Kansas City Lightning

by Stanley Crouch

  A few weeks later, in early September, Rebecca was downstairs talking with Parkey when Charlie called her from upstairs. She went to him—she always did—but this time she wondered, What will it be now? When she opened the door, Charlie stood before her, aloof, clearly full of that stuff. He seemed as if he were all the way across the street, even though he was right in her face. His eyes empty, he spoke to her in a dark and imperial fashion.

  “Go sit on the trunk and look out the window.”

  She did. She heard a click; cold metal was pressed against her temple. Oh, my God, she thought.

  “Rebeck, where is the letter?”

  “Charlie, I don’t have the letter.”

  “Rebeck, where is the letter?”

  “Look in the drawer,” she answered, not knowing why.

  As he removed what must have been Parkey’s pistol and turned away, Rebecca reached for a flatiron that was on the floor. Sensing something, Charlie slipped through the door just as she threw it, barely missing his head. The flatiron hit the door. She picked it up, pulled open the door, and threw it at him, missing his head again, and this time sending the iron through one of the long, slender windows flanking the front door.

  At the bottom of the stairs, Charlie turned and stared up at her.

  “The next time you pull a gun on me,” Rebecca cried, “you best to kill me!”

  “What’s the matter, dearie?” asked Parkey from the parlor.

  Charlie said nothing, but a sudden calm came over the house. In a moment he was himself again, as if nothing had happened. But Rebecca would never forget.

  The difference between fact and fiction was now more than superficially important to Rebecca and Charlie. She was being punished for standing up to a falsehood, instead of letting it pass—a decision that was not always available to her community.

  Charlie Parker and his young wife had grown up in circumstances where all Negroes were presumed to conform to a false portrait—that primitive image that had dominated print and stage depictions for more than a century. They were presented as simple beings, never humanly complex—except perhaps in newsreel snippets, one of the main ways Charlie and Rebecca would have learned about the larger world. Those newsreels brought them stories of world leaders and national criminals, tragic fires and startling floods; they featured film shot on faraway grounds that were soon visually familiar: royalty in Europe, merchants in Asia, Jesse Owens at the Berlin Olympics. None of whom the conspiratorial couple, or most others in the theater, could likely have imagined alone. It was surely a smaller world, now; looking up at those giant bodies and giant faces—some of them exotic figures with wild makeup and strange tattoos, with wooden discs or metal rings stretching their bodies in surprising and unaccustomed ways—it became easier to imagine the world beyond Kansas City, as Charlie had been doing ever since his days sitting on the steps at the Crispus Attucks library, reading about foreign people and odd ideas. The cinematic images made available by technology told truths that made viewers more sophisticated, more curious, more skilled at facing problems.

  Not long before, in 1934, the Harlem Renaissance painter Aaron Douglas had put a determined, if fanciful, image to the dreams Charlie Parker was already starting to have. One of the figures in his landmark triptych Aspects of Negro Life was the silhouette of a black man standing athwart the skyscrapers of the city with no more armor than a saxophone held to the sky, radiating light, a beacon but also a weapon. Like Billy Eckstine, younger Negroes such as Douglas were starting to reach beyond the injustices of minstrelsy, which scandalized their names so casually and consistently.

  Yet back at 1516 Olive it was Charlie Parker who was doing the scandalizing, threatening Rebecca for calling him on the deceitful life he was living right before her eyes. That gun to her head was no movie gun; it was not filled with blanks, not as far as she knew. That was the injustice Rebecca was struggling against, and she was ready to go down for the truth. She could only wish that her husband would somehow return to the way he’d been not too long ago, when the two of them were conspiring to deceive her mother and sneak down to the movies to get acquainted with the larger world.

