Charlie would have known Smith from the Kansas City clubs. Smith had been a major figure in the Oklahoma City Blue Devils, a formidable bluesman on the alto saxophone and the clarinet; he was one of the players who had coaxed Lester Young into the Blue Devils, and a member of the reed section John Hammond heard at the Reno Club after the Blue Devils had blown their last note and their former members joined the best of Bennie Moten’s men under the guidance of Count Basie. At first they led the band together, Smith and Basie, but the easygoing and likable Basie seemed born to lead. This was clear from the moment he landed one of his unforgettable piano introductions—sometimes giddy, sometimes insinuating—followed by hot, well-placed chords and riffs, provocatively fine stuff to build an improvised dream on. Bill Basie—from Red Bank, New Jersey—knew how to find that groove, putting his arm around it, slapping that thing silly, or playfully grabbing its throat.
What distinguished Buster Smith in the Basie band was his writing and arranging prowess, which earned him the nickname “Professor,” or “Prof.” At first Charlie seems not to have noticed his playing. Perhaps it was only after Young’s departure for New York that he turned his attention to Smith. Certainly Young still loomed large in his mind; Gene Ramey recalled him memorizing Young’s solo on his 1936 recording of “Oh, Lady Be Good.” “Oh, when Charlie came back from the Ozarks, he had gotten that Pres solo on ‘Lady Be Good’—which we called ‘Lady Be No Good.’ He had it down. Charlie played that solo all over town. He played it so much, almost everybody else memorized it!”
It was when Charlie started listening to Buster Smith, though, that he began to recognize what the alto saxophone could do. Tall, slim, dark, with his hair combed back and his mustache thick, Smith was a figure to be reckoned with. He had the sound of the Southwest in his quick speech, a swift way of talking that almost duplicated the zip of his saxophone playing, and that was punctuated by the gallows wit and Olympian laughter so often heard from those Negroes closest to the tragic-comic sensibility of the culture, a perfect human mirror of the democratic soul of American life. Smith had learned the craft of composition almost entirely by himself, and he spent his afternoons sitting at the piano, texturing the air of empty clubs as he worked on his pithy arrangements.
Though Smith had been one of the infamous Oklahoma City Blue Devils before he settled in Tom Pendergast’s town, no musician had a higher position in the pantheon of Kansas City. Born near Dallas, Texas, in 1904, he took an early interest in instrumental music, playing an organ in his mother’s house at the age of four or five. He later told journalist Don Gazzaway: “Yeah, my brother would get down and push the pedals to make the notes come out, and I was up above playing the keys. My grandfather made us get rid of that old organ because he told my mother it wouldn’t do anything but lead me into the worst of sin.” He was in his seventeenth year, still living at home, when a clarinet in a shop window caught his eye. Young, very dark brown Buster knew he wanted one, and knew he wanted it quick.
As soon as he got home, he told his mother about the clarinet. She told him he could have it if he picked three hundred pounds of cotton every day. That neither changed his mind nor sent him running to hide under his bed. He soon earned the $1.50, and Smith was off, untethering his family from sanity as he learned the instrument through squeaks that slowly but surely abated under the sweating force of the patient boy’s determination. Before long, young Buster was getting jobs playing that music in what he called “pig iron” houses, where pork was served, liquor was drunk, and the bands played blues all night in the keys of B, D, and E. The Negroes there danced on the dirt floors through the night, kicking up dust until they left the next morning, soaked with perspiration as they stepped into the welcome fresh air, no more moon at all. Walking home, the men laughed at the sight of one another, their sweating faces covered with so much danced-up dust that they looked like they were wearing pancake makeup.
