Kansas City Lightning

by Stanley Crouch

  Even more private than the spook breakfasts were the kinds of after-hours shows given at the Antlers on Saturday nights. Admission to these shows was restricted, more or less, to those who knew Bus Pasler personally; they might be rich, they might be politicians, they might be black or white, but if they were tight with Pasler and could pay the price, their way was cleared to the upstairs room where the “freak shows” took place. “In the freak shows they had freedom the backwards way,” one musician recalled. “Everybody [was] looking at something strange, or they was up in front of people doing something strange.”

  The shows, also known to the musicians as “smokers,” generally involved sex acts presented in an almost vaudeville style, with the band performing musical backgrounds for different kinds of erotic exhibitions. Men in dresses were seen performing oral sex on other men, or being mounted by men after being lubricated in a slow, sensual preamble. Women had sex with other women. Some puffed cigars with their vaginas; others had sex with animals. On those secret Saturday nights, playing third alto in Buster Smith’s band, sixteen-year-old Charlie Parker had his eyes opened yet further to the difference between what went on in the conventional world and what happened when people chose to reject the laws of polite society, to satiate their appetites, whatever they might be. It was a spectacle to erode one’s confidence in rules and laws, in anything beyond the pursuit of mutually agreed upon satisfaction. Morality had its peaks and valleys, and in Kansas City, those down at the bottom seemed as confident in what they were doing as those on the top.

  The world of the musicians themselves, however, rose high above the corruption that surrounded it. There was a feeling of community among them when they were out in the streets after their jobs were done, or as they prepared themselves to look their best for the next engagement, some dance or college date at home or not so far away. It was a world in which the smell of barbecued ribs, chicken, and chili; the feel of new shirts; the fresh scent of leather shoes; and the nosegay of soaps, pomades, and colognes added up to expressions of excellence and visions of glamour.

  “Musicians were strictly following rib joints and chili joints after work,” bandleader Jay McShann recalled. “Guys would have them a taste or two or three or more through the night; some might take some drags off a reefer; either one or both would make you hungry. Your stomach would be crying out for something to arrive and come on down there and get to filling it up. None of this has stopped you from continuing to have a little taste between shows, out in the alley behind the club with guys, that sort of thing. One more sip and just a little bit more hunger. So the hours are passing, you’re up there sweating and swinging, and your stomach is still crying the blues, louder by the minute. With all this activity, you knew you had to get something down in your stomach, and by the end of the gig, you wanted it to be hot, it had to be a solid, and it better be right.

  “So we’d give Smith’s barbecue and chicken and Gates’s chili and Harris’s barbecue a rough time. That kind of food would counteract that alcohol. If we was working downtown, by the time we got to Twelfth and Vine, we was straight. Didn’t make no difference what you did, you held on to a quarter so you could get some of that chili. It would straighten you out. . . . Smith, Harris, and Gates, oh, they were rough. Walk in on one of those three and that wood-burning smell mixed up with that meat would hit you and you knew good and damn well you was in the right place. No mistake had been made. None.”

  McShann recognized men like Smith, Harris, and Gates as comrades. “All of those men were proud of what came out of their kitchens. People were like that then. They worked hard to do something right. That’s how everybody expressed himself, putting in that little extra. You had to get it right. Oh, yes, you had to get it right. It would be your signature, you might say. Then people knew who you was. Wasn’t no confusion. You were good. The facts spoke up for you. That’s right. They sure did. They spoke loud and clear.”

  And looking good was as important as eating well. “In those days, wasn’t no looking like bums, none of that. You tried your best to look as good as you could. Musicians used to buy their clothes at one place on Eighteenth and Vine and another across from it, both run by Jewish fellows. One or the other got your money. They had the quality, the look; they knew what they were doing. Those Jewish fellows were tops. They had everything a musician needed. Cats like George E. Lee used to stay sharp going in there. Those two places sold shoes, suits, shirts, everything, because all a musician wanted was to be sharp. When we played these one-nighters, we’d set the styles of how people dressed and how they wore their hair.”