  PART III

  AN APPRENTICESHIP IN BLUES AND SWING

  One master jazz musician said to a young player, “It’s not magic, but it should seem like it is.” He was referring to the way professional improvisation felt to the listener—the sort of improvisation in which intellect, passion, and technique all conspired to create a mysterious and irresistible momentum, perfectly formed, no matter the tempo. The master also said that the role of the jazz professional was quite close to that of the magician. No matter how much labor had been put into working out all the aesthetic details, the appearance or disappearance of material, the manipulation of form, the apparent creation of a new reality—all were supposed to seem like the work of a musical prestidigitator, one so in touch with the very chemistry of the moment that he or she could pull love potions or explosions right out of the air. And yet improvisation was never truly accidental, never the result of the hot mess that was ignorance.

  Once he achieved his position as a thorough professional, Charlie Parker wasn’t one to talk in musical detail about what he was doing. He rarely raised technical specifics in his conversation, and when he did talk, Parker sometimes gave the impression that he was largely a natural, an innocent into whom the cosmos poured its knowledge while never bothering his consciousness with explanations.

  The facts of his development were quite different. He worked for everything he got, and whenever possible, he did that work in association with a master.

  8

  It was during his stints in the Ozarks that Charlie Parker began to work on his art with real diligence. The jeering and the rejection back in Kansas City must have lingered, but they were probably less important than the challenge of synthesizing all of the things that had touched his musical sensibility. Now he could start to live by what he heard Jimmy Rushing sing on Count Basie’s “Boogie Woogie,” right in there with Basie and Lester, floating on the airwaves that spring of 1937:

  I may be wrong, but I won’t be wrong always

  It was a maxim for the life he intended to live, not desperately, but with iron resolution.

  Like so many before him, he was learning primarily by ear, and now he was beginning to hear more clearly. He had known something of the piano since the days when he’d played around on it at Sterling Bryant’s, and it was through the piano that he started to find his way around the concept of harmony. He had an appetite for those combinations of tones known as chords, combinations that had their own laws according to the order in which they were placed and the keys in which they functioned. They were fundamental to the mystery of the music he was trying to learn.

  At Musser’s Ozark Tavern, Charlie and the rest of the band played from eight o’clock until perhaps midnight, but they had the days to themselves. There was a schoolteacher who lived nearby, and every so often the musicians paid a visit; now and then they even went to watch the water pouring through the nearby Bagnell Dam. They went to look at the lake, but they never fished. Driving was risky in that weather, as they knew all too well. Not a lot to do.

  Once, Clarence Davis and Parker went rabbit hunting in snow that was nearly waist-deep, the trumpeter armed with a double-barreled shotgun, the saxophonist with a German Luger, perhaps one of the weapons brought back from World War I and still floating around.

  Stopping at a hole, weapons at the ready, they waited for the prey to come out. They were prepared to leave it doornail-dead immediately and then pick up the carcass on the way back to Musser’s to be stewed up as part of the dinner menu.

  When the rodent showed, Clarence turned—and almost shot Charlie, who damn near squeezed off a slug into his buddy. They had fired too fast, but not fatally; the split-second judgment that was at the core of their burgeoning artistic success had not betrayed them out in the field. So they looked each other in the eye and burst out into laughter
, almost crying. Eventually they transformed the near-tragic accident into an adventure story, a supple joke they would revisit over and over as they traveled back to what they should never have left, changing its texture, its meaning—even the outcome—along the way. By then, the two aspirant woodsmen had decided they best let others do the hunting.

  When they did get hold of some rabbits later that day, Charlie and Clarence were perfectly prepared. These Western boys knew how to dress the animals, slicing into the carcasses, peeling away their coats, chopping off the heads and feet, and then cutting up what remained to make a tasty dinner, the taste and texture of the fresh meat still vital and gamey. Unlike their more urban counterparts, who had spent their childhoods dressed up as movie cowboys and Indians, Charlie and Clarence weren’t at all squeamish about dressing a dead animal killed to be eaten. Later, as he was moving through the big time, that country boy side of Charlie Parker would shock those who knew him for his urban sophistication, his literate speech, and his artistry.

