Kansas City Lightning

by Stanley Crouch

  The time Charlie spent in the Ozarks paid off. One evening, after his little job at Musser’s was over, he took his horn down to the Tap Room, where his old buddy trumpeter Oliver Todd was leading a group. Charlie was in good spirits, laughing and joking, reminiscing about how Todd had split his wages with him when they worked together at Frankie and Johnny’s and the owner wanted him fired for refusing to get a screw to fix his saxophone. That was only a year ago, back when he was still being laughed off the bandstand at the Reno Club. But Charlie wasn’t crying now. There was a new feeling of confidence in the way he stood, the way he pulled on a Camel cigarette, in the cast of his eyes and the feeling he had about music. Now Charlie wanted to play, and over the scowling protests of the band, Todd invited him up onto the bandstand after the break. It was about 11:30. Todd looked at his friend and asked him what he wanted to play. Charlie Parker chose “I Never Knew.”

  The tempo kicked off. Everyone was looking at him, lying in wait and listening. It was warm up on that bandstand, invisible waves of red heat dominating the air. His shirt was beginning to stick to his chest and stomach. As the music floated into the air, Charlie took aim and played what he knew how to play. It might not have been a lot, but it was what he knew. He had struggled for it, and it was right.

  That didn’t change the hostility in the air. It was there, thick and hard as a mature oak, disdain not about to budge. This kid had him some nerve to step up there with them again, disrespecting the music with his ineptitude and his desire to be seen in the company of professionals. Todd was making a mistake, letting this guy come up there. He was nothing but a drag—a mutilator, not a musician. Charlie had to play through all that animosity if he was to stake his claim for some respect.

  The only thing Charlie Parker had now was what he had learned, what he knew he knew, what the sweat and frustration had led to, how the time he’d spent playing had been shaped into the sound of a young saxophonist who clearly felt himself in the presence of his enemies. All he could do was play. He reached for what he knew and held on.

  “Before the thing was over,” Todd said, “all the guys that had rejected him were sitting down with their mouths wide open. I had seen a miracle. I really had. It was something that made tears come down my face.”

  9

  Playing with Buster Smith had been a dream of Charlie’s since he’d started listening to the former Blue Devil’s broadcasts out in the Ozarks with Clarence Davis. “When you got up there on the bandstand with Prof Smith, you knew you were somewhere,” Orville Minor recalled. At one point, Charlie passionately asked Oliver Todd, “Please get me in that groove,” meaning Smith’s band. But the deal was actually sealed after the Ozarks job, later in 1937, when Smith heard Parker play. In effect, he got himself hired through the quality of his playing.

  At that moment, Buster Smith was almost all Charlie cared about. He wouldn’t allow his mind to set on anything else for very long. His mission was nearly sacred to him, and he went at his apprenticeship with the resolute intensity of one converted through revelation. Buster Smith knew that saxophone, and he wasn’t afraid of it. There was something in his work that lay close to Roy Eldridge; it took on the instrument and made things come out no one expected. Smith’s ideas turned corners at a fast clip, and his knowledge of the piano gave his chord structures solidity. There were also the distinctions that writing music gave his playing. The discontinuity that Ralph Ellison observed is also a way of thinking in more than one line at the same time, a way of creating something like a contrapuntal effect on a single-note instrument, playing one voice up here, answering it with another down there, starting an idea at either end of the instrument and taking it all the way to the other extreme, sailing through the ballroom of the music with the audacity of those Oklahoma City dancers in Slaughter’s Hall. All those effects—that internal dialogue, that contrapuntal effect— became basic to Charlie’s mature style.