  As McShann recalls, nightclubs and restaurants weren’t the only places where the Kansas City musicians crossed paths. “All up and down either Eighteenth Street, near Vine, or up and down Twelfth Street, near Vine, were the barbershops. All the news and the sports averages and that sort of thing, people with their political opinions and what not, like the neighborhood Senate or Congress, you might say. Arguments. Lies. Who shot John. Bloody murder. Oh yeah. You never could tell what the talk would be, but it would be loud and strong, and you’d get yourself a laugh while they was fixing up your look. Cat go in there with his hair looking funny one way, and he’d come out of there looking all good, smelling all good, hell, feeling all good. In the barbershop he’d get the hot towel on his face, get the hairs picked out of bumps, get the sideburns right—sideburns were big then—put on some cologne, and then he’s ready.”

  CHARLIE PARKER’S FIRST stint with Buster Smith lasted only a month or two, and soon Charlie was out looking for other work. In the summer of 1937 he got another job in the Ozarks, with George E. Lee and His Novelty Singing Orchestra. Lee had been a rival of Bennie Moten’s in the late twenties, but hadn’t been able to maintain the quality of musicians that would have allowed him to hold a position in the upper reaches of Kansas City instrumental swing. He had also been guest leader of the Deans of Swing, when Charlie was getting his professional feet wet at Lincoln Hall, and is thought to have helped the young alto saxophonist with some union business at an early point. Regardless of his troubles keeping a good band together, Lee was still a very popular Kansas City singer, proficient in both ballads and the kinds of oddball comic tunes that were rooted in minstrelsy and vaudeville.

  Lee’s work reached into the repository of American show business, reflecting the popularity of the arias that spun on so many turntables, regardless of race, when the recording industry started to roll. The sentimental ballad went all the way back to the minstrel shows, the tunes of Stephen Foster and the overweening moments of mush when the white men—yellowed up as Creoles—sang of, or to, their objects of affection, who were also white men, but in drag. Negroes didn’t have much of a tradition of singing slow, lyric material that wasn’t religious or blues, but the long shadow of Enrico Caruso stretched across America; almost everyone heard his ringing tenor, including Louis Armstrong, who recalled enjoying the singer’s recordings when he was still a child in New Orleans.

  Caruso’s sound brought a melodic sexuality to the American drawing room, and his material projected the fascination with death that arose over and over in opera. Over time, his image slowly transformed into that of the patent-leather-headed Latin lover, he of the tango and the desert tent, which moved into the American sensibility in the form of Rudolph Valentino on the silver screen, and in phonograph records in the form of handsome popular singers who appealed to the female need for romantic recognition that could be dangerous, elegant, scalding, or tender in so many transcendent ways that they took on a masculine majesty. By working in that musical tradition, George E. Lee was one of those who took a path that led away from the blues—the same path that Billy Eckstine eventually followed all the way to the position of matinee idol. With his fine clothes and his ensemble of musicians, traveling in an eye-stopping team of luxurious Hudson automobiles—one pink, one blue, one green—Lee was inclined in that direction himself.

  Lee was an entertainer all the way, a showman
who made a winning combination with his singing sister, Julia, who also played the piano and could drink and gamble with the best of them. For laughs, George Lee even made a show of puffing into the tenor and baritone saxophones onstage, prolonging the instrument’s minstrel identity even as everyone Charlie admired was ushering it into more sophisticated territory—including Buster Smith himself, who joined the band around the same time as Charlie. Another member was the guitarist Efferge Ware, and it was Ware who taught Charlie how to run cycles of fifths and resolve different kinds of chords. He gave the same lessons to Gene Ramey, who remembered jamming with Ware and with Charlie, all three of them trading insights about their craft while tightening their harmonic precision.