  The musicians holed up in their modest Ozark accommodations, cooling it out, practicing or studying their interests before or after work. The band’s female pianist mostly kept to her own cabin, but the men in the band all bunked together, some of them smoking reefers as they listened to radio broadcasts. And it was through the broadcasts that Charlie picked up on another mentor. Coming out of Chicago every night from the bandstand of the Three Deuces was the music of Roy Eldridge, the most powerful influence on the trumpet after Louis Armstrong. Like Lester Young, Eldridge was working on creating something different from the sound that dominated his horn. For nearly a decade, Armstrong had been like a monumental wagon wheel: his style was so rich that scores of individual trumpeters took out one mighty spoke and bent or carved it into a personal style. Armstrong’s imagination was given to the grand gesture and the floating beat that lifted up over the tempo and moved through songs with the freedom that defined jazz. His improvised melodies evolved in stark structures, surprising bursts of rapid-fire notes, sometimes coming off like internal obbligatos, as if he were making asides in response to his own statements. His influence had reigned over jazz from the middle 1920s into the middle 1930s, when other elements began to offer a counterbalance to Armstrong’s influence. These younger voices were building on what he had laid down, taking his principles in new directions, and Eldridge was among the most prominent figures intent on finding his own way.

  The virtuosic Eldridge brought a fresh technical proficiency to the trumpet and expanded the expressive possibilities of jazz in the process. Born in Pittsburgh in 1911, he was an Eastern musician whose early style ignored the transmutation of Negro vocal styles that was so prevalent among the playing of titans such as Armstrong, Red Allen, and Bubber Miley. “I came up playing the horn real straight,” Eldridge said. “I didn’t bend notes and growl like the guys did out west. When I first heard them in Saint Louis, I didn’t know what to do. They had something else going on that was foreign to how I did my playing. They made me think a little different. Over the years, I put what they did in with what I was already doing and my sound came out. Eventually, it all became me.”

  Eldridge initially came to Armstrong the back way. As a young man he was swept up by the style of Coleman Hawkins, learning the feature part the tenor saxophonist improvised on “The Stampede,” a 1926 record with Fletcher Henderson’s big band. That brief solo was Armstrong processed through Hawkins, delivered with the bravura and rhythmic surge of the trumpeter. Eldridge was drawn to such flashy playing—so much so, he later admitted, that his early work often had more to do with showing off his fast playing to impress listeners, and showing he could rout the opposition in cutting contests, than it did with true content or invention. “When me and Jabbo Smith went at it one night, we played a whole lot of trumpet but not much music, maybe none at all, but, again, a whole lot of horn was played that night.” When he finally did hear Armstrong at New York’s Lafayette Theater in 1932, though, he was amazed at the logic of his playing. This was what jazz musicians meant when they said that someone “told a story.” The units of music that Armstrong invented evolved seamlessly, one into the next, his ideas perfectly shaped and balanced. Listening carefully to Armstrong’s music, Eldridge learned how to pace himself, how to relax and build a statement. It was this epiphany that transformed Eldridge the virtuoso into Eldridge the artist.

  Even so, Eldridge didn’t really want to phrase or breathe like a trumpet player. He often commented that he leaned toward the longer, swifter lines of saxophonists. A harmonically oriented musician, he wanted to play through the changing chords with the authority he heard in Hawkins, Benny Carter, and Chu Berry. His daring style shocked its way up into the highest range of his horn, using high notes not just for drama or tonal percussion or to draw a little applause from the crowd, but as organic parts of his work. Eldridge was full of heat; his stamina allowed him to play in the upper reaches of his instrument for set after set, then go out scouting for jam session battles, which could inspire him to punch and counterpunch with his trumpet until late the next morning, even into the afternoon. He had the confidence and the gladiator spirit to seek out the best trumpeters wherever he traveled, always intent on wiping them out, bruising their self-esteem. At home he was a great irritation to his Harlem neighbors, practicing four to six hours every day. By the time Charlie Parker and his fellow musicians started tuning in to his broadcasts in their winter haven in Eldon, Missouri, in early 1937, Eldridge had put together the style that would be a dominant force in jazz for several decades to come.