  During his apprenticeship with Buster Smith, Charlie drew on everything in front of him. After putting in his time in the lower grades of learning, now he was in musical college, doing an independent study with a master who also allowed his student performing space right next to him. In Charlie, Smith found himself with a musical son. Wherever Smith was, Parker was sure to come. Charlie studied Smith’s fingering, watched how his mouth worked when he was executing his passages. He listened for every element that connected one thing to another, asked questions about how to shade individual pitches, and worried over his tone. Smith even agreed to practice with Charlie. Master and apprentice sat down, saxophone to saxophone, playing through the lines and improvising on fast-paced pieces like “Dinah,” “Oh, Lady Be Good,” “Sweet Georgia Brown,” and “After You’ve Gone.” Parker stopped by to see Smith as he worked at the Antlers during the day, walking his stooped walk across the floor to join Smith as he worked out chord progressions on the piano.

  For the musicians on his bandstand, Smith set an inspiring example. “He liked to sit down and play some chords and talk about things in the world,” Minor recalled. “He was an intelligent man. As a saxophone player, he was something. His technique was very good. Buster had the good sound of a lead alto, but he played like he had been schooled good somewhere. Buster was playing all of the modern changes, the chords the advanced people knew. You had to pay attention to him when he was playing.”

  Smith took care to usher his young charges into the jazz fraternity. “Prof wrote notes big enough for you to read a block away,” Orville Minor remembered. And he extended himself to Charlie in particular, telling him how he, Lester Young, and Eddie Barefield used to study Frankie Trumbauer, listening to the recordings over and over. He told Charlie how impressed he’d been, in those early years, by the virtuosity of players like Jimmy Dorsey, with his control of the alto saxophone and his ability to execute difficult passages. He was startled at how quickly Charlie picked up on what he was shown.

  As Orville Minor remembered, Smith’s protégé could be a playful troublemaker. Now and again Smith would admonish him—“Don’t be practicing on my bandstand”—when Charlie started wiggling phrases on his horn between songs or tried to push something through a hole in an arrangement. “Charlie Parker was a guy who didn’t like anything according to Hoyle, and if he could bend it, he would bend it quick. He was full of mischief and was one of those people hated a dull moment.” Yet with Smith he generally behaved himself. “Bird was under a microscope with Prof’s band, because Prof was a real professional and didn’t put up with something if it wasn’t right. Buster Smith laid the law down, and Bird paid attention to it. He stayed on Bird’s case every night. Buster was somebody he respected. You had to respect that man: he knew too much music, and when he wrote something, he meant for you to read it right and for you to come in when you were supposed to— no missing, no messing around.”

  Though Charlie was the soul of attentiveness and manners when he was in Buster Smith’s presence, once the job was done he was more than ready to stay out all night long. Those long nights included running over to Fourth and Main, where an Italian woman known as “Moms” sold marijuana, four reefers for a quarter, a full red Prince Albert tobacco can measured into a paper bag for three or four dollars if you had it. Since the automobile accident, Charlie had learned how to clean out the seeds and the stems, pinch off the sometimes gummy marijuana into a cigarette paper, lick it, and inhale the smoke with the loud viper puff that was more a theatrical gesture among reefer smokers than a necessity. The smoke in his bloodstream slowed things down; it brightened the sound of music, the textures of voices, the songs of birds, the industrial noises of city life. He even put his digital virtuosity to work on the party trick of rolling a cigarette with one hand. He also started experimenting with the stimulant Benzedrine, which allowed him to go on and on, practicing, jamming, walking the streets and looking in windows, talking of his dreams with friends, and remaining out until those who’d gone off to bed hours before were awake again and ready to play.

/>   Once everyone else went home, Charlie sometimes stayed in Paseo Park, alone with his saxophone on a bench that had been filled with musicians a few hours earlier, all of them swinging the blues and going through hard tunes, neither the people in the neighborhood nor the police bothering them. Popping more Benzedrine whenever he found himself about to fall asleep, Charlie stayed out until his mother came and took him home. He later told his third wife, Doris Parker, that if not for Addie he might never have gone home; staying out was too exciting.

