Bales started hiring McShann for private parties. And he started suggesting that this relatively new Kansas City musician start thinking of himself as a bandleader, not just as a member of pickup duos and trios. McShann liked Bales, he could see that he was a white man who enjoyed picking himself a Negro to groom and help, to present and push. Profit wasn’t part of the deal; it was the satisfaction of taking one’s money and adding something, separating from simple, flatfooted privilege, and moving forward as a member of an aristocracy, insiders sensitive to blues and swing as they were right there, right then.
Walter Bales, and those like him, were patrons of homemade art. They were as natural as the musicians they often loved. In some extraordinary way, these people sensed the wonder of a music that had no academic credentials, no long history, and was being made up day by day, tune by tune, on bandstand after bandstand, in one dance hall or nightlife joint after another, disappearing into the air more than 99 percent of the time or else leaving a short stack of recordings to speak for thousands of hours of effort, struggle, dismay, excitement, and success. Those like Bales were part of the tradition of true believers, often wealthy, who have stepped in with assistance when an art form needs them—as they did for George Balanchine when New York City Ballet was built, or for the Museum of Modern Art when it was planned and formed. True believers arrived, sometimes just in the nick of time, to bring a new movement in the American arts to fruition. Patrons were often reaching down from above, but they just as often knew how to pick up the dice, blow their hot Olympian breath on those bones, and roll them.
At that point, Jay McShann had made no recordings at all. He was just a man who had come into Kansas City after roaming the territories in second-string bands, and who’d gotten a bit of local experience in Buster Smith’s small group and big band. He was jolly, round-faced, and loved him a chance to sip until he was mellow. But there was something else there. McShann could swing, could swing very hard. He knew how to accompany a singer, how to support, nudge, lay back, underline something, hold a groove, and help somebody get out of a song if things got knotted up. Bales heard promise in this young man with the flat Oklahoma accent, the spiraling light in his eyes, the big laugh, and the feeling of anticipation that always purred under the skin of musicians who could swing. Walter Bales intended to see just how much promise stood right before him, and he started testing McShann immediately.
When Bales told McShann that a friend of his wanted to bring a band into Martin’s-on-the-Plaza, McShann put together a group for the occasion, but its personnel kept changing as the gig went on. One evening, McShann was listening to the Sunday broadcast from Lucille’s Paradise, where Buster Smith was working. Smith was whipping up a hurricane of swing, spinning through those tunes and turning them into splinters. McShann shook his head in wonder at his old bandleader’s work, and when he saw Smith a short time later, he was delighted to tell him how much he’d enjoyed the broadcast.
“That wasn’t me,” Smith said. “That was Charlie Parker.”
McShann was shocked, but it was true. Smith had refused to perform that night after some hassle over money. Charlie had played in his place.
“That’s when I woke up to how much Buster was in Bird,” McShann said.
McShann encountered Parker when he took a small group to do battle with Harlan Leonard, a veteran of Bennie Moten’s band. Charlie was among the opposition. Another alto player, Leonard had made his way up through the Kansas City system, had gotten his early discipline at Lincoln High from Major N. Clark Smith, had solid command of his horn, and wasn’t about any foolishness. He was a sophisticated player, with one blind spot: he wasn’t very good at setting tempos, which kept his repertoire from swinging as much as it could—but he had a sense of how the music should go. Leonard had first shown his independence in 1931, when he and a group of musicians broke away from Moten, convinced that he was getting too much of the money from their jobs—and that he had become too enamored of the eastern style. Leonard and company thought the band should stomp, stomp some more, and keep on stomping. As the leader of the saxophone section with his alto, he brought a big sound, precise reading abilities, and a willingness to become a tonal part of the rhythm when a riff was set.