  Eldridge’s playing combined ease with urgency, lending the motion of his lines a fresh, shimmering energy. His work echoed the industrial confidence of the culture, the disdain for heights that led to the skyscrapers, the energy that laid the railroad tracks, that dug the subways, that rolled car after car off the assembly lines, that lit the American night. It was the sound of steel, electricity, and concrete made lyrical. Young musicians like Clarence Davis were as stuck on Roy Eldridge as their predecessors had been on Armstrong ten years before.

  In Eldridge, Parker probably heard more elements, more pure information, than he may have been aware of. He was still a young man, with only limited knowledge of how complexly things moved in jazz, how invisible threads of influence connected each musician to other players they may never have paid much attention to, may never even have heard. Eldridge combined the schools of melody and harmony that were represented by Armstrong and Sidney Bechet on one hand, by Hawkins and Art Tatum on the other. Like most New Orleans musicians, Armstrong and Bechet were fundamentally bluesmen. Hawkins and Tatum, by contrast, were impassioned intellectuals whose music introduced another aspect of consciousness into the art. In time, Charlie Parker would combine both orientations—melding the visceral with the intellectual, the freedom and force of swinging the blues with an extraordinary conceptual appetite and capacity for intricacy.

  The towering figure of the intellectual school was Art Tatum, the piano genius who had influenced Coleman Hawkins so profoundly in the late 1920s, when the tenor with the big sound traveled to Toledo with Fletcher Henderson’s surging, twirling big band and heard the local keyboard wonder. Hawkins would never be the same. Tatum was perhaps the greatest of all jazz virtuosi, admired by the young Vladimir Horowitz, who could re-create one of Tatum’s improvisations by reading a transcription but scoffed at the notion that he could invent anything of Tatum’s brilliance in the moment. Tatum sprinted through his material, dancing over broken chords while inserting chord substitutions that allowed for more intricate connections within the harmonic foundation. Hawkins, a trained cellist and classical student, could hear how Tatum combined the European technique of harmonic motion with the New York stride piano school led by James P. Johnson, Willie “The Lion” Smith, and Fats Waller.

  So when Eldridge put his horn to his lips, he was bringing together styles that seemed, at least on the surface, contradictory. Though Armstrong’s influence had transform
ed everything in a manner that had no precedent—making him the first figure in Western music to raise a revolutionary flag with a single-note instrument—a new generation of more harmonically adventurous jazz musicians was joining the conversation. From the early thirties forward, wind and keyboard players would maintain a dialogue of influence, pushing their instruments into fresh areas.

  Charlie had been following Roy Eldridge for a while; Rebecca had already heard him playing along with Eldridge and Chu Berry on the Fletcher Henderson record “Stealin’ Apples.” On those late nights in the Ozarks, Charlie must have been impressed by the trumpeter’s Chicago broadcasts. Eldridge offered some of the same pleasures as Lester Young: He was uncanny, devoted to an individuality that forced him to invent his own way. You never knew what kind of a phrase he would play or how long he might keep it going. The trumpeter embodied the audacity of jazz music, the combination of moxie and technical command that gave him freedom in every direction—in his range, his conception, his coloring of notes, and his rhythm. All of those elements Charlie Parker would eventually work into his own style, steadily achieving greater and greater comprehension of the details every jazz intellectual has to master, then feel, in order to attain greatness.

  While at Musser’s Ozark Tavern, Charlie and his compatriots also tuned in to station W9XBY, broadcasting from the bandstand of a Kansas City club located on the Kansas–Missouri state line. It was on these broadcasts that Charlie first homed in on the sound of the alto saxophonist Buster Smith.