  Between Buster Smith and Efferge Ware, the first half of Charlie’s summer was perfect. In the second half, Buster Smith launched a new big band at the Club Continental that included the piano of Jay McShann, who had landed in Kansas City earlier that year. It was McShann’s introduction to the musical aristocracy of the swing capital.

  “I first met Buster Smith when I came to Kansas City in 1937 and Basie had already left,” McShann recalled. “Buster was playing with Dee Stewart’s band at the College Inn, which was then called Club Continental. They needed a piano player, and I was working with a drummer named Elmer Hopkins, just the two of us, and the cats come and got me. . . . They hired me on a short-term basis until their regular player came back. When he came back, the guys still wanted me to stay. I couldn’t go. By then I was working at this place called Wolf’s Buffet, where they had me and a drummer and sometimes Joe Turner came in there and sang the blues, and we had one of those girls who could dance by the table corner and put that twat up there and take the money off—so she was valuable, bringing in those tips, which we split three ways. We were doing just fine. I had my wife to take care of, so I had to take the best paying job I could get.

  “I made the next gig, though, which was Prof’s big band at the Club Continental. His big band didn’t last very long, because then there wasn’t much business for a big band in Kansas City. It couldn’t have lasted more than two months. We would have been lucky if it lasted three months. Things were over and it was gone. Situations were moving very fast then. We all loved the band, but it didn’t work enough for us to be able to do anything with him for very long.”

  Smith’s big band played college dances, fraternity socials, and the like. “After those dances, we would have sessions somewhere on the campus or near. . . . There were always some kids who still wanted to swing. We worked in places like Missouri University in Columbia, between Kansas City and Saint Louis, practically almost in the middle. We played our jazz book, just what we had. Those white kids wanted to swing, and we knew how to give them all the swing they could stand. Yes, we did.”

  When Charlie wasn’t studying with Buster Smith or listening to the latest records from the East—Roy Eldridge, Chu Berry, Jimmy Dorsey, Benny Carter, Johnny Hodges—he hung out with some of the guys at the Castle Theater on Twelfth and Paseo. They sat in the balcony, drinking wine as they watched the afternoon’s fare—two serials, a feature, and a comedy—and listening to the ways the chords in the movie soundtracks moved and resolved, how the scores went into relative majors or minors. They listened to everything over and over again, analyzing and debating what they heard until it was time to leave for the job. When they actually watched the movies, which they didn’t always do, the musicians noticed how different tempos and colors were associated with various moods and actions. In the grand democratic tradition of technology in American life, they were scouring other art forms for elements that could serve them in their own, which helped them to increase their control of the craft through which they could express their individual identity.

  One night at the Club Continental, while the big band was swinging, Benny Goodman came in. He wanted to hear Buster Smith again. Jay McShann remembered the night well:

  “Now Prof, [with] all that saxophone he could play, you never could get him to play. He’d take one chorus, whet your appetite, then he’d stop. It was frustrating because you always wanted him to stretch out. Buster would play short, then he would let Charlie play, let me play, whoever else, somebody. Everybody but himself. Buster didn’t care about it. He drove us crazy. We wanted to hear that music come out. That wasn’t his style. Give you a little bit and sit down. That was Prof.

  “But the night that Benny Goodman come in, we wouldn’t settle for that short stuff. We wanted to hear Prof open up. . . . We started to calling out, ‘Go ’head, blow, Prof, blow.’ I guess we made him feel it. He let it go. Oh yeah, he let it go, but he let it go with all that control that kind of musician has. When you hear that, man, that really is something. It really is. . . . It starts to build, and it starts to build some more, and it keeps on building; each one of those choruses comes right on in there, perfect, just like a coupler snapping those boxcars together. It starts to rolling and you have to feel it, you can’t resist it. That groove is in there and you can’t get over it, you can’t get under it. You got to swing. We’re still calling out, ‘Blow, Prof, blow,’ and we’re swinging hard as we can now, with Prof out there letting it get just as rough as he wants it to be. . . . This is do or die right now. This is the master in action. This is Kansas City swing, strong as it gets. This is the whole kit and kaboodle coming out red hot. You couldn’t hardly stand it he was sounding so good. Prof got to playing so much he leaned over and his glasses fell down to the end of his nose, just hanging there about to fall. It looked funny but you couldn’t laugh; you couldn’t laugh because he was playing so much. Benny Goodman just sat there shaking his head.”

