Kansas City Lightning

by Stanley Crouch

  The house band at the Reno was Count Basie and His Barons of Rhythm. With the exception of Carl “Tatti” Smith, a former member of the great Texas band led by Alphonso Trent, the musicians were the best of the warriors from the Kansas City–Oklahoma City battles of music, veterans of Bennie Moten’s Orchestra and the Blue Devils: Oran “Hot Lips” Page and Joe Keyes, trumpets; Buster Smith, alto and clarinet; Lester Young, tenor; Jack Washington, baritone; Walter Page, bass; Jo Jones, drums; and, on piano, Bill Basie himself. Basie led the band without ever mentioning it; his direction was clear from the moment he landed one of his unforgettable piano introductions—sometimes giddy, sometimes insinuating—and followed it with a series of hot, well-placed chords and riffs, provocatively fine stuff to build an improvised dream on. He and the band were in there, swinging all night, playing for the featured dancers, sailing and stomping along with the excruciatingly clear blues and the ballads sung by rotund Jimmy Rushing, taking breathers and laughing when the comedians were on, and waiting for the end of the job, when the jam sessions would start at the Reno, then move to the Subway or the Cherry Blossom.

  During breaks, the band cooled it in the lot behind the club. Basie, Young, and Jones engaged in a lingo they had developed that no one else understood. Others nearby took nips, smoked cigarettes, wandered somewhere to light a reefer, joked with the whores, talked shop about their instruments—new refinements and mouthpieces—admired a suit, a pair of shoes, a tie, dreamed of futures in music, recalled some incident from the days of the Blue Devils or Bennie Moten. To younger musicians like Charlie Parker and Robert Simpson, Count Basie and His Barons of Rhythm were symbols of glamour and victory. Everything they did, no matter how simple, had the glow of authority. Those men had been around, had proven themselves out on the road and up on the bandstand. They made that lot and those benches, the cigarettes they smoked, the liquor they drank, the clothes they wore, the colognes they rubbed on, and the instruments they played all part of a myth turned radiantly active through their music, which they summoned into the air with consistent confidence.

  Silent but observant, Charlie hung around the yard behind the club, his horn in a sack, his appetite staved off by chicken from one of the local chuck wagons. When his nerve was up, young Charlie would cadge a cigarette and stand off to the side with his hand in his pocket, one leg forward and bent a little, trying to give off the look of an older player swimming deeply but easefully in the nightlife. He spent many a night at the back door listening to the Basie rhythm section’s superb introductions, to the blend of the saxophones, the stinging brass.

  Blues was the lubricant that opened up the music. It let you get the feeling in. Lips Page could speak blues words with his trumpet, chorus after chorus, covering the bell with his hand for more precision or with a glass to color each note with expression. Buster Smith rambled over his alto, quick and deceptive, then pushed forward moans that called up melody with a personal but clarion lyricism. Lester Young had an odd sound, part light, part dark, and could work his notes with the skill of a pitcher who could land the ball anywhere he wanted within the strike zone. Jack Washington’s baritone was a dancing bull ever ready to bloody its horns. Often placing the blues in the foreground, sometimes letting it play in the shadows, edging the sound of a popular song, the band gave Charlie lesson after lesson. It was always graceful, easy in the rhythm, capable of cheek-to-cheek romance, a smoldering lope, or the running joy of an up-tempo celebration. Yet the celebration was always tempered by the shocks of the piano chords and the smacks of the drums, the odd yelp of a horn, the blue pinch that was always in the story, no matter its exuberance. Basie’s music traced the roller-coaster fate of the human heart: rising high, falling low, singing, joking, sobbing, reminiscing, dreaming, cursing, bragging, praying. Everything was in there.

  Charlie was simultaneously awed and inspired by what he heard. He came every chance he got, staying through the night when he wasn’t working a gig of his own, or heading over immediately after he got off. Sometimes, he was found sleeping in the yard come early morning after the jam session was over, having succumbed to fatigue while listening. Eventually he became recognized as a regular, sometimes seen coming through the front door in the company of a young white piano player and sitting down before the band with his horn, as if he was hoping to be invited to play. Everyone knew who he was.

  No one ever invited him to play.