In an interview with Ross Russell, Leonard made it clear that he understood what made jazz the force that it was. “You could divide jazz musicians into two classes, the trained men, like myself, and the people I call ‘naturals’—those with natural ability, who were usually self-taught and used unorthodox fingering, embouchures, reeds and so on. You needed both kinds in a strong band. For example, Basie later on had to hire trained men like Ed Lewis and Jack Washington to steady his sections, even though he had great natural players like Buck Clayton and Lester Young. A band’s intonation and sound quality depended a great deal on accurate section leadership. I always thought of myself as a trained man, a good sight reader and section leader, not as a hot soloist or highly gifted improviser. Some of the great naturals were Prof Smith, Eli Logan, Snub Mosley, Fred Beckett, Lester Young and Charlie Parker.”
Harlan Leonard may have understood band dynamics, but Jay McShann knew how to swing and find the right tempo for it. McShann’s six-piece group, with Gene Ramey on bass and Gus Johnson on drums, ran over Leonard, swung him against the wall. The force of McShann’s rhythm section held up, showcasing and inspiring the featured players. The pianist knew how to get down into the cracks of the blues, using a groove so rich it popped the right notes out like slices of bread in a toaster.
Charlie was startled by how good they sounded. He was sounding good himself, playing with a hard, intense sound that wasn’t yet satisfying him, but that kept his fast passages from running together, turning to mush. Clarity is what he was after, all of the notes coming out right, none getting lost. Charlie was looking for his way to say it. He had something of Chu Berry’s snapping attack, but there was a different urgency in his playing. Young and skinny as he was, with mysterious bags under his eyes and an appearance just short of an unmade bed, he was the biggest force up on that bandstand. When he put the saxophone in his mouth, his music seemed to fill quickly with light. Harlan Leonard looked at him with appreciation and disdain, a cold respect.
Before the gig was over, Charlie came up to McShann. “I like that rhythm section! Can I join you?” McShann knew big talent when he heard it, but he didn’t want to be bothered with Charlie Parker’s problems—problems that were already all over the Kansas City grapevine. The word was, Charlie was great as long as he was blowing his horn, but once he put it down—bad news. McShann declined to bring him in. He was trying to build something solid, and he didn’t want anything to do with unreliable musicians. Charlie Parker sounded fine, but he would have to keep sounding fine somewhere else.
On those spring evenings when Charlie was working with Harlan Leonard at the Dreaming Club on Cottage and Vine, a younger kid named Junior Williams used to wait for him to get off, and they would walk the streets together. Sometimes Charlie bought a quart of orange juice, nearly finishing it before passing it to Williams for one last gulp. Sharing didn’t come natural to Charlie, but Williams didn’t care. He wanted to play the alto saxophone, and he’d been following him ever since word started getting around that Charlie Parker was turning into a hot force, just a step or two below Buster Smith and Tommy Douglas. Williams recalled passing Lincoln High after school, back when Charlie was still a student there, and seeing him going over some music lesson with Miss Marson. That was only a short time ago, but now it seemed a small point on the rearview mirror of memory. Charlie had whizzed right up out of the gutter of disrespect to take a real place in the ranks of local musicians. Little crowds of younger men like Williams would follow him as he strolled the streets, deciding where he was going to jam. There was something miraculous about it all.
Though not yet a king, Charlie was a prince of Kansas City, and his dominion extended as far as his sound carried. To those who heard him at this point, it seemed cl
ear that some sort of serious crown would someday rest on his head. He was still shy, but there was something both charming and lumpy in his demeanor. Though he still displayed the nervousness of his youth—and his condition—the young man was starting to walk with a different feeling, no longer the jerky dig of the kid who left home every night wondering if he would be rejected before the night was over. He was starting to hold his saxophone case with the confidence of a young doctor carrying his medical bag, one who knew well that his skill and what he did with his tools could keep pain at bay.
There was a certain majesty to this young man, but also a delicate misery, a flitting turmoil in his eyes, an ache and terror that he managed almost to hide in the variety of voices he used to express himself and to amuse or surprise his listeners. With his natural gift for mimicry, he was starting to take on a hint of the theatrical, an attempt to sound absolutely unwounded by experience. He waxed rhapsodic about the voices of British actors like Charles Laughton and Ronald Colman, who had the ability to spike a sentence with subtle venom, to declaim exasperation in the face of clumsiness, to create a scalloped rhythm of lyric hope or stoic heartbreak. Friends recall Charlie mocking the minstrel coonery of popular entertainment. And he laughed with an intensity that drained anything less than joy from a situation. Yet his reputation still pushed away as many as it attracted.