  Sometimes it would be two or three days before Addie found him, nearly muttering in a hoarse and tired voice, mouth dry, lips white, eyes ablaze, joints in his knees and arms aching, his body smelling from not having changed his clothes, but his soul feeling as satisfied as his body was exhausted. It was during this period that Charlie began to notice that his appetites were larger than those of others, that he started to sense that he was somehow a danger to himself.

  On the job, Charlie Parker was punctual, and at first Smith had few real problems with him. Now and then Charlie nodded off, but no one really understood what was happening with him. Hard drugs were still novel then; most musicians either drank or smoked reefers. Parker later told fellow heroin addicts that morphine was the first high that pulled him down into the tiger trap of addiction. It was strange: morphine was an upper-class high, one that moved through the decadent world of casual substance use that Cole Porter wrote of in “I Get a Kick out of You.” Though many claimed to have influenced Charlie musically, no one seems to have taken credit for the first time he was shown how to prepare the powder and shoot it into his arm, for the moment when he was introduced to the slowed-down, drowsy world of sedation and chaos.

  Still, there are tales that shed some light on Charlie’s darkness. According to one Negro hustler who ran an after-hours gathering spot called the Happy Hollow, heroin didn’t come to Kansas City until around 1940, when he went north and got permission from the Chicago mob to bring it in himself. If he is to be believed, then, the only thing Charlie Parker could have scored in 1937 was morphine stolen from a pharmaceutical dispensary or a hospital. This connection to the medical world is highly possible; some of the old heads from the time remembered a woman known as “Little Mama” who worked as a nurse or in some similar capacity at a Kansas City hospital, and who, legend has it, introduced the young musician to hard-core dope. Little Mama is said to have been small, dark-skinned, nicely proportioned, and vivacious. If Charlie’s drug struggles began with her, that would make her a female counterforce to the power of Addie Parker, nurturing the gummy darkness that would stain the course of his life. Whoever the culprit was, bassist Buddy Jones told Robert Reisner that Parker himself described the beginning to him: “Getting high at fifteen, Bird told me what he felt. He pulled out $1.30, which was all he had and which was worth more in those days and he said, ‘Do you mean there’s something like this in the world? How much of it will this buy?’ ”

  Charlie’s curiosity about narcotics may even have been related to his affection for Sherlock Holmes mysteries, which he read during his teenage years. Arthur Conan Doyle’s tales had the kind of intellectual materials that would resonate with a curious but introspective young man like Charlie. The detective Holmes was no average person. He was gifted to a superior extent, but alienated by his peculiarities and his focus on elements missed by those who moved more casually through life. Parker wouldn’t have had to read very far into the Holmes stories before encountering the second of Conan Doyle’s Baker Street tales, The Sign of Four, with its startling opening:

  Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantelpiece, and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case. With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle and rolled back his left shirtcuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist, all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks. Finally, he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined armchair with a long sigh of satisfaction.

  If Charlie Parker the fledgling professional was looking for ways to rationalize his burgeoning dependence on drugs, he could easily have found one in the example of Holmes, who goes on from that passage to exhibit incredible powers of detection, a mastery of large implications divined through small details. If Charlie read the story before encountering the sweet haze of morphine, his curiosity is understandable. Each Doyle sentence is a road leading into a world where calculated or desperate destruction became comprehensible through the heightened gifts of a great detective. The Holmes stories transcend constraints of race or class, since any brilliant young person in the modern world might identify with a detective solving the riddles of the universe.

  The Holmes stories, of course, were narrated by his friend and helpmate Dr. John Watson, and there was something further about the narcotic lifestyle to be learned from Watson’s reaction in the very next paragraph of The Sign of Four:

  Three times a day for many months I had witnessed this performance, but custom had not reconciled my mind to it. On the contrary, from day to day I had become more irritable at the sight, and my conscience swelled nightly within me at the thought that I had lacked the courage to protest. Again and again I registered a vow that I should deliver my soul upon the subject; but there was that in the cool, nonchalant air of my companion which made him the last man with whom one would care to take anything approaching to a liberty. His great powers, his masterly manner, and the experience which I had of his many extraordinary qualities, all made me diffident and backward in crossing him.

