Kansas City Lightning

by Stanley Crouch

  Living in the Woodside gave him another chance to move further into that aspect of the city, just as he was doing in the after-hours world of jam sessions, even in the menial restaurant and nightclub jobs that gave him a more thorough sense of how things worked: how professional cooks got ready for business; how memory was everything when it came to being a good waiter or waitress; how, no matter how good the night in a restaurant might be, an evening of fat tips and receipts also meant the filth and the disorder of dirty dishes, bathrooms, and floors after the doors were closed and all the customers had gone home. Some were hired because they were willing: standing up to the mess made them essential. No good room could make it without them. Charlie’s father had embodied the truth that the luxury of good service was nothing to be ashamed of; for a busboy, the end of a shift—with all external filth removed—was an unnoticed sunrise of pride.

  Trumpeter Jerry Lloyd told Robert Reisner that he met Charlie through fellow trumpeter Benny Harris while the saxophonist was staying at the Woodside. Lloyd took his new friend to jam at MacDougal’s Tavern down in the Village. “I got Bird one of his first jobs in New York,” Lloyd recalled. “He was desperate. Some days he’d go without eating. I got him a job in a joint called the Parisien Dance Hall.” It was a taxi-dance establishment.

  Decades later, Claxton laughed loudly as he remembered how people’s opinions of Charlie changed when they heard him play. “One time he asked one of Ernie Fields’s alto men to let him play his horn. . . . So the guy let him play his horn, and he was shocked because Parker played so much stuff! Maybe he didn’t have anywhere to stay, but I mean he knew how to play alto saxophone! . . . Man, that horn had never been played like that before!”

  Claxton’s recollections reveal much about how information moved from place to place, musician to musician, in those days. Born in 1913 in Bartlett, Tennessee, near Memphis, he was one of eight children from a highly musical family. His mother and father played by ear, but the Claxtons made sure that their four boys and four girls learned music formally. The Claxton children all played and sang in the choir at First Baptist Bartlett, where Rozelle’s parents were deacon and deaconess. For six years Rozelle studied concert piano under three different teachers.

  He described his most important instructor:

  Mrs. Georgia Woodruff is the one who was responsible for my developing my left hand. She was playing at the church in Memphis, you know, Central Baptist. Her father was the minister, the Reverend T. D. Rogers. I studied classical music with her, and also the jazz part; because she was able to do that, too, play both of them—play and sing. She was very talented. She just had talent enough to play the jazz, to go into the theaters, the Pantages Theater and the Palace. She played the organ for silent movies. A lot of guys from New York used to come down there. They had stage shows, and those guys were playing the stride style like James P. Johnson. So she picked up on it, and she taught it to me.

  Woodruff also taught Claxton how to use minor seventh and dominant seventh chords and their harmonic extensions:

  Well, I mean, naturally, playing those classical things you played all those different kinds of harmony anyway. Well, the classical things, most of it’s in triads. But she added the IV, V harmony to it, the major and minor sixth chord, or then the major and minor seventh chord.Well, you get all those tones in classical music, but they are in triad form for the most part. So when you play the IV, V, and add the IV, V in jazz, the chord sounds full. . . . After the seventh, you played a ninth, then the eleventh, the augmented eleventh and the thirteenth.

  Woodruff’s ear was so good that when she heard a device Art Tatum used—modulating up a half step, then resolving his improvisation back into the original key—she taught that to Claxton as well. After performing under Jimmie Lunceford at Manassas High School, Claxton went to Kansas City in 1933, where he worked with the band of Clarence Davis, the trumpeter who played and roomed in the Ozarks with Charlie Parker. At one point, W. C. Handy used Davis’s group when he came through Kansas City, and encouraged Claxton to leave for New York. Young, dumb, and plumb in love with a local girl, Claxton remained.

  Claxton met Charlie Parker in one of those 1937 jam sessions when things were changing. The two worked together in Harlan Leonard’s band not long before Charlie finally hoboed the hell out of there. During one session, somewhere in 1938, Claxton used Tatum’s shrewd technique. “How do you do that?” Charlie asked, his eyes gleaming in wonder. “Would you please do that again?” Claxton taught him how it worked, and before long the half-step shift became a permanent tool in Charlie’s approach.

