much about saxophones, but she was still committed to making life as pleasant as possible for her son. If it got to the point where he needed more in the saxophone department, his mother would figure out how to save the money that was necessary.

  Perhaps Charlie’s strange behavior was as much a response to Simpson’s death as it was to the “cure” Addie Parker cryptically referred to after Rebecca found him tied up in his bedroom. Things were going bad for him in a number of ways; young Charlie was at risk of buckling under the weight of his disappointments and his shocks, the rejection of his fellow musicians and the sharp, metallic loss of such a close friend so soon. And his musical aspirations still seemed out of reach. “At that time, Charlie Parker was trying to work up on something,” recalled his friend Clarence Davis, “but he didn’t know what he was doing. He was fishing, but nothing was biting.”

  Even so, Charlie kept going out into the Kansas City night of affirmative blues and swing. The music was a refuge, a world of memory and dreams, a field of aristocrats, of aesthetic wizards and sorcerers’ apprentices. One of the places he went was the Reno Club, on Twelfth Street and Cherry. It was perhaps fifty by one hundred feet, with a fifteen-foot bar to the left as you came in the door, then tables on either side. Beyond that was a small dance floor, with a gallery overhead for those who wanted to party and drink above the flow of customers, music, and hustlers. At the end of the room was the bandstand, and behind it a door that opened into a yard where prostitutes sat on benches in the summer, waiting to be called into action by a pair of code words: “walk one” meant there was a single john looking for action, while “walk two” signified that there was a duo ready to slump into what might be some polluted pudding.