Kansas City Lightning

by Stanley Crouch

  Juba set precedents both for black show business and for the attitudes that would later make jazz what it was: a music ever in pursuit of vigor, variety, elasticity, mutation of movement, and potency of pattern. A music, that is, inclined to infinite plasticity.

  Like Juba, the new black show-business people who emerged in the wake of Appomattox had moved beyond the slave condition of prized livestock that provided entertainment: they were paid. Audiences could see and hear them sing and dance. Though they used the convention of blackface, it was clear to all who paid more than superficial attention that their creative energy was coming directly from the authentic source—the same source the white minstrels themselves consistently recognized. The Negro minstrels took great pride in what they did, and for good reason. The material they performed was almost always their own; they took care with their own self-presentation, crafting individual costumes that conveyed their personalities; and they used their roles to create personal reputations. They wanted to be the best entertainers in the world.

  By the turn of the twentieth century, the most ambitious of these performers were setting their sights higher: they wanted to become some of the best artists in the world.

  THE WORK OF the Negro band and private instructors, so important after the Civil War, brought a new emphasis on tone and discipline into music departments and homes. When Negro musicians were well taught, however, they were as often as not removed from the aesthetic bite and the sarcasm of the street life, where ribald satire, as well as the terrors and hurts of life lived hard and fast, found their ways into rhythm and tune. But the unexpected amalgamation of these two attitudes—the discipline of instruction and the salty posture of the streets—led to the creation of ragtime.

  Ragtime was a turn-of-the-century craze that went national, then spread through the Western world. At heart it was an extension of Frank Johnson’s habit of turning those lovely airs into reels, country dances, and jigs. Initially a sophisticated piano music, ragtime was first performed in honky-tonk situations where Negroes as low as snakes in wagon tracks were the rule—pimps, hustlers, whores, gamblers, thugs, and murderers, either primped up bright and gaudy or as soiled on the outside as they were in their lowdown, froggy-bottom souls—and the music that emerged in their midst was a remarkable combination of high and low. The very fact that ragtime was first played on the piano means that it was a city music, not a collection of rural tunes performed on banjos or guitars by folk musicians.

  The ragtime masters brought folk elements to celebratory, high-minded refinement by taking tunes they heard in the street and mixing them with the formal elements they had learned from private teachers and in schools. Another element in the mix was the era’s marching band tradition—a part of street culture that was as respectable as it was popular—and the pioneers of ragtime borrowed both the exuberance of march music and the form’s traditional three- to four-part structure. Since many of the original ragtime pieces were premiered in the red-light districts, and since the music lent itself naturally to the steps of the cakewalk, it’s no surprise that much of the music was marked by a bittersweet joy. Gloom is bad for business and doesn’t do much for courtship in the mobile environment of the dance hall.

  There’s another reason the music was so joyous: it was created in recognition of freedom. Ragtime represented people doing what they wanted with everything they liked and understood. The jaunty rhythm, syncopated and moving fresh ideas about the beat into piano music—the left hand a drum, the right a lyric, breakaway dancer—was not only fine for cakewalking, it was the contemporary myth in action. Slavery was behind Negroes; the cities were ahead, on the horizon, open to them in ways they hadn’t been for their chattel forebears. The implications of this newfound freedom of choice were not overlooked or misunderstood by a people for whom choice had been the least available aspect of their experience. And black people in show business drew on that sense of liberation, every chance they could get, to define and direct what they did.

  To the musicians, the prospect of available travel was a revelation. Even if the cars on the trains were segregated, that fact was secondary to the excitement of seeing one town after another, smelling the air affected by nature and local industry, hearing the accents of speech as they shifted from one place to another, coming to know the delicious specifics of recipes and seasoning in home cooking, and recognizing the characters of various towns, counties, and states as expressed in the tunes, jokes, and tales. They noticed the ways each town lived one way during the sun’s reign and another when the moon, the clouds, and the stars took over.