  The early-morning Reno jam session was the big time, and if you weren’t ready, you didn’t come expecting to do anything more than listen. It was highly competitive, a place to out-think, out-execute, and out-swing the opposition. This, as Ralph Ellison has pointed out, was the jazz musician’s “true academy,” where the novice learned his trade, developed the ability to negotiate various materials, adjust to the beats of different rhythm sections, manipulate the harmonic demands of unfamiliar keys, and eventually take a position as one of the professionals, a player whose individuality and flexibility combined for an artistic personality worthy of serious consideration.

  Gene Ramey was there on the night in the summer of 1936 when Charlie Parker finally made it up onto the bandstand. The bassist had come to the Reno with Margaret “Countess” Johnson, a piano player and rival of Mary Lou Williams, who—with her almost roughhouse virtuosity, her intelligent compositions, and arrangements—became the extremely beautiful, dreamy-eyed brain trust of Andy Kirk and His Twelve Clouds of Joy. Ramey loved going to the Reno jam sessions to watch the masters at work, to see them demolish musicians from out of town, black or white, famous or not. Sometimes Ramey’s mentor, Walter Page, would say to him, “Baby, come hold my bass.” Then Page would tell Basie to kick something off in the key of C, forcing the terrified Ramey to play. Then, afterward, Page would give Ramey pointers, explaining how to shift the flow of the beat, build tension, relax it, how to work under an improviser, spark him, seek an even beat to fit with the drums and fill the space between the drummer and the piano. Ramey took in everything Page said, but he was glad when he got off that bandstand. It was too hot up there, and those guys—if they had blood in their eyes—would run through the keys on you without mercy. “You’d have to be ready,” he said. “Because they’re not going to wait and give you a chance to brush up on this thing.”

  One of the most popular musical venues of the era was The Original Amateur Hour, a nationwide radio broadcast hosted by a music promoter known as Major Bowes. If you did well on Major Bowes’s Amateur Hour, you got a prize; if not, however, they let you know by whacking a gong or ringing a bell—a gesture that got picked up and turned into verbal and musical slang in the jazz world of Pendergast’s stronghold. “We got so in Kansas City that even if you were talking and you said something that I didn’t believe,” recalled Ramey, “I would say, ‘Ring the bell.’ That means I’m telling you that I think you’re lying. And so we had that thing in playing. If a guy wasn’t playing too much, or their beat was goofed up or something, you’d ring the bell.” At the Reno, Jo Jones would hit the bell of his cymbal—ding, ding—to tell a novice to back down and try on another night. It became a source of suspense: would you or wouldn’t you get the bell?

  And so it must have been for Charlie that night when he went up there with Gene Ramey and Countess Johnson looking up at him on that bandstand, where the blood of the vanquished flowed when drumstick hit cymbal. He was a skinny teenager with a horn held together with rubber bands and cellophane, and he was surrounded by men twice his age or more. They were merciless, and they didn’t mind making you look like a fool. If you didn’t know what you were doing, you might be force-fed a lesson that would make you sick to your stomach. No matter how much you had practiced, the only thing that would save you was functional knowledge. Things you practiced alone wouldn’t necessarily work in the mobile situation of the improvising band, where coordinated call-and-response was all. But come soft praise and acceptance, or jeers and disgust, he was up there, and the only thing to do was play.

  The instru
ment seemed heavier, the reed almost the size of a tongue depressor, the buttons on the keys slippery. He could feel his every breath, almost the flow of his blood, the indifferent presence of his nervous system. It was warmer on the bandstand, the lights and the shadows more intense. Everyone seemed to be staring at him, looking at no one else. What tune would they call? Would he know it? He knew he would know it. Would they give him any mercy? He didn’t need any mercy. He’d listened to them plenty. He was sweating. Everyone was relaxed except him. They were smiling. Were they laughing at him already? His stomach was fluttering. It was hot up there. What tune would they call? He knew better than to suggest something. You didn’t do that, not unless they asked. Why would they ask him? All he could do was wait, every sound in the club, every color, every smell more vivid than he had ever known. It was a long, long wait. Then they called the tune and he was in the middle of everything, the piano vamping in the song, the bass humming out the harmony, the drums setting a pulsation of metal and skin. He knew it! He knew the key, too. Charlie could hardly hold himself back. This evening he would get it right. This was it. Now was the time.