To Junior Williams, the attraction was Charlie Parker’s music. Charlie favored the younger man with the fatherly smile he would give with increasing authority throughout his career. The saxophone prince stayed out all night, Williams by his side, and in the morning they went to the younger guy’s house, where his mother would fix them pancakes and eggs. Charlie talked about becoming a father, and how proud he was of his son, but he also confessed to Williams that he was having problems with his wife. He loved her, but she didn’t understand what he was doing. She wanted him to get a job and work for the family like the people who went to bed at night. Charlie had other things going on in his head. Music was everything. And at that point in Charlie Parker’s development, the musician who meant everything to him was Chu Berry.
Charlie was overwhelmed by Chu Berry. He told Williams that Berry was the greatest saxophonist who ever lived, that his first inspiration to play the saxophone had been Berry.
Berry was one of the first fast tenor saxophone players. He loved to sprint across his instrument, kicking clouds of harmonically rich notes at his listeners and executing difficult passages with a cautionary fire, a tip to potential adversaries that was a measure of grace. With Coleman Hawkins in Europe and many skull-cracking jam sessions in Washington, DC, under his belt, Berry was the stateside tenor saxophone man of the hour—at least on the East Coast. He was a large guy with a large horn, but his mustache and metal-rimmed glasses gave him the look of a college professor, maybe a dean partial to swatting discipline into place. He looked like a man who settled things. A veteran of Fletcher Henderson’s band, he learned quickly that the bandleader wouldn’t stick to those friendly keys jazz musicians preferred—B flat, C, F, and G—and learned to play in all the hard keys.
It’s easy to understand, then, how Berry must have impressed Charlie Parker. The tenor man’s work had the hard sheen of virtuosity; it was focused on logical musical statements, and there was something in his sound that answered the industrial clamor of the times with the same sort of human power that had conceived and built the machines making all the noise. In that sense, he was kindred to Roy Eldridge. His strength never apologized for itself.
Charlie may have been introduced to Berry through his recordings with Henderson and Eldridge, or through his broadcasts with Cab Calloway. If he wasn’t there himself, he probably heard Buster Smith’s story of what had happened in 1935, when Berry came through Kansas City with Fletcher Henderson and went out jamming his horn up against Lester Young, Herschel Evans, and the other locals who were always in the mood to rough up some eastern star eager to gamble his reputation and possibly the suit on his back. According to Smith, Berry stomped off a medium-fast ride through “Body and Soul,” blowing combative chord changes with such sudden ferocity that Lester Young started heading for one door and Herschel Evans another, leaving a handful of lesser saxophonists to close their horn cases and creep out behind them. Smith stood up, laughing, and shouted, “I told you not to mess with that man!”
WHENEVER CHARLIE WAS having musical problems in those early years, some figure seems to have stepped up to help, recognizing his talent and reckoning that the music he could produce was worth the expense of keeping him in line. Charlie might bring disorder to your border, but then he could turn around with disheveled grace and pull a mother lode of what everybody was looking for right out of the air. That was how it was, and the bandleaders of Kansas City had to decide if they could put up with it. Many would not; many would.
Gene Ramey, McShann’s bassist, kept after the leader to hire Charlie. McShann could tell what was on Ramey’s mind by the way he walked—could tell what he was going to ask, and what he thought Charlie could do for the unit. No matter where they were, what time it was, that damn jet-black Ramey would not let his bandleader rest until he went ahead and hired that boy from Olive Street. Finally, McShann made his bassist an offer: he would hire Charlie Parker, but Ramey would have to take responsibility for his friend the bad but irrepressibly shiny penny. McShann didn’t need an alto saxophonist who showed up at a job without a horn, making the situation worse by telling one of the endless sad stories that had led to his being fired all over Kansas City.
