Kansas City Lightning

by Stanley Crouch

  In jazz, the myth in action was the discovery of how to use improvisation to make music in which the individual and the collective took on a balanced, symbiotic relationship, one that enriched the experience without distracting from it or descending into anarchy.

  As the youthful Charlie Parker absorbed the performances he saw in the clubs every night, he was watching his hometown in the process of becoming the swing capital of the land. Kansas City was a kind of experimental laboratory where the collective possibilities of American rhythm were being refined and expanded on a nightly basis. Musicians were learning to navigate a constantly shifting context of complex harmony and propulsive rhythm, to absorb and respond to it within split seconds. This was long before the digital age; before technology revealed how the mind and body could serve the sensitized aesthetic response at such high velocity—in seconds and milliseconds—allowing musicians to create high-quality jazz, an improvised creation of form and response. But it was happening. In Kansas City, in the 1930s, the blues got shouted, purred, whispered, and cried in such inventive style that the city became the third great spawning ground for jazz, after New Orleans and Chicago.

  THE FIRST MOVEMENT in that revolution had occurred a few decades before, down in the tropical southern nexus of superstition, panache, gumbo, street beats, and cultural complexity known as New Orleans. From roughly the turn of the century up through World War I, New Orleans musicians initiated the most revolutionary conception of ensemble music in the twentieth century. After the red-light district of Storyville was closed down in 1917, the first generation of New Orleans jazzmen moved north to Chicago, the midwestern home of a harsh wind that was as legendary as the city’s favorite thug, Al Capone. In Chicago the substance of the new ensemble style was made most obvious by King Oliver, whose cornet playing was considered golden and full of light.

  Oliver had been a triumphant local hero in New Orleans from 1910 to 1917, but his most influential band was formed when he sent home for Louis Armstrong to join him in Chicago in 1922. With the arrival of young Armstrong on second cornet and Baby Dodds on drums, Oliver had seven pieces, and the circle of charismatic effect was complete. The band’s performances at the Lincoln Gardens dance hall were the recipes of legend, sparking and romancing the dancers while drawing musicians from all aspects of the business, each come to hear that marvelous ensemble swing one tune after another.

  In 1923, King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band went into the studio and recorded the material that would largely determine Oliver’s reputation. As a blues player of seminal eloquence, Oliver brought to his music a melodic sense, and an expressive clarity, that captured the elements of mood and feeling that were central to blues: contemplation, celebration, lament, wit, eroticism, and ambivalence. Those blues phrases, and the heroic dignity they served, influenced the young Louis Armstrong, and others, in elemental ways. Oliver’s innovative uses of mutes provided the template for timbres that would later become signatures of the Ellington brass section and were then passed on through Cootie Williams to Jay McShann’s trumpet player, Piggy Minor, for use when McShann and his men were dropping coals of fire down the pants of Lucky Millinder and his fellow victims.

  But what contributed most to Oliver’s position in the music was his authority as a bandleader. In Chicago, where the partnership of the mob and Mayor Big Bill Thompson made sure there was a hot time in the old town every night, King Oliver brought everything he had learned in New Orleans—in the years he’d spent amid the city’s marching bands, funeral processions, street-level musical battles (often conducted from dueling horse-drawn wagons), and bandstands in Storyville, where the soundtrack of the tenderloin had a drive that satisfied the musicians and drove the customers to peaks of excitement. Oliver possessed a brilliant understanding of how to make improvisation and composition work in the balanced way that became the foundation of jazz. His recordings were exquisite collages of polyphony and solo statement, punctuated by shifts of rhythm and stings of percussion so well coordinated that they never give the impression of anarchy.

  And those achievements affected the players themselves, created among them a feeling of elite identity, however down-home and greasy that identity was. That elite feeling existed behind all the public masks—even those of comedy—and was central to the way black show-business performers came to see themselves, especially as their achievements were captured and confirmed in objective recordings. In Jazz from the Beginning, reedman Garvin Bushell remembered talking to clarinetist Johnny Dodds and drummer Baby Dodds, who were working with King Oliver and Louis Armstrong, about the place their work had earned them in the jazz landscape: “They felt very highly about what they were playing, as though they knew they were doing something new that nobody else could do. I’d say they regarded themselves as artists, in the sense we use the term today.”

  Bob Redcross, who later became a friend of Charlie Parker’s, also perceived how surely the performers of the time were driven by that appetite for recognition. Born in 1913, Redcross grew up in Chicago, where his mother worked as a hat-check girl in a club where King Oliver and Louis Armstrong played. As a child he would sit in the coat room, draped inside his mother’s coat, as the musicians and customers filed in and out every night, and his ears were filled with music from the bandstand. Seeing, meeting, and listening to so many performers—veteran and upcoming comics, dancers, singers, and instrumentalists—from such an early age, Redcross learned how the musicians saw themselves and the world in which they lived:

  You wanted to be known by your name, not “that nigger over there.” To be an individual was the most important thing in the world to you. People [knew] who Bert Williams was—the funniest man who ever lived. Later on they knew who Louis Armstrong was, who Duke Ellington was, and everybody else that broke through. That was the goal, and competition made for a whole lot of invention, you can believe that. Somebody would get mad at all the attention some other sumbitch was getting. He would get as green with jealousy as your finger does if you wearing a cheap ring. All he can think about is, How can I get some attention? What will make them notice me? I’ll walk like this, I’ll sing like this, I’ll dance like this. Pretty soon—if he’s got what it takes and he puts in the homework—people notice him, they see something different, something nobody has done before. After all, how are you going to make any headway if you only do what somebody else did?