  But it didn’t come out that way. The boy wanted to blow, but instead he blew it. “Bird had gotten up there and got his meter turned around,” Ramey remembered. “When they got to the end of the thirty-two-bar chorus, he was in the second bar on that next chorus. Somehow or other he got ahead of himself or something. He had the right meter. He was with the groove all right, but he was probably anxious to make it. Anyway, he couldn’t get off. Jo Jones hit the bell corners—ding. Bird kept playing. Ding. Ding. Everybody was looking, and people were starting to say, ‘Get this cat off of here.’ Ding! So finally, finally, Jo Jones pulled off the cymbal and said ‘DING’ on the floor. Some would call it a crash, and they were right, a DING trying to pass itself as under a crash. Bird jumped, you know, and it startled him and he eased out of the solo. Everybody was screaming and laughing. The whole place.”

  Humiliated once again, Charlie walked casually over to sit with Ramey and Countess Johnson, his face a mask of coolness fighting to hold back the frustration.

  “You got ahead of them,” Johnson said to Charlie.

  “Yeah, I got messed up. I just ran my cycles wrong, and I must have rushed it or something.”

  “We’ve got to get with that,” said Ramey. “But above all, you’ve got to stop playing like you’re so anxious, because if you’re so anxious like that you’re sure to get ahead of them.”

  “It’s all right. I’ll be back.”

  But Charlie Parker didn’t come back—not for a long time, not until he was sure he would never be so wrong again.

  SOMETIME DURING THAT summer, Charlie later told John Jackson, he had a breakthrough. One night, as he was listening to Lester Young jamming at the Subway, he began to understand what the tenor saxophonist was doing, and he broke out into a cold sweat. From that point, Charlie Parker came under the sway of that tall, light-skinned man, who held his horn out to the side and pumped his ideas into the air of his usual job, at the Reno, and from there to the nation at large.

  Born in Woodville, Mississippi, on August 27, 1909, Young was part of a cluster of Virgos who created the environment that inspired or supported Charlie, including Addie Parker (born on August 25), Buster Smith (August 24), and Chu Berry (September 13). In Kansas City, Young was the local demon, a handsome and easy-speaking man whose style was individual to the point of sedition. Not for him the brusque call of Coleman Hawkins, whose vibrato bristled gruffly against his tone. Hawkins had developed a distinctive, arpeggiated style after he heard the piano of Art Tatum and realized the breadth of harmonic color that broken chords could give to the saxophone. Though the thrust of Hawkins would rise into Young’s music every great once in a while, he had something else going on in his mind; drawing on influences quite different from those Hawkins put together, he arrived at an approach that liberated the spirit of his imagination.

  Young’s attitude toward the tenor saxophone was an example of the democratic freedom artists took while on the aesthetic frontier of the 1920s, when everything American touched everything else, sticking or seeping in and inflecting the personal style of any musician who was talented and willing. Jazz musicians, like their counterparts in the other aesthetic arenas of the period, were working to develop a common language of technique and style that could serve as a vehicle for individual expression. Though the richest and most charismatic synthesis came from the Negro community, no one spent much time worrying where something came from if it worked as a compositional device, added tang to an arrangement, or showed you something about your horn. For all the regional pride that is so essential to the story of this country, no one seemed overly concerned where the raw material came from—the north, the south, the east, the west, the academy, the street, the social palaces, the ethnic provinces—as long as it sounded good.

  As a result, the aesthetic parentage of early jazz was as complex as the miscegenated identity of the flesh-and-blood culture. Musically speaking, an artist could have a Negro father, a white mother, a Negro sister, a white brother, and cousins who were Christian, Jewish, Indian, Italian, Irish, and so on. The phonograph was particularly important in closing the gaps among regions and races, and a number of Negro saxophonists—like Young’s early running buddy, Eddie Barefield, and Buster Smith, his fellow Blue Devil—listened closely to the recordings of Frankie Trumbauer and Jimmy Dorsey, each an important figure during the pioneer days of reed mastery. This was one of the first moments since the advent of printed books—and, later, newspapers—when a new technology offered a wide audience equal access to information. Logic, sensibility, and technical skill took precedence over social or racial differences.