  Now, in the summer of 1939, the two were reunited in New York—Claxton an employed professional, Charlie still a scuffling vagabond looking for his niche. Charlie told Claxton about the musicians in New York who impressed him, young guys who were getting it together in the Harlem sessions. They talked about the hierarchy among piano players: Tatum first, of course, though Charlie was just as interested in Teddy Wilson, who was influencing many Manhattan piano players. But Charlie’s greatest admiration was reserved for the saxophone players: first Lester Young, then Ben Webster and Herschel Evans, Basie’s other tenor man.

  When Charlie left the Woodside, he found himself a place downtown in the Stuyvesant High School area, renting a space where he could sleep and practice. Whose horn he had or how he got it is a mystery. The son of the woman who was his landlord recalled to jazz scholar Phil Schaap that Charlie gave his name as Charles Christopher Parker, an expansion that Rebecca Parker had never heard from Charlie or his mother. (The affectation may have been a way of saluting his lineage: Christopher was the middle name of his grandfather on his father’s side, Peter Parker.) He got a job washing dishes in the Stuyvesant area but did all of his playing uptown, gradually turning ears in his direction.

  By late 1939, Charlie was playing with more confidence. There is some mythic talk that, while working at Jimmy’s Chicken Shack, he listened at close range to Art Tatum, the harmonic grand master of jazz and the most startling virtuoso the music ever produced, who had a long engagement there. Biddy Fleet never heard Charlie mention studying Tatum in person, but like every player familiar with the pianist, they were both in awe of Tatum’s approach: his unusual impositions and resolutions of harmony, his complex conception and sparkling execution.

  Tatum had astonishing rhythmic imagination, perfect time, and absolute swing. His playing combined the digital fluidity of European masters like Liszt and Chopin, the honky-tonk and barrelhouse line that led to ragtime, and the hotel and cocktail sound of sentimental ditties and Tin Pan Alley standards. In his book Stomping the Blues, Albert Murray observed that jazz musicians used Tin Pan Alley as a kind of folk source, and that idea was never better illustrated than in Art Tatum’s playing. He remade popular songs into miniature American concerti, arrived at through a style built upon Earl Hines and the Harlem kings of stride such as James P. Johnson, Fats Waller, and Willie “The Lion” Smith. Given Charlie’s appetite for fresh approaches, if the alto saxophonist had been lucky enough to watch Tatum in action nightly at Jimmy’s Chicken Shack, Biddy Fleet would surely have heard all about it.

  Another player casting a large shadow in New York at the time was Coleman Hawkins, who’d just returned to the States after five years abroad, where he had lived the life of a celebrity unencumbered by race. Across the water he did what was not always possible in the United States. Yes: driving fast cars, skiing, and coupling up with pretty women, no matter what hair textures or skin colors were involved. Slick and strong enough for whatever New York had to offer, Hawkins was out to reclaim his title as the king of the tenor saxophone from innovative upstarts like Chu Berry and Lester Young, that tall yellow demon who had perpetually bested him during a December 1933 jam session at the Cherry Blossom with his light, melodic fluidity, sailing up as he extemporized. But that was then and that was all right: this returning innovator, the man who had given the tenor saxophone its position in jazz, had something for th
em, all of them.

  On October 11, 1939, Hawkins recorded a version of “Body and Soul” that succeeded in simultaneously rattling and inspiring his fellow musicians. To the surprise of everyone—and despite the fact that Hawkins never quite stated the tune’s familiar melody—the recording became a big hit, the force of his saxophone line making an enormous impact without ever resorting to familiarity, gimmicks, or simplification. In one three-minute recording, Hawkins had given his horn a wholly new identity, drawing on Art Tatum’s sophisticated arpeggiation but repurposing it in the service of his own frontier mind.

  “Body and Soul” was the talk of the town. It was one of those marvelously odd moments in American aesthetic history, a burst of complex invention that managed to capture the public imagination. It was everywhere—on record and on the radio, crooning triumphantly through windows, walls, and doorways all over Harlem. And it was a subject of ongoing analysis among musicians, who argued fiercely over whether Hawkins was gaining new ground or leading them all into a bog of inaccuracy.

  None of this was lost on Charlie Parker. The style he was in the midst of forging, through constant practice and contemplation, certainly drew on Hawkins and Tatum, as well as Lester Young, Buster Smith, Chu Berry, and Roy Eldridge. Yet it went beyond the fusion of such different influences: the sharp edge of his sound, his bubbling rhythmic intensity, and the aggressive velocity of his technique conspired to create something fresh that was inspiring talk very different from when he’d first arrived in Harlem. He was starting to get work on bandstands—paying jobs!—and to attract a tight circle of younger musicians who recognized that there was something to what he was doing. Charlie Parker was starting to get with the groove of New York, and the Big Apple was beginning to get with him. It was peeling pleasantly, sweet and tasty. His dream was closer than ever.

  IN THE SPRING of 1940, a young trumpeter named Joe Wilder traveled down to Annapolis, Maryland, with a band from Philadelphia called the Harlem Dictators. Annapolis was on the circuit then, and people from Washington, DC, and Baltimore would go there to hear the bands at two hotels, the Washington and the Wright. The crowds were thick, and sometimes you might see a handful of white people out there listening or dancing, but the dominant ethnicity by far was Negro American. Wilder was on vacation from Philadelphia’s Mastbaum School, a home to other players, including clarinetist Buddy DeFranco and trumpeter Red Rodney. Years later he couldn’t recall which hotel his band worked in, but he remembered that Pearl Bailey was also on the bill, singing and doing comedy, though still unknown to the greater world.

  During the day, the musicians would get together and jam. Wilder went to one of the sessions and learned that the musicians working the other hotel were employed by a showman known as Banjo Burney Robinson, as part of a large revue of singers, dancers, and instrumentalists. Burney was about the size of Count Basie, but his reputation was far different: Burney was known for taking revues out on the road from New York, paying everyone in full the first week, coming up with half the money and a story the second week, and then disappearing with all the money at the end of the third week. (Biddy Fleet had a trick for getting even with those kinds of bandleaders: he would steal the sheet music for the first-chair parts from the saxophone, trumpet, and trombone books—leaving no one to play the melody and thus making it virtually impossible for the band to play the arrangements.) For the moment, though, things were looking good in Annapolis. Banjo Burney had uniforms for his instrumentalists and costumes for the singers and dancers. It was a very professional-looking outfit. And one of the guys in his band was Charlie Parker.

  When Joe Wilder first encountered Charlie, he was struck by the way the young man played the saxophone: thrusting the horn straight out, not holding it to the side or with any of the posing associated with the big boys of the instrument. No visual sauce, no extras, just a deadpan stare that earned him the nickname “Indian.” He “reminded [them of] the cigar store Indians that you used to see in front of the tobacco shops . . . because he held it right in front of him and he had features somewhat like an Indian.”

  There was no derision to Charlie’s nickname, however. Charlie was the highest-ranking combatant in Banjo Burney’s orchestra, and when things got especially hot in a jam session, someone would say, “Go get Indian.” Then it was off to find him, practicing somewhere but always ready to step into the tempo, the key, and the harmony, and to put something down so rough that victory had to come his way.

  Joe Wilder remembers “Indian” Parker’s first appearance at those jam sessions in Annapolis: “Most of us were somewhat awestruck by him, you know. He was something. . . . I mean, he did things and played with such clarity and freedom that it was sort of unheard of. We had guys who could play. There were fellows in the band that I was in who played extremely well. But even they were amazed by what Charlie Parker played. He just had it. . . . His development of ideas was different than what most of us had heard or even attempted, because he was doing a lot with an approach to harmony that most of us had never even thought about. It wasn’t bebop. He was just swinging. But his interpretation was completely different.”