  Watson’s attitude toward Holmes’s behavior—troubled, yet guiltily indulgent—anticipated the attitude of many of Charlie Parker’s admirers as his career grew. When Watson does question the great detective about his drug use, noting its potential danger to his health, Holmes responds: “I suppose that its influence is physically a bad one. I find it, however, so transcendently stimulating and clarifying to the mind that its secondary action is a matter of small moment.” Pressing Holmes further, Watson mentions not only the drug’s effects on the body but also the “black reaction” that comes over his idol under the sway of the drug. “Surely the game is hardly worth the candle,” the doctor urges. “Why should you, for a mere passing pleasure, risk the loss of those great powers with which you have been endowed? Remember that I speak not only as one comrade to another but as a medical man to one for whose constitution he is to some extent answerable.” Holmes almost welcomes the doctor’s questions, but his answer is hardly comforting: “My mind rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation.”

  It would take a while, though, before Charlie Parker’s comrades even recognized what was affecting him. To Buster Smith, he seemed no more than a somewhat fatigued but enthusiastic fellow when he took his place on the bandstand at the Antlers. “Son, don’t be sleeping on my bandstand,” Smith said whenever he caught Parker’s head starting to droop forward. “Sleep at home. Get yourself some rest, son. No sleeping up here.”

  But Charlie didn’t let anything get in the way of his work—at least not yet. He was too impressed by Buster Smith, so much so that he was starting to call him “Dad,” which was hardly surprising, as he was trying to learn everything he heard Smith play. Somehow, he managed to keep his wild side in check around his first flesh-and-blood mentor. Smith had no idea what made Charlie seem to need so much sleep, and Charlie was able to keep him guessing: all he had to do was snap his head up, open his eyes, and become attentive, smiling slightly as though acknowledging that he just needed a long night’s rest.

  Once he got back out onto the street after the show, Charlie kept up his other apprenticeship—in the codes and activities of the nightlife, the solid rules of the evening. Those rules were seg
regated, at least during certain hours. During those hours the musicians and the people in positions of service appeared and did their jobs, the former using instruments to turn the smoky air of a nightclub into a paradise of rhythm, lyricism, and blues, while the waiters appeared and disappeared at the tables with an elegant balancing of drinks, food, and advice for the evening—much as the white train passengers of the time were served by other graceful Negroes, among whom spillage and accidents were as rare as the appearances of intelligent Negroes in American films.

  If a Negro musician hit it off with a white woman, there were ways of pursuing that interest, too. Later, the musician could have a light-skinned guy take a cab to her neighborhood, pick her up, and bring her to one of the whorehouses on Tenth Street, or to an after-hours spot where he could get a room for the night. Of course, there were still limits—one of them being that the woman couldn’t be attractive. It didn’t get that liberal: as long as she was stringy-haired or old and shapeless, the club owner would turn away if he saw boudoir looks being exchanged. At some of the clubs, Negro musicians were allowed to sit at the tables with customers; this was tolerated almost exclusively in rooms owned by the Italian gangsters, who were so powerful that they did whatever they wanted and allowed whatever they felt like allowing.

  After hours, yet another set of rules played themselves out at the “spook breakfasts,” which began after everything else was over—starting at four or five in the morning, often extending till noon. At the spook breakfasts, held at a different club each week, musicians played while obliging locals served up hot dogs, hamburgers, and chili—quick food, nothing that took too much time. The spook breakfasts were wide-open racially. When white customers felt comfortable rubbing shoulders (and whatever else) with Negroes, they could come and live for a few hours in a world of ethnic diversity after dark. White musicians who had heard about Kansas City swing brought their horns if they felt they were ready, their ears if they felt they weren’t. Everybody in the nightlife knew about the spook breakfasts, and they were never at a loss for customers.