Smith discovered that he had a special aptitude for the instrument and swiftly became a member of the local musical elite. This was before the virtuoso wind-playing era; emulating the Negro voice was plenty, especially if the player had good rhythm and could project his sound. In that respect, wind players were a distance behind what the Eastern piano players were putting together. And since Smith was self-taught, there was no reason for him to aspire to anything beyond what he heard on recordings of the day and witnessed in the work of local musicians or the traveling bands that performed in Dallas. Getting with the kind of sound blues singers were putting in the air was a job in itself, and meant encrusting notes with nuances that reached back to the field hollers, moans, and hums of the shared Negro memory—the elements that took music beyond the tonal precision of the piano, opening the door to what might have initially seemed like guttural exhortations or cries of pain, even ambivalence, but were actually the foundations of a language that was expanding the expressive power of Western music.
As young Buster Smith mastered his clarinet, then, he was bent on getting with the rough music of the barrelhouses, the places where joy came in muscular or soft packages but could surely arrive the hard way. He hoped to speak to those who wanted their secular experience expressed with the same intensity they felt in the churches and camp meetings, where the spirit could arrive with the force of a hurricane, throwing believers this way and that, taking possession of listeners, forcing unintelligible sounds from their mouths, pushing tears from the eyes of witnesses, terrifying children who had yet to learn the vocalizations known to the believers as the language of God, sounding that way to deceive the devil, who, just like the savior, was everywhere. Buster was finding out, as all bluesmen had to, that the audible route to success was through creating subtlety and fire in the tones and timbres of Negro American speech and rhythm and song. You had to be able to soothe the people or insinuate them into reverie; you had to be able to make them rise up, stomp, kick, spin, and caress; you had to remind them that the sandpaper facts of human life could be smoothed over if met in the close quarters of courtship or celebration, where the sun going down at the arrival of evening promised recognition of something far inside the soul and right under the skin. None of the sweet, sentimental music white folks listened to was for them. They needed stuff played that was as tough as they knew the world to be, and that was as compassionate as they wished it could become. The kinds of voices they heard in their daily lives had to rise out of horns; the intervals they liked had to be rolled or trilled or boogied out of the piano; the backbeats they liked to set their dance steps to were expected of the drummers. And, working in his little trio with pianist Voddie White and drummer Jesse Dee, Buster Smith met the demands of Dallas.
Sporting his new shirts and pants, his polished boots, smoking his stogies, Buster Smith soon began loving the life he had found for himself. It lifted him up into another stratum, allowed him to go about picking up musical information from every corner. He didn’t miss the big acts that came through Dallas, either: the appearance of some famous Negro musician at the L. B. Mose Theater or the Hummingbird was an event of importance for professional and lay alike. At the stage shows, audiences saw comedians, jugglers, contortionists, torch singers, now and then an animal act, and the main attraction. But what struck Buster Smith most was the local crowd, coming out to see those boys who worked with territory bandleaders like Troy Floyd and Alphonso Trent, wearing all that expensive stuff and carrying themselves as if they were recognized for sitting right on top of the whole world. They had cars, shiny ones, their shoes gleamed, and they traveled around, making names for themselves. It was easy to see that this music business could be very good to a man if he worked on it hard enough, if he got so he could be reliably good, be depended on to touch the people.
Buster Smith was the reliable type. If he got a job, he was there and ready to perform. He was ready, too, to learn anything you threw at him. Quick. He paid close attention. Boy wasn’t stuck up, was not the backbiting kind. You didn’t have to worry about him getting drunk and e
mbarrassing anyone. He was a young man on the go, looking for ways to better himself as a musician, fast to learn and gifted with a powerful memory. The musicians liked him, and whenever something came along that could fit his talents and help him out, they told him about it. He had a kind of light coming out of him that attracted people to his side and that neutralized distrust. Above all, Buster Smith didn’t abuse the popularity that came to him; he was solid and proud, liked him a laugh, was a good friend to others, and could be counted on for loyalty once he declared himself.