  Lester Young—a light-skinned Negro—took the smooth tone of the C-melody saxophone as played by Trumbauer—a white man with Cherokee blood—and remade it into a sound of deceptive understatement. Himself a dreamer, Young heard in Trumbauer something kindred to his own preference for a world of romantic fantasy and joyous humor. Yet that wasn’t enough for Red Young either. He took Trumbauer’s high-minded timbre and used it to serve up the low-down options of the blues. Fusing that tonal color with his greatest influence—the floating swing and melodic logic of the most liberated and daring Louis Armstrong—the tenor man with the light sound gave birth to an approach of chameleon plasticity and cool elegance. Stubbornly unique, Young was a melodist partial to shock effects: sudden descents into the lower register; repeated single notes given melodic variety through alternate fingerings that switched around timbres; slithering ideas that arrived in phrases of unpredictable lengths; maneuverings of tonal color for drama; rhythms that jumped inside the beat or held it at bay to create exquisite tension, until the suspense was released with a sweep of lyric defiance or jest or dreaminess, often bowing out with a muffled howl of ambivalent passion.

  Young had plenty of road dust in his memory by the time he became the central saxophonist in Kansas City. Reared in Algiers, on the West Bank in New Orleans, he had heard jazz when it wasn’t yet twenty years old, listening to the street bands as he passed out leaflets for upcoming appearances. His father, Willis, led the Young Family Band, with Lester playing drums before he switched over to saxophone. They traveled through the South and through the Dakotas, Kansas, Minnesota, and Montana, performing with circuses, on fairgrounds, at dances. The repertoire was popular songs, waltzes, jazz tunes, and blues. Even in short pants Lester was a musical battler: one veteran remembered him bloodying an equally young Louis Jordan, and another saw him jump up on a bandstand to show up a cousin, who had to be restrained from leaving bruises on his young antagonist.

  In 1928, Young joined Art Bronson’s Bostonians. He started on alto but went to tenor, he later claimed, because the band’s regular tenor player was always holding up the band by taking his sweet time before a mirror, primping almost to prissiness while souring everyone else to the edge of murder. The deeper and broader voice of the tenor immediate
ly appealed to Young, and the style he’d been cultivating—one rooted in swift execution—became an alternately startling and mellow approach on the throatier tenor horn, one wielded so inventively that Young baffled almost all comers in jam sessions, their dreams smothered with transcendently songlike passages the whores called “silky saxophone.” His tone replaced the conventional vibrato with a sound like a light streak; a sense of rhythm that stuttered, balked, and swooped unexpectedly; and a decidedly melodic imagination.

  In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Young divided his time between Minneapolis and Kansas City, playing briefly with Walter Page’s Blue Devils, King Oliver’s band, and, briefly, Count Basie’s first band. He was often seen roaming the streets of Kansas City, long after dawn broke, in the company of fellow tenor saxophonists Ben Webster and Dick Wilson. Carrying their instruments like rifles—the necks crooked over their shoulders, the body held in one hand—they were constantly on the lookout for another place to go and do battle with their musical imaginations, blowing to goad and challenge, inspire and devastate. There was only one rule: however hot and sparkling one of the others played might be, you couldn’t imitate it. You had to find a way to make it a part of your own identity.

  John Hammond heard Young in 1934, when the jam session demon came east to replace Coleman Hawkins in Fletcher Henderson’s band; the producer sang Young’s praises to Henderson, but the saxophonist was rejected by his fellow band members, none of whom seem to have recognized that his style represented a new—and extremely good—development in the horn’s power to project feeling. Henderson, brilliant and well aware of Young’s talent, wasn’t strong enough to back the tenor saxophonist against the protests of his musicians and those of his wife, who got the new man out of bed every morning and played Coleman Hawkins records for him, hoping to remedy what she considered the repulsive lightness of his sound. Henderson was said to have tears in his eyes as he reluctantly agreed to push Red out of his band, but even as he did, he insisted to his bandsmen that the tall, yellow, soft-spoken tenor player was the best musician among them.