  For these musicians, there were palpable dreams as well as good times to be had, private property, apartments, fine clothes, and pay—any salary at all, but enough to wish for with all one’s might. One has only to look at the photographs of Scott Joplin and the others who wrote the music—at the confidence and mischief in their faces as they pose around a banner heralding their social club, suits and ties pressed, shoes gleaming, heads under derbies cocked at the angle of aristocracy—to see the sweetness of city life as they experienced it.

  Like the upbeat movie musicals and screwball comedies of the 1930s, ragtime was welcomed by a public that recognized its national spirit acted out in the music’s tartly elegant melodies and banjo syncopations—which had risen from slavery through the minstrel shows—creating that enjoyable tension between the steady and the unpredictable that is so essential to the American soul. It also offered the same kind of antidote to resigned dejection that the popular art of the Depression did. Ragtime was “the gayest, most exciting, most infectiously lilting music ever heard,” as Rudi Blesh and Harriet Janis wrote in They All Played Ragtime. “When the first instrumental ragtime sheet music appeared in 1897, no costly, high-powered promotion was needed to put the music across . . . and within a year it seemed as if it had always been here. [It] was as healthily overt, as brimful of energy, as the barefoot American boy.”

  Beneath that energy, though, there was piquancy and pathos. Ragtime was much more than an audible happy pill; at its best, it conveyed messages about standing up to life, taking its indifferent or intended blows, and learning to move forward with the indispensable grace of vitality. In it we hear the realization of folk potential, technical skill, and the technology of the day—the development of material from an oral culture into an art that was thoroughly conceived, arranged, and transcribed for the sheet music that was increasingly being printed, distributed, and stacked up in living-room piano benches across the country. It became a music for home entertainment in the time before radio, in the days when American music was more like a democracy that was enjoying a high level of active participation.

  At the forefront of ragtime was Scott Joplin, born in Texarkana, Texas, in 1868. Joplin, who had shown talent from childhood, took instruction from a German teacher before going out on the road as a teenager, making his living in one bawdy situation after another, picking up every kind of song and fragment of melody or rhythm that was out there, working what he could into his nightly repertoire, and storing away the rest. Joplin’s travels foreshadow the life of professional musicians up through the 1950s: “His whole orbit of saloons, honkytonks, pool halls, poor restaurants, and the Forty-niner Camps—the traveling tent shows depicting the California gold-rush life and featuring the cancan dancer and the roulette wheel—was a world near the soil,” Blesh and Janis observe, a world where “Civil War songs, plantation melodies, jigs and reels, country dances, ballads, hollers, and work songs were still current coin.”

  In 1894, after eight years in the ragtime bustle of Saint Louis and one in Chicago, Joplin took a job playing second cornet with the Queen City Concert Band of Sedalia, Missouri, while also playing piano and singing around town. The Queen City Concert Band was known for musically whipping the heads of any Negro bands willing to compete with it—a tradition that echoed the 1845 contest in which Master Juba defeated John Diamond, and that would still be in effect when the musicians who awed
Charlie Parker “went out there and sliced up so much ass with that Kansas City swing there was ass waist-deep all over the floor,” as Harry “Sweets” Edison bragged of the Basie band’s unfortunate opponents in the rough-riding battles of the 1930s.

  Joplin also benefited from the city’s culture of early jam sessions, gatherings where ragtime piano players exchanged ideas, fingerings, harmonies, and rhythms, sweating and grunting, or cooling it and slyly smiling, over the keys as they made spontaneous academies of their private moments. Beginning in 1896, Joplin studied harmony and composition at Sedalia’s George R. Smith College for Negroes. His own band, and his social position in Sedalia, changed local attitudes toward ragtime; it was clear to those who heard his music, and to those who observed the eggplant-dark, self-assured Joplin, that his example proved the adage, “It’s not where you come from or where you learn, but where you go and what you do with it.”