Smith wouldn’t back down from something he wanted to do just because it took a whole lot of work. This characteristic helped him understand that Charlie Parker boy when they later met. Good man Buster knew personally what some ironclad determination could do. But he also wouldn’t do anything he didn’t want to do. At one point, some guys from New Orleans who’d heard about him came in and got him up on the bandstand for their engagement in Dallas. When they tried to get him to go out on the road with them, though, he wasn’t interested. He didn’t feel like traveling out with the circus and medicine-show bands that came through, the ones where musicians just blew as loud as they could, nothing connected necessarily, just what it took to attract people over to where they could be transformed into suckers by the men selling remedies for everything that ailed anybody on the face of the earth.
Smith later concluded that jazz, for him, had begun with his reaction to those medicine shows, to the way those gawking, gullible customers were drawn into the fly trap by those complicit musicians. Buster didn’t mind standing around blowing on his horn in the open air, his tone getting stronger, testing his instrument’s abilities, noticing the power music had to bring people right up to where he was playing. But he was satisfied with that—with the instrument itself and its power to draw the people in. He didn’t feel the need to go any further, to keep them there while someone else picked their pockets. After all, he was now working things out on a new alto, one he had gotten from Jesse Dee, his trio drummer. The horn came out of Jesse Dee’s closet or somewhere, green as a new leaf. It fit him pretty good, and he didn’t know many other players who had one. He needed to clean it up, show that it was being cared for by a professional musician. It gave him another something to add to the list of what he could do. And he was getting with it, getting with it fast.
The tempo of things picked up in 1925, when the Blue Devils came into Dallas from Oklahoma City. Now those musicians had something appealing to Buster Smith. It seemed like they all had something about them that they got from being out there on the road, moving around, finding out about things. The Blue Devils were full of fiery stuff, and they played music like they meant it, every note. Crackshot McNeil was on drums and he excited Buster Smith in a way that was different from anyone else he’d ever heard. McNeil had spark, and he could get around his drums well; he knew how to get the rhythm up under you and make the stuff you were playing come out better. He would make you want to play. It didn’t matter how you felt when you got there, once he started putting that rhythm on you, you had to execute something good just to satisfy yourself. Then old Walter Page could pluck you into something with that bass, the notes booming out low and close to the drumbeat. If the piece called for it, the man would put his bass down and pick up the baritone saxophone, or take off down low on a sousaphone he’d perched nearby on a scaffold. It was as if he knew he had to punch the band forward, and one instrument just wasn’t enough to do the job.
It was the punch and the verve of the Blue Devils that got to Buster Smith as he played with them around Dallas. They stood and talked with pointed assurance; they held their instruments as if nobody else could play them; the power that came out when those men got rolling, and the feeling of being there with them and having to get up over all that fire, gave him a steaming thrill. These were young men, too, musicians of his generation, cocky and ready to go anywhere there was a job. Once they arrived, well, it was on—and that was how it was at the last job, and that was how it was about to be at the next, and they weren’t bashful about letting anyone know it. A strong new buzz saw had no cause to apologize for splitting a log in half.
Once Smith had spent a little time with those musicians, leaving Dallas didn’t seem like such a bad idea. There was suddenly an inevitable quality to imagining being out on the road with musicians like the Blue Devils. You went to a gig, you did good work with your instrument, you got paid, you divided up the money evenly, and you moved on. The Devils were still being led by Ermir Coleman, but the band would soon come under new management as Walter Page’s Blue Devils. Whatever the moniker, it was really a collective organization. Smith later called it “a commonwealth band,” all for one, one for all.
When they asked him to join the band and hit the road with them, Buster Smith was ready. He bade good-bye to his family, packed up his clothes, got his instruments together, packed everything into one of the Blue Devils’ cars, and was gone. No more a local boy, he was about to become a shaper of the sound of the territories, and eventually an instigator of innovation.