  The two bands, the Harlem Dictators and Banjo Burney’s organization, stayed in Annapolis for three weeks, and during that time Wilder noticed something remarkable about how Charlie practiced. Charlie was “a very likable person and a very intelligent guy,” he recalled, but he was always working on that saxophone. In those days, most musicians focused their practice on certain areas of the music, sticking to a limited number of keys. Charlie was different.

  “He was practicing every day,” Wilder said, “and he would practice diligently. Whatever he played in one key, he would play in all the other keys. No matter how difficult the figure he was playing, he would practice it in every key. And that’s where, apparently . . . not apparently—that’s how he developed that dexterity that he had, where keys meant nothing at all to him.” In those long practice sessions, Wilder says, he heard some foreshadowing of the harmonic devices that later distinguished bebop.

  There was another young alto saxophone player who was turning heads in those Annapolis jam sessions. His name was Oswald Gibson—the musicians called him “Little Gib”— and he was working with a seven-piece group down from Philadelphia under the leadership of pianist Jimmy Golden. Frank Wess, who lived in Washington, DC, and had yet to start playing professionally, came to Annapolis after school to hang around the musicians and hear the fireworks at the jam sessions. Of the encounters between Indian and Little Gib, Wess says, “They both sounded very much alike. Yeah, very much alike. . . . You know, the music progresses, wherever it is, at about the same rate, and you have the same thing going on in a lot of different towns. Some towns get together faster than others.”

  Charlie and Little Gib had never met before. “It was just coincidence that they played so much alike,” Joe Wilder says. But his assessment of the two saxophonists, contrasted with Wess’s, shows how differently two musicians can hear the same events.

  “Some of the guys felt that it came out kind of even, because this little guy Gib was quick, too,” Wilder remembered. “He was fast, you know. He didn’t have the musical knowledge that Charlie Parker had, but he had some of the same facility. On that basis, he was sort of able to keep up with Charlie, where the rest of us, I mean, we were dragging our feet. We had never heard things that fast, although I knew some guys like John Brown in Philadelphia, who later played with Dizzy’s big band . . . who could play like that. But still, they weren’t Charlie Parker. Charlie was an exception.”

  The trumpeter Idrees Sulieman, then known as Leonard Graham, was there as well. He recalled musicians saying to Little Gib that he played everything that Indian played, to which Gib answered, “Yeah, but he played it first.”

  How could Charlie Parker have felt about Oswald Gibson? Had he ever expected to find himself blowing against another young player, someone he’d never heard of, from a town he’d never been in, who was wo
rking toward the same kind of instrumental command? If we believe Joe Wilder’s account, Charlie may well have discerned the difference between his own musical knowledge and Gibson’s. Yet Gibson’s presence may have inspired Charlie to work even harder, given his pride and competitive nature. Charlie loved having buddies to practice with, but no one remembers him practicing with Little Gib. They battled in the jam sessions and went their separate ways.

  CHARLIE KEPT IN touch with his mother—as he always would—letting her know how he was faring, now and then charming her out of a small loan to get him from one day to the next. So Addie Parker must either have known where he was living in New York or had heard from him when he was down in Annapolis with Banjo Burney. However it happened, his mother contacted him in May with bracing news: his hard-drinking, freely wandering, nightlife-living father had been murdered at the hands of some street woman. Her angel child, her favorite son, had better pack right up and come on home for the funeral.

  Charlie returned to Kansas City by rail. This time he had a ticket, but his heart was no lighter than on the gloomy night he’d left, around eighteen months ago, nearly a year before Coleman Hawkins had his Negro community hit with “Body and Soul.” The town was far different now. He could hardly recognize it.

  A year ago, on May 22, 1939, Tom Pendergast had been sentenced to fifteen months in prison after pleading guilty to income tax evasion, the same charge that brought down the mighty Capone. The many thousands of wide-open Kansas City days and nights were gone, victim of an overdose of the brand of honesty that made it hard for musicians who depended on the nightlife to survive. What a moment: just as Charlie was getting with the New York groove, his erstwhile dissipation behind him, mastering his horn and earning some respect for it, bloody murder pulled him back into the K.C. blues. Luck was hard to come by—and, when you got it, it never lasted long enough to get a goddam thing done all the way right.