  IN ANOTHER OF the quick leaps from one bandstand to another that were so common in the lives of professional freelance musicians of the era, Charlie also spent time with Kansas City jazz legend Tommy Douglas. Like Walter Page, Douglas had been classically trained at the Boston Conservatory, and he had a strong reputation in Kansas City. Though his specialty was the alto saxophone, he was a master of more than one reed instrument and stood confidently within the ranks of Kansas City musicians. In photographs, Douglas projects a pert dignity and has the imperious posture of a man who was both a disciplinarian and a rumbler. One photo shows him standing in front of his band bus, a few feet above a line of squatting musicians, holding a clarinet and staring at the camera with the low-keyed but baleful intensity of Joe Louis.

  With Buster Smith, Charlie had been given enough improvising space to try out new ideas almost instantly. Douglas was a different story. As Clarence Davis pointed out, “When Charlie Parker worked with Tommy Douglas, you can believe that he was playing third alto, because Tommy Douglas was going to be the star. Tommy might have let him get off now and then, but Tommy Douglas was going to do almost all of the playing. Buster Smith and Tommy Douglas was the two best around here. Tommy Douglas knew how to play them high notes way up there. They used to get him. He was one of the ones they would wake up if somebody came through town blowing. He’d get up out of his bed and come over there and put something rough on him.”

  Douglas took a more authoritarian attitude toward Charlie than Buster Smith had—especially after he realized that the young man had started hocking his saxophone for drug money. As Douglas told Robert Reisner, he saw Parker’s problems and promise very clearly:

  “Charlie Parker was playing with me when I cut the band down to seven pieces. He was on alto. He was about fifteen then, and he was high then. I told him he was in trouble, and I used to have to go and give a taxi driver ten or fifteen dollars to get his horn out of hock because he was high on that stuff. Finally, he lost the horn and I got mad and wouldn’t get it for him. The taxi driver soaked his horn and wouldn’t tell him where he had it.

  “When I was blowing, he’d be sitting there smiling and tapping his foot, and I figured he was just high off that jive, but he was digging. I took a Boehm-system clarinet (I played both Boehm and Albert) over to him one day, and he came back the next and pl
ayed all the parts; he was that brilliant. It wasn’t long before he was playing all the execution, and it was that clarinet that started him soloing.”

  Apparently, Douglas was thinking beyond the harmonically commonplace. His style pointed in the direction of the bebop movement that Charlie would pioneer, with Dizzy Gillespie, in the 1940s. “I was playing almost the same way, way out. What caused me to do that was studying theory and harmony. I made all passing tones and added chords, what we call intricate chords today. I was doing all that then in 1935, and in order to get that in, it called for a whole lot of execution. Naturally I couldn’t just run notes, and I had to figure out a style, but nobody understood it.”

  Douglas may have been overstating the gulf between himself and his peers. He was a highly sophisticated musician, but he was also very popular, as Jay McShann confirmed: “When Buster Smith or Tommy Douglas came in a club, musicians would sit down and listen. They knew there was learning to be done.”

  So did Charlie, who was taking in information like a vacuum cleaner and challenging himself in more inventive ways. By now, he had long since mastered the physical challenges of playing—the pain of the lips, the tongue, and the teeth; the fatigue of the fingers; and the limitations of the lungs—and become preoccupied with the coordination of mind and muscle necessary to make his own way.