  The refinement of Joplin’s music, and its lyrical celebration of rising above circumstances while retaining its spark, gave his ragtime its impact, in both his original solo keyboard versions and the marvelous full-band arrangements that were soon putting heat on the traditional repertoires of nationally famous bandleaders like John Philip Sousa. Joplin was the first of a succession of pianists who would set standards and aspirations for Negro music as it expanded. His work exhibits a pensive but active melancholy that counterpoints the joy of the beat, a precursor of the double consciousness so fundamental to jazz: the burdens of the soul met by the optimism of the groove—the orchestrated heartbeat, tinkling or percussive.

  THE NEXT SIGNAL combination of high and low took place around 1900 in New Orleans, where jazz seems actually to have been born. The legendary figure who apparently first brought together the elements that became jazz was Buddy Bolden.

  In his exceptionally well-researched In Search of Buddy Bolden, Donald Marquis describes Bolden in terms that would also apply to the men who made ragtime: “He was born twelve years after the Civil War, and if his mother remembered the days of slavery and the aftermath of Reconstruction, being a little uncertain of just what emancipation meant, Buddy was of a generation that didn’t know or particularly care what the rules had been and saw life as an open challenge instead of a restricted corridor.” Bolden was never recorded, and his legend is at least partially the result of tantalizing stories surrounding the “open challenge” of jazz improvisation and what he did with it.

  Bolden became a professional in an era when there was a great deal of tension between the light-skinned Negro Creoles of New Orleans, who were trained in European music, and the city’s intuitive, self-taught “ear” musicians, who made up the core of the early jazz innovators. Bolden himself was one of the so-called “fakers,” who would sometimes substitute imagination for memory and who developed a reputation for playing embellishments that struck his audiences as exciting, surprising, and sometimes even superior to the original compositions.

  Bolden did more than challenge the primacy of written music. He also pioneered an equally profound revolution by changing the instrumentation of conventional groups, combining elements of brass bands and string ensembles, and reversing orthodoxy by giving the wind-blown instruments the leads and the strings the supporting roles. In Bolden’s day, the brass bands performed marches and some rags, while the string ensembles played dances and parties. Bolden did them all, but he was primarily a leader of a dance band—smaller than the norm but, by all accounts, possessed of tremendous power. He himself was capable of playing with a volume that not only expressed his passion but also advertised his presence, often “calling the children home” from outdoor concerts where other bands were performing. The strings couldn’t project with the power of the brass in those preamplified days, nor had Negro musicians begun to approach their instruments the way Bolden did his cornet, incorporating the vocal intonations of black speech and song, and bringing a moan to his sound on the blues that touched listeners with a power akin to that of church music.

  The only known photograph of Bolden shows him with a six-piece group: cornet, trombone, two clarinets, guitar, and bass. With groups of that sort, he worked at remaking familiar material. As Marquis writes, “Given Bolden’s personality we can be sure he was looking for a novel approach—something to gain the crowd and sway the applause his way when he competed with other bands. His efforts took the form of playing ‘wide-open’ on the cornet and of playing in up-tempo or ragging the hymns, street songs, and dance tunes to create a musical sound that people were unfamiliar with.”

  Bolden was not an immediate success; indeed, at first his new ideas caused friction with other musicians. His “style did not catch on immediately and the Creoles scornfully called it honky-tonk music,” Marquis notes. But Bolden’s sound “had an appeal, especially to a liberated, post–Civil War generation of young blacks,” and Bolden eventually became king of the uptown New Orleans musical scene. He helped set the standards of performance the Creole musicians had to absorb when the Black Codes of 1894 forbade them from performing in the downtown white community, breaking their dominance of the musical jobs across the city.