McShann wasn’t alone in his contempt for Charlie’s raggedy excuses. Kansas City jazz musicians were accustomed to counting on one another, to being able to take a man’s word, and they were galled by the lies Charlie told in order to get drug money or to laugh off the tardiness that came naturally to the addict. Of course, Charlie’s world was constrained by a simple imperative: he either got the money he needed or suffered the pain of withdrawal, which terrified him. McShann would take a chance on him only if Ramey was willing to deal with that knucklehead and his habit, so that he could keep his attention on developing the band. If Ramey was willing to babysit, he could go right ahead.
Ramey accepted McShann’s terms. He picked Parker up every evening before the job, took him home, and kept his alto until the next day to make sure he didn’t sell it in a moment of weakness. Parker always implored the bassist to let him play just a little before taking the saxophone. Ramey usually agreed, which meant that he had to stay out with Charlie on many nights, waiting for him to blow himself out. Sometimes he drove Charlie down to the Missouri River, where marijuana grew tall, and waited while the saxophonist picked what he needed before bounding back to the car. When he got Charlie home, his mother always seemed relieved to see him strolling up to the door. “Take care of my baby,” she urged Ramey before they left every night. “Don’t let him get hurt. Please watch over him.”
Despite Ramey’s precautions, Charlie kept finding ways to get his morphine high. By this point small glass vials of morphine were starting to be available for two or three dollars, stolen pure from some warehouse, hospital, or drugstore and making their way into the hands of local dealers, who were beginning to multiply. Yet the trouble McShann expected didn’t materialize, at least at first. “When Bird came in my band, Bird was making time,” the bandleader remembered. “I did notice a few sleepy symptoms sometimes. As a rule, the cat sitting next to him would tug him. He stayed happy, and he was moving all the time when he was with the small group.”
Charlie and the rest of the band were still studying what Count Basie and Lester Young were serving up from the East Coast—live, when they could get it. “We’d always keep up when Basie and them was on the broadcast so he could hear Lester Young,” McShann remembered. “He’d say, ‘Man, what time are you going to take intermission tonight? Basie and them are coming on at such and such a time. Why don’t you take intermission so we can hear this?’ I’d say, ‘Okay.’ We’d switch the intermission
s around so we could run out to the car and tune Basie and them in. . . . He loved Lester Young, boy.”
When Young did something new or exciting, Charlie either memorized it or remembered enough to filter it back through his alto when the McShann Orchestra returned to the bandstand. There Parker would toy with Young’s phrases, bending them, stretching them, stripping certain things away, and mixing the compressed version with bold ideas of his own. But even when it was almost recitation, Charlie could tell his story with a shrill savagery you never heard in Young. That squawling side of Charlie’s sensibility became part of the excitement for the rest of the band. No one ever knew what Lester Young was going to play when that radio knob was turned, and neither did any of McShann’s men have a clue what Charlie Parker was going to do when he returned to the bandstand after the latest radio master class.
Those Basie broadcasts seemed to get Charlie thinking about broader horizons. “He decided then what he wanted to do,” Ramey recalled. “He told me he wanted to go to New York, that he was going to look over New York. Just wanted to go there and look.”
Charlie told Gene Ramey his troubles, just as he had back when he was still Charlie Parker the laughingstock. He told Ramey that Rebecca had called the police on him through the courts, that she had him charged with lack of child support, that he was arrested and had served time in jail. That seems implausible. Rebecca was living with the Parkers. Neither she nor Leon was suffering, except perhaps from loneliness. Charlie did get into some kind of jam with the police during this period, but Addie Parker described it to Robert Reisner quite differently: “Charles got into serious trouble one night when he kept a taxi for six or seven hours and ran up a ten-dollar bill, which he couldn’t pay. The taxi driver tried to snatch his horn, and Charles stabbed him with a dagger. They took him off to the farm. I told the police, ‘How dare you treat my son like that? Bring him back!’ He came home the next day.”
Kansas City Lightning Page 22