Kansas City Lightning

by Stanley Crouch

  That was it: Charlie had to find a place to play. The music would smooth his path. For the moment he didn’t have much choice about how he looked, but when they heard him play they would know what choices he had made, how’d been spending his time. Not too long ago, people had been following him around the streets of Kansas City, waiting for him to decide where he was going to pull out his horn. Now was the time to get that kind of respect in this man’s Chicago.

  NEGROES IN CHICAGO had their own excitement going; they weren’t always that thrilled about musicians coming in from other places. They were proud of their town; the feeling seemed to steam out of their clothes, evident in the way they stood waiting for public transportation or drove their cars or walked the streets, wrapped up in overcoats, complaining about the weather or listening as someone told them a story, their eyes wet from the wind. They existed in that perfect American intersection where the first-class machinery of the Northeast turned and reached all the way down to the cultural bass notes of the South. If you weren’t heading as far as New York, but you wanted to know what it meant to get next to something modern, you went straight to Chicago.

  The Negroes had come, up from the Mississippi Valley mostly, delta moons and limber vitality in their looks, gazes filled with impenetrable solitude and humor; their speech rhythms could be as swift as the Chicago piano of a machine gun or as thick and oily as homemade peanut butter. They were answering the call that went up with World War I, when the city’s mass production businesses could no longer rely on the dirt-cheap immigrants who’d been arriving from the East for decades, ready to work in the stockyards; to pour, forge, and cool steel; or to make their way up into the higher grade of American poverty by drawing their pay in the packing plants. Now all those European workers were back across the Atlantic within the battling nations, or heading back to war, leaving plenty of work behind them. Down yonder, a generation of country people—black, brown, beige, and bone—looked north for another chance to get in on the promise of the land.

  These Negroes saw a new chance to rise up from under the blood-encrusted glare of home, to pack their lives and savings into a cheap suitcase, tied up with a rope or a belt, climb on up those train steps, and watch the Delta country get behind them. They filled the colored sections of the trains, carrying biscuits dipped in molasses, fish sandwiches, ham sandwiches, fried chicken, preserves, cornbread, jars of greens, and the delicious pot liquor they drank after the greens were slurped down.

  Some arrived looking as country as the mouth of the Mississippi. Others wore their down-south Sunday best, causing the red caps to laugh and the hustlers to lick their chops. However they looked, whatever they thought, their arrival in numbers changed Chicago—and Chicago changed them.

  The participants in the Great Migration were met by much of the same hostility their immigrant predecessors had experienced in the second half of the nineteenth century. The rejection, the violence, and the crowding didn’t stop them, any more than it did those Europeans, any more than those industrial skyscrapers stopped Chicago from being a hometown to the blues. They became part of the energy of the city, earning their positions in urban life through their factory and trucking jobs, their work packing meat or making household gadgets, and their hours on assembly lines knocking out one tool or product after another in that town where stores were as large as dreams.

  And there were other kinds of work in Chicago, in the homes of white folks who needed their floors mopped, their windows cleaned, their rugs walloped, their dishes made spick-and-span, their floors polished, their beds done, their laundry washed and ironed. When the blues craze spun off of turntables in the twenties, some white women tried to forbid their colored cleaning girls from listening to that indecent music while on the job—only to see the girls throw their heads up and walk out. But most of them kept their jobs, working through the impossible summers, the heat held in the concrete, and the winters that put white mounds in the streets, forcing them to wade through snow up to their waists. Spring was sweet, and during July or August you dreamed of autumn.

  It was late autumn when Charlie Parker sidled up to one of the guys standing outside the 65 Club, on Fifty-Fifth Street at Michigan Avenue, and no one thought he might be dreaming about music. They gave him a look that was short on contempt but long on experience. These were night people, men in possession of the electricity, the anarchy, the pride, the suspicion, and the doubt of the times. They knew how it went. Whatever it was, they saw it coming. They lived in that part of the night known as after hours, when the streets were wandered by only the most intrepid party spirits, by musicians looking for someplace to pull out their instruments and jam, by johns ready to barter with some whores, and by the homeless, who had to keep in motion to hold back as much of the cold as they could.

  One of the guys out in front of the 65 Club was a young Negro named Bob Redcross. Redcross, at that time, was a hustler by his own description. He worked hard at moving whatever he could and had a gift for clothing design that would come in handy later when he started suiting up entire dance bands. Light-skinned, thin, about five feet nine, Redcross had the spark of wit in his eye, but it was matched by an iciness that could be unnerving. When he went to New York in 1937, hustling the backside of the Apollo Theater with the notorious ruffians and desperadoes of 126th Street, people were heard to say: “Leave him alone. That’s a Chicago nigger. He’ll shoot you.”

  Redcross also loved music. He was a serious collector, the kind who was there to help out famous musicians who were looking for a recording they’d made back in the day but which was no longer in print and was scarce on the ground. If it was good, chances were Redcross had it tucked away carefully in a brown paper sleeve inside a record-album book, practically brand-new. Records were easy to break back then—they were made of shellac—but in Bob Redcross’s collection, everything was in order and protected with a do-or-die attitude.

  Though he was only in his mid-twenties, Bob Redcross had show-business roots going right back to the start of serious jazz in Chicago. From the time he first heard King Oliver and Louis Armstrong, sitting inside his mother’s coat in the Royal Gardens checkroom, he’d known them both on stage and in private—the musicians and singers, the dancers and comedians. A curious man, a voracious reader and conversationalist, who consumed Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy as a young man, Redcross was also a sociable type who liked playