Kansas City Lightning

by Stanley Crouch

  It was on one of these stints in Chicago that he first encountered Bob Redcross, who became a longtime associate. Redcross may have been a hustler, but he was a principled one who prided himself on giving a sucker an even break and on his ability to make fast friends with a peer—even that skinny kid from Kansas City who walked up out of nowhere and cadged a cigarette, standing there talking after the smoke was lit, his leg crooked like the out-of-towner that he was.

  Redcross and the stranger soon found they had a connection. It was the kind of intellectual curiosity that brought them together as friends who had both feet in the jazz world, though they found themselves taking distinctively different paths through pages of books, newspapers, and magazines. Their literacy and curiosity often coaxed them into music quite different from jazz, and into museums that cost nothing but provided plenty. Some of those public institutions were more than ready to make a pair of young Negroes feel like interlopers, but Charlie and Bob were too optimistic to let that distract or discourage them.

  “Over the years,” Redcross told me years later, “Charles and I would get to something like an art museum—like when he was having a ball with that painter Gertrude Abercrombie. But in the early times we just wanted to discuss things that interested us, smoke a little, drink a little, and listen to as many records as I was willing to play until Charles fell asleep, or I did. Then it started all over the next day. It was that wild and crazy in one room, because men with intelligence and energy, and a lot to explore, know how to keep busy. It wasn’t that we were bored to tears; we were always on the lookout for things that were informative and could make us think deep and distant thoughts.”

  The earliest recording of Charlie Parker, the first document we have of his playing, is sometimes said to have been captured by Clarence Davis, though Bob Redcross also claimed responsibility for all of Parker’s earliest recordings. Whatever the case, one thing is certain: the player is Bird. It is a four-minute solo recording of the young saxophonist playing two songs, “Honeysuckle Rose” and “Body and Soul.” Parker fans have since come to know the performance as “Honey and Body.” Many have assumed it was recorded in May 1940, but it may have been made earlier—which would make some sense of how Parker sounds on the recording, much closer to 1939 than some have suggested.

  The recording is a fleeting moment in time made memorable by technology, discernible through a haze of popping and hissing, an audible window screen against which his face is pressed. In those four minutes, we hear Charlie Parker confronting himself, confronting both what he knows and what he is still trying to work out. He stands alone, keeping time in his body, maintaining tempo all by his lonesome, with no audible measurement from a metronome or a drummer, a guitarist, a bassist, or any other rhythm player. In usual jazz circumstances—regardless of style, from New Orleans jazz to last week—the featured player is constantly responding to the inventions of others, all aesthetic notions in motion, all attention acutely on one another. On “Honey and Body,” though, there is no band. Not at that moment, not on that recording. There is only Charlie Parker.

  This—the sound of the moment before ignition—is what people have long hoped to find in searching for recordings by Buddy Bolden, the New Orleans cornet player thought to have brought together enough functional understanding to begin jazz, or to get so close that others knew what to do. In Bolden’s case, we have no voice of the dead; we have only a photograph, Bolden with his band, in his playing context, handsome and charming but as still as written notes on manuscript paper. We can only surmise that he is holding closed a secret, invisible box, waiting to pull something out that will allow him to turn the world around.

  Charlie’s recording is more intimate than even the extended solo breaks and extraordinary single-note improvisations of Louis Armstrong’s “Laughin’ Louie,” recorded a few years earlier in a raucous 1933 big band studio session for RCA. “I’m going to do a little practicing,” Armstrong says before leaping into his marvelously controlled and heartfelt performance. But this was a commercial record, intended for the public. Charlie’s private recording is different. It is an audible diary passage, among the earliest evidence we have of a major jazz artist appraising himself with the looking glass of a private recording, preserved by luck and discovered through the army of collectors that was beginning to mature at the same time Parker did. He surely intended it only for himself, probably not valuing or even remembering it for long.