  As they pursued their craft, of course, the black show-business people weren’t confined to friendly towns like New Orleans and Chicago. Their work took them into the redneck South, and as they traveled through that unfamiliar territory, they must have felt much like their counterparts in the unsettled West of the nineteenth century. As the onetime minstrel performer Tom Fletcher noted in his impeccably informative 100 Years of the Negro in Show Business, in those early days “a colored man with a banjo would draw almost as big a crowd as an elephant in a circus”—and the Negro professionals often saw their audiences as dangerous hicks who might be elevated above their barbarous ways by the experience of black entertainment. “The old saying that music hath charms to soothe the savage beast worked fine for us,” notes Fletcher, who was born in 1873 and was on the road with Negro minstrel shows by his adolescence. “In our minds most of these people did everything the savages did except eat humans. We also found that they had the same weaknesses as savages. . . . I have never quite figured out whether it was the music or the shows which made the people gradually get a little more civilized.” To Fletcher, that question was “central to understanding the difference in the thinking of committed minstrel figures from all contemporary stereotypes,” often “men who were up to passing on the kind of insights inspired aspirants were looking for.”

  One of the talents these wise men passed on was a knack for registering subtle cues of danger. Negroes learned to read such signals as soon as they began to enjoy freedom of movement, and they learned to protect themselves the best they could. Those who showed even a playful contempt for such constrai
nts—like Jack Johnson, always willing to break the speed limit and thereby break the bigot’s rules of order—became true symbols of sedition. Black Jack became the most overt and imposing Negro variation on rebellion since the American Revolution.

  The men young Charlie Parker was starting to admire as he became more and more serious about the saxophone, seeing them as local legends or watching them as they arrived from out of town to play a dance, to thrill the local ladies, and to sip or guzzle the flowing good times of Kansas City nightlife, had learned well the savage ways of their own patrons, the Italian and Jewish and Irish gangsters who paid them for their services. Those musicians also knew the parallel dangers of white police who became progressively more irritated by the attention given these horn-tooting coons—and even the anger of local wallflower Negroes, who could grow sullen and dangerous as their sisters and girlfriends stared with mounting admiration at the men on the bandstand.

  “They didn’t like seeing those Negroes looking so good,” as fellow musician Gene Ramey recalled. “Guys would be on the road in their new cars, and they would stop outside to take out rags and wipe off that dust, change their clothes, and come on in looking like they ruled the world. That’s one of the reasons they smoked marijuana, some of them anyway. The police would be looking for something to bring you down, any excuse to show you were no more to them than one of the local niggers. Prohibition was going on, and you didn’t want any alcohol on your breath. Then they could get you. Arrested for drunk driving or drunk and disorderly or drunk and drunk! You couldn’t have that. And then at those dances you had to stay on your p’s and q’s to keep some local lug from going crazy over the idea of losing his girl.”

  The implications of a muttered comment or gesture; the way a voice rose, lowered, or broke; the look on a powerful gangster’s face as he entered a room; the way a policeman adjusted his hat or cap, pulled up his gun belt, or put one foot up on the car’s running board; the way a rowdy Negro surveyed the dance hall from one end to the other: these were all signals the musicians learned to recognize and accommodate as seamlessly as a silent cue from the bandleader. As professionals, the jazz players learned that the friendly and the hostile live next door to each other, that they stand shoulder to shoulder and sometimes even dance together.

  KANSAS CITY TOOK its position in the development of jazz for the same reasons New Orleans and Chicago had: there was a community crazy for the music and a regime that let the good times roll. The city provided plentiful and steady work for professional musicians and those aspirants who could learn and develop on the many jobs necessary to satisfy the party-hungry customers in various venues. Jazzmen combined the refinements of high-society instrumental music with the stronger stuff they employed in those cauldrons where the patrons came to boil the blues out of their flesh, to begin the ritual of courtship on the dance floor, to reduce every chaotic element in life to a series of elegant gestures, steps, turns, and embraces.

  That democratic stretch of sources, always connected to dance, had been rising in the oven of the culture for some time, its ingredients reaching back much further than the young Charlie Parker knew or even sensed. As he went out into the Kansas City night, listening, sitting in, being thrown off bandstands, getting a little better, intensifying his resolve, and practicing even harder, Parker was preparing for the day when he would have it together enough to join the royalty of those bandstands where only the best playing was accepted. Yet everything he would do as a musician was the result of a long creative evolution that we must examine in some detail if we are to understand what happened in that moment when he became entranced by the activities inside the Cherry Blossom.