As Ross Russell wrote in Jazz Style in Kansas City and the Southwest, “The Blue Devils was just another ambitious, young, brash southwestern territorial band when Buster Smith joined in 1925. The average age of its members was around twenty-three. Page, at twenty-six, was looked upon as something of a patriarch. In the next four years the Blue Devils became one of the best and certainly most feared in competition of all the bands in the Southwest.” As Russell notes, their core players included half a dozen future pillars of the Kansas City scene, including Bill Basie, Eddie Durham, Lester Young, Lips Page, and Walter Page. “These talents were recruited by a team project of sifting rumors, bird-dogging leads picked up over the musical grapevine, and a systematic series of auditions, evaluations, offers, sales talk, raids, and cajolery—all part of the infighting of the dance band business. The process took place in much the same way that a major baseball team is brought up to championship level by the acquisition of stars and superstars to field its various positions.”
As in all human teams, personnel, craft, and spirit separated the journeymen from the good, the good from the great. The bands of the Southwest were intent on becoming great if they could, and the elements that would make them great included repertoire, technique, and rhythm. They would learn from the mass technology of print, from the phonograph record, through the reactions of the audiences they played for, and by conferring and competing with other professional musicians. Each of them would learn things about music on his own, as well as with others—mulling over a piece of material, practicing in a difficult key, making and listening to suggestions at a rehearsal, meeting the challenge of a stranger’s imagination at a jam session, or plotting the sequence of tunes at a bandstand battle the same way a baseball manager would select the pitcher and pick the order of batters. It was all about the audience: Pull them right in, let them lull awhile, build back up with some kind of surprise, scoop up their attention, get all eyes on the bandstand as things start twirling pleasurably in unexpected directions, until the tension is tighter than Dick’s hatband. Then the hot man, whoever he is, stands up and lays down more of a good-sounding time in rhythm and tune than the law allows. This lifts the band, the dancers, and the room itself into an invisible carnival of joy, up there somewhere, up there. That’s where they want to go—up—and your job is to get them there if you can. The people want to feel as if they were made for joy, and joy was made for them. Why not be celebrated for the ability to do that? Few can, very, very few.
Ralph Ellison was from Oklahoma City, the Blue Devils’ home base. As an aspirant musician, he saw the Blue Devils walk the streets with the sheen of local celebrity. Working in the local drugstore, he mixed up citric acid with two or three eggs in milkshakes for musicians, pimps, and laymen looking to stand in bed after a long night. He knew Buster Smith, and remembered seeing Lester Young coolly strolling around in a white sweater, carrying an old silver tenor. He also saw the Blue
Devils when they performed at Slaughter’s Hall. That was where the Negroes gave their dances, though the band headquartered itself at the Ritz Hotel, a white place. As Ellison noted, the sensibility of an era isn’t always what we assume in retrospect: “What gets lost when you overstate race is the fact that people aren’t always thinking about race. They might be thinking about style, about technique, about information that would allow them to do whatever it was that they were trying to do. Hell, when you went to the record store, you were looking for anything that could help you achieve your own aspirations; you weren’t concerned about seeing yourself in the limited terms that someone else might.”
Ellison perceived something essential about the musicians of the 1920s and 1930s: that they saw music as an opportunity not just to entertain, but to express something of their shared situation. “There is a wide-open sensibility in jazz, and that sensibility made it possible to express so many of the essentials of the national character in the sound and feeling of the music. You hear the wanderlust, you hear the hopes and the dreams; you are given a feeling for the inevitable disappointments and the equally inevitable humor. That is why those bands swinging that music had such significance. They existed in a ritual where the highly demanding aspects of the musical imagination—and the dancing imagination—frequently met, pulling together techniques and expressions of elegance from anywhere they could.”
Like all the Negro bands, the Blue Devils played for everybody who gave them work, and that meant that they performed in many segregated situations. To meet the demands of their white audiences—when those demands fell outside of their jazz tunes and original material—they would stop by music stores and buy stock arrangements of the popular songs of the day, sometimes playing them straight, but sometimes treating them to the creative reinvention that’s known in music as arranging. That is how Buster Smith started expanding his skills at composition. Smith had learned to read music in Dallas, but he hadn’t made much of it. In the Blue Devils, he started writing music—a process that involved a small parade of revelations.
Kansas City Lightning Page 17