  Parker delivers the two songs through a series of statements, each evolving into the next, following the logic of group improvisation, but through a solo voice. The single line is removed from its context, divorcing the listener from any sense of how small a slice of the story is truly being revealed. He is like an actor on an empty stage, trying to drive himself through an entire play alone, while still reacting to every other part. His silent costars are the ghosts of jazz, living or dead, remembered exactly or partially or imaginatively. Most of all, he is alone, as he had always been. He is the concentrated history of his art, an ambitious journeyman with an appetite for personal greatness whose special abilities never settled for recapitulation but ushered his own identity forth along with everything he heard on the bandstand, in the audience, through the radio, or spinning around on the turntable.

  We know already how much of Charlie’s knowledge came from Buster Smith, his professorial mentor, as they practiced far away from the roar of the crowd, or sat not more than one chair away onstage at the Bottoms, or upstairs at the private smokers, where the good times rolled as decadently as they could. We know how he studied the silken mysterious lyricism of Lester Young, heard nightly during his recent boyhood in the backyard of the Reno, among the musicians, the whores, and the hangers-on like himself, all of them awed by the sailing surprise of Lester’s imagination.

  We know what he got from the recordings and broadcasts of that rough tenor taskmaster called Chu Berry, whose fast, combative passages argued with and against the chords, twisted them out of shape, made a yowled getaway at the peak of a heated passage—with the kind of tempered hysteria that was more about expression than loss of control, as Charlie himself surely wanted it to be. Even when hysteria crept up on him, it melted away when he shook at it with the censer of his saxophone, the transformed rattle used to purify the ritual, the brass tamer in one body: the hellfighter made with twenty-two keys, a mouthpiece, a reed, and a bell. But all of that was still not enough.

  Wherever he was, in whatever room playing whatever horn, owned by him or not, Charlie Parker was in a condition of confrontation. That was inevitable. By now he knew, deeper than his marrow, what all serious artists realize: that no matter how great and perfect a major creator is at a moment of sublime delivery, there are always limitations. No one person is perfect enough to conjure what another person feels as he tries to express what is inside. Parker, the young talent, was beginning to realize that no established genius, however rough, tough, and dreamily hypnotic, could hear what he was hearing. Perhaps what he heard was actually his and his alone.

  That must have been almost as frightening as the moment when Charlie sat in on “Body and Soul” up on Jimmy Keith’s bandstand, naively running the changes of “Honeysuckle Rose” and “Up a Lazy River.” Those mistakes got him thrown off the bandstand because—as he later put it—there was “no kind of conglomeration” that could make those chords match what the band was playing. So he got off the stand in defeat, showered down with derision. But from that point on, he pledged to learn how, to unlock the genie that was hidden somewhere in his soul.

  He had always sensed it was there, that genie, despite the lack of available proof. It was as real as the spirit in the tale of Aladdin, but it had to reveal itself to a boy in Kansas City with a funny-shaped head. And he knew there was nothing magic about it, though the masters could make their work sound that way. He could learn it if he was willing to work hard enough. Well, as that first recording reveals, he now had the genie by the foot and was trying to pull it o
ut.

  “Honey and Body” was a kind of test flight. Armstrong and the others had been as real as the Wright brothers; they had proven, through recording technology, that human beings had the ability to fly through their minds, to spy upcoming notes within themselves and harness them instantaneously as personal statements, within the context of mutual improvisation in which cohesive magic arrives through empathy and the art of the invisible—music—is ultimately made to shine like Klondike gold. But this was a new kind of aerodynamics.

  We know nothing about how Charlie Parker arrived in the room where he recorded that day, how long it took him to get ready for his saxophone, how much time elapsed before it was ready for him, prepared to stand up under his enthusiasm. Yet we can picture him: Standing or seated, in dark glasses or none, eyes open or closed, at the perfect angle to see through a glass darkly. He blows without hesitation, lurching forward with pure lyric power. Swing and control of time are already there. No prisoners taken and none demanded. He sees the music clearly and knows what he must do with it. It comes to him in an unfinished outline, and he proves himself in private, not for that moment alone, but for all time. A whole leg spins audibly on the turntable. It is Charlie Parker, indisputably stepping through the air and waiting for the other limb to drop.

  Acknowledgments

  This book is dedicated first to Emma Bea Crouch and her husband, James Crouch, each of whom embodied and evoked, through the tone of their memories, what first hooked and fascinated me about the art of jazz and the world out of which it came during the Depression years of the 1930s. What Richard Schickel calls “the American vastness” inhabited their memories of the clothes, the automobiles, dance halls, the trains, the movie houses, the sense of style, and the contempt for all limitations, coming from within or without, arriving as a distinctively graceful way to live, or—way down at the other end—as an ongoing vulnerability to the delusional.

  My mother’s grandfather was from Madagascar; he arrived on a Portuguese sailing ship in 1863 and heard the percussive war music of General Grant’s cannon shelling Vicksburg, Mississippi. Jumping ship, he met a Choctaw woman whom he married before moving to Arkansas and later to east Texas. He was remembered as tall, jet black, with slanted eyes and hair down to his shoulders; he and his wife must have made a somewhat unique couple. My father described his grandfather as a redheaded Irishman who owned a plantation in Atlanta, Georgia. This cluster of bloodlines has led me to the conclusion that I, like many others, am an all-American guy: part African, part Asian, part Choctaw, and part Irish.

  While my mother had a sensibility that lived on the bright side of the street, my father preferred the darker side. He was well acquainted with the hustling ethos, and he was prison victim of his belief that he was much less naive or square than workaday people, who could tell him nothing about the bright lights, the big city, and the nefarious ways things went on the back streets. In the end, however, a good-looking domestic worker, or maid, breathed much more free air than this roustabout criminal who spent most of my childhood behind bars, convinced he would not mess up that way again, until he found himself serving another sentence.

  The rest of their family introduced that American vastness to me in weddings and funerals, long hopeless loves, bad marriages, and the periodic brass rings of a life that may sometimes have been a merry-go-round, but tended at moments to reshape itself into a roller coaster. Through all of the joy, all of the sorrow, and all the bittersweet half-steps, I came to recognize that jazz was always, or could be, a looking glass through which to see and express life in its multi-various forms and the infinity of its feelings, articulated in the transcendent beat of blues and swing.

  I can reconnect with my entire family, all of my neighborhoods, everything I’ve ever done or imagined, whenever I hear any jazz band heat up and “put the pots on,” showing how well it can struggle for joy together. No art says “I want to live” better or more forcefully than jazz. From the whisper, to the mysteriously artful noise, to the exultant and affirmative cry or scream, ever unwilling to be held down, every page of this book is a testament to that.

  THIS BOOK WAS begun more than three decades ago, and has benefited from layers contributed by all manner of people in or out of the arts, seeking to help or clarify things about what they knew, or thought they knew, about Charlie Parker and his world. I am most deeply appreciative of the time, feeling, memory, and understanding of those who were Charlie Parker’s first loves, his earliest friends, and those who knew and worked with him as a young man and an evolving professional within the mythical and epic context of Kansas City. That midwestern town was a combustible and joyous compression of American history and modern life.

  Beginning in 1981, I started formally interviewing people who had known the young Charlie Parker, and whom I came to know over many conversations and further interviews far into the next decade. I learned much about Parker’s meaning to musicians through many, many conversations with trumpeter Bobby Bradford, a forty-year friend, one of the most intelligent men I have had the benefit of knowing. Bradford knew Parker’s first wife, Rebecca Ruffin, and introduced me to her. By then she was living in Pasadena; she had not been interviewed and was eager to talk about that point in her life. Later, in Kansas City, I got to know her younger sister, Ophelia, the baby, along with Parker’s bandleaders, his many friends, and others, all of whom gave this tale heft—though only after the narrative had been absorbed, sifted, and weighed against the misreadings, distortions, and willful fantasies that some others have paraded forward as fact. Some of the greatest revelations about Parker were provided by Rebecca, and by what Ophelia saw of their secret romance and quicksilver marriage to Charlie.