  The road to Kansas City probably begins with the popular nineteenth-century Philadelphia bandleader Frank Johnson, whose career predicted the vistas of later Negro big bands and represented the combination of the sophisticated and the primal that would be central both to jazz and to ragtime, its immediate predecessor. Johnson embodied large cultural shifts that were taking place in America in his time, as African dispositions were absorbed into the context of public joy. Much attention has been paid to the loss of specific tribal traditions that marked this era, but that was less important than the set of attitudes that replaced those traditions. As Eileen Southern has documented in The Music of Black Americans, Negroes were influencing dance rhythms in America as early as the late eighteenth century, through their reinterpretations of the popular music of the time. As this writer observed in the anthology Considering Genius:

  . . . those black people who played fiddles during bondage or as free citizens were the result of a social crucible that produced perhaps the most influential synthesis of Western and non-Western ideas since the indelible impact of the Moors on Spanish and southern European cultures. They were a new people—some mixed with European blood, some with that of the American Indian, some with Hispanic tributaries in their family lines. Above all, the raw impositions of slavery ironically liberated them from the tribal enmities and religious conflicts that still bedevil contemporary Africa, allowing for a richly distinctive Negro American sensibility of remarkable national consequence. . . .

  What existed within the ritual confinements of polytheistic African cultures and has been dubbed “an affinity for distortion” was transmogrified into what I call a sense of infinite plasticity. In Africa, this sense of plasticity has been observed in the stretching of necks with rings, the extending of lips with wooden plates, the filing of teeth, the elasticizing of slit earlobes so that they could hold large wooden discs, and so on. The plasticity of stylization in African singing allowed for a scope that included falsetto, whistles, tongue-clicking, shouts, plaintive to joyous slurs, growls, and enormous changes of register, rhythm, timbre, accent, and intensity. That the shifts of meter, tempo, and accent in African drumming reflect this sense of plasticity almost goes without saying, as should any observation about dancing that demands independent coordination of the head, shoulders, arms, trunk, and legs . . . [And] this disposition . . . had an impact on professional Negro musicians at the same time that it was functioning in a folk context.

  One of those musicians was Frank Johnson, who led marching bands up and down the East Coast in the early nineteenth century. By 1819, Southern notes, Frank Johnson’s Colored Band was observed “distorting a sentimental, simple, and beautiful song, into a reel, a jig, or country-dance.” Johnson was a prototypical jazz musician, rearranging familiar music around surprising new rhythms. Like the golden age Negro jazz bands that played for dances across America in the first half of the twentieth century, Johnson and his band traveled the country—as far south as Richmond, Virginia, where one planter wrote of his ensemble, “who ever heard better dance music than this?” In 1838 he even toured England, receiving a silver bugle for his efforts when he played a Buckingham Palace command performance for Queen Victoria. Clearly those in power, down south or abroad, didn’t allow their own bigotry to prevent them from having some dancing fun, or from getting the chance to hear a superior performer work his hard-earned skills and disciplined charisma on familiar instruments.

  One hundred years would pass between Frank Johnson’s success and the Kansas City swing scene that young Charlie Parker wanted so badly to join. In between came a parade of Negroes in American show business, emerging from rural and urban communities where local and traveling performers heard music inspired by belief in God, by the need for rhythms to get people through monotonous work, and by the desire to tell tales of love, blood, sex, blunder, mystery, disaster, and wonder. As soon as the Civil War ended, with the Confederate weeping and the Union rejoicing at Appomattox, the country started to win the west in earnest, and Negroes redoubled their efforts to develop a rich body of original music, dance, and humor—much of which reached its audience through the crucible of minstrelsy.

  Those with a flair for performance and a will to invent, as well as an attraction to chance and adventure, took advantage of the thrilling mobility that their ne
w physical freedom allowed. In the eyes of the law, at least, Negroes were no longer like children; they did not need to be taken care of; they did not need to be protected. To those who went into show business, the options seemed suddenly limitless. If they could not handle something, they could learn how; if they couldn’t do that, it was still nobody’s business what they did. They were as ready to take their lumps as any free person was. If one stumbled, that was too bad—but not bad enough for him to step away from the choices that came whenever one could make them. The right to fail was a fresh choice and one that they did not take for anything less than what it was. Being able to choose yes or no, up or down, was what it was all about. It was the ethos that mortared the bricks of the music they played and the way they chose to live, with an abiding respect for human individuality.

  Before the South fell, a few minstrel shows featuring black performers had roamed the country, though none lasted very long. Only two Negroes are thought to have performed in the very popular burnt-cork revues: one was a dwarf, and the other was William Henry Lane, known as Master Juba. Juba was the greatest vernacular American dancer of his age, proving his superiority when he defeated John Diamond in an 1845 competition that presaged the dance band battles that came to prominence in the late 1920s. Juba introduced percussive patterns to the rhythm of the jig that might have been the first professional examples of Negro innovation in American dance. When he traveled to London in 1848, one dance critic wrote that he had never seen such

  mobility of muscles, such flexibility of joints, such boundings, such slidings, such gyrations, such toes and heelings, such backwardings and forwardings, such posturings, such firmness of foot, such elasticity of tendon, such mutation of movement, such vigor, such variety, such natural grace, such powers of endurance, such potency of pattern.