  That edict, an extension of the laws that took black artisans out of competition in the post-Reconstruction South, had nothing to do with artistic advances. Ironically, though, it helped bring about a new convergence between the music of the drawing room and the sounds of the dance hall. The most popular bands in the lower-class black community were like Bolden’s, setting a communicative standard with their hot rhythms and the timeless awe and tragedy of the blues. The Creoles, meanwhile, discovered that their formal training, their “legitimate” techniques, meant nothing to an audience that had grown fond of the guttural lamentations and sensual celebrations of King Bolden. And slowly but surely a remarkable synthesis took place: as the Creole bands migrated back into the black community, and encountered the competition of the Bolden-style black bands, the two Negro classes—long separated by skin-color prejudices promoted in the Haitian community—underwent a gradual musical integration.

  The uptown arrival of the Creoles marked the beginning of the transition from ragtime and marching band music to the art later known as jazz. As the sophistication of the Creoles fused with the earthy innovations of form and technique pushed into the air by men like Bolden, the uptown musicians learned in turn from the Creoles—commencing a musical exchange of profound cultural import. Aesthetic integration is what it was; it came through the mutual respect that can happen when people are forced to deal with one another—to like or dislike one another as individuals, not as good or monstrous myths told at a distance.

  Bolden’s aspirations were not as lofty or wide-ranging as Joplin’s; it’s a notable democratic truth that it was the Texas honky-tonk piano player who elevated Negro music to new heights of precision. Joplin, who was highly mindful of his artistic individuality, was also one of the many Negro entertainers who counted themselves as members of an elite, who shared the common scars left by their shared ethnic gauntlet and the satisfactions that came of facing the invisible mystery of music and the human world they traveled through.

  And that human world could take its toll. King Bolden became a statistic in the fast life of big spending and heavy dissipation, playing “like he didn’t care” and making great demands on himself and his instrument. The strain of playing might have been the cause of the headaches he started to experience shortly before he began to go mad, suffering from advanced paranoia and, later, alcoholism. Marquis concludes, “He took an unrouted, sometimes hedonistic path, and unfortunately he did not have the benefit of learning from others how to handle this situation; no one of his circumstances had been there before.” In ways both musical and personal, Bolden was truly a precursor of the young Charlie Parker.

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  Even before the ragtime craze of the 1890s, Kansas City had been a music town. One of the central hubs of the cattle trade, it was a place where mixtures of taste and passion arrived regularly, and the range of custome
rs demanded that professional entertainers be capable of everything from elegance to sentimentality, from trendy dance numbers to broad humor and stunts. Bands performed outside in parks and at dance halls, traveling in from every direction, succeeding or failing on the basis of whether they got to the feet of the listeners, made those feet pat or do steps. Popular songs, marches, novelties of every sort—including the saxophone player’s trick of playing two horns at once—were common to these traveling bands, which played endless variations on the conventions their audiences expected. In such a stratified society, the bands had to be ready to play for tea drinkers in one setting and hooch sippers or guzzlers in another. Their music had to possess a democratic stretch, no matter the color of the players.

  When clarinetist Garvin Bushell first encountered the music of Kansas City in 1921, he had already heard the Chicago work of Joe Oliver and Johnny Dodds, musicians who shook up the jazz world. To Bushell, it seemed as if those early Kansas City musicians were still catching up. “[In Chicago] we felt we had the top thing in the country,” he recalled in his memoir, Jazz from the Beginning, “so the [Kansas City] bands didn’t impress me. It may be, now that I look back, that I underestimated them.”

  The two godfathers of the Kansas City jazz scene, bandleaders Bennie Moten and Walter Page, are excellent examples of the broad experience, training, and imagination that underlie so much of jazz history. Born in 1894, Moten was a piano player who worked his way up through the broad spectrum of popular music that entertained audiences in the late teens and the twenties. Though he was linked with the blues from the very beginning of his recording career in 1923, Moten was working toward a sound and a beat that evolved with his bands and with the ever-expanding frontier of jazz, where composers, improvisers, and bandleaders were influencing one another almost by the day, in person and through the sheet music, phonograph records, and radio broadcasts that became their common language.