  Then there were the musicians who knew, befriended, inspired, and collaborated with Charlie Parker in his earliest years—chief among them Gene Ramey, Buster Smith, Jay McShann, Orville Minor, and Oliver Todd, five aces in the flesh, all of whom I interviewed at length on tape, and had many informal but informative conversations with as the years passed. These were estimable men who knew all of the Kansas City fact and lore, understanding many of the varied meanings of that era and how far that brief time actually was from what is believed, or even documented, all these years later. Jo Jones, in particular, helped me understand how Negroes negotiated the pressures of corruption and deadly criminals while maintaining their aesthetic, social, and human desires, whether general or specific. Those who knew Charlie Parker as the little boy who lived across the street, ready to pull pranks on hobos and neighbors come Halloween, or who performed with him in a local band, included Edward Reeves, Sterling Bryant, Julian Hamilton, Fred Dooley, Junior Williams, Earl Coleman, and Harry “Sweets” Edison, who all supplied atmosphere and detail. Insight into the McShann band’s first visit to the Savoy Ballroom, and the responses of the audience, the Savoy staff, and fellow musicians, came from Panama Francis, Gus Johnson, John Tumino, Chubby Jackson, Biddy Fleet, Frank Wess, Rozelle Claxton, and Joe Wilder. Further contributions came from Mary Lou Williams, Buddy Tate, Lawrence Lucie, Kermit Scott, Jimmy Heath, Walter Bishop, Jr., Jackie McLean, Walter Davis, Jr., Michael James, Bob Redcross, Phil Schaap, and Billy Eckstine, and many others, the chorus of voices necessary to put flesh and bone on legend, or wings, when they fit.

  One of my most intellectually substantial friendships has been with Loren Schoenberg, a musician and educator who knows how to lead a band, how to teach a class, and how to run a nonprofit, none of which is easy to do. I have benefited from his feelings for the music, his writing, and his range of subtle insights. My best friend, Wynton Marsalis, has been an ever-growing compendium of musical accomplishment with a large appetite for knowledge. I met him when he was seventeen and have discussed every aspect of the arts and human life with him almost daily for more than two decades. WM was a match with Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray, and Saul Bellow, three men who were always ready, willing, and able to treat me to inspiring, informative, and loquacious exchanges, often as bawdy as learned, eac
h believing it was of the utmost importance to stay acquainted with the street. As Armstrong said, “It’s all life.” That is the perfect way to describe the fluid, insightful contributions of Max Roach, perhaps the grandest drummer in the history of Western percussion, and an imposing raconteur with a multitude of facts at hand. Right behind him, as a raconteur and great teller of unheard stories full of illuminating detail, was Philly Joe Jones, one of the grand masters of “the hang,” a sublime and masterful teacher. And the quality writer Tom Piazza and I talked for three decades about Armstrong, Ellington, Basie, Lester Young, jazz itself, cinema, American and world literature, and Parker, whom he always held in a high, invincible place.

  At Mosaic Records, thanks to Michael Cuscuna and Scott Wenzel for essential and speedy help. Invaluable help in providing photographs and documents came from Donna Ranieri at the Frank Driggs Archive, newly housed at Jazz at Lincoln Center, and from Llew Walker at the website www.birdlives.co.uk, also a valuable source of details on Charlie Parker’s life. Thanks to them, and also to the Miller County Museum, Miller County, Missouri, for its photos of Musser’s Ozark Tavern, and the Kansas City Library for the photo of the Antlers Club, originally seen on John Simonson’s blog http://paris-of-the-plains.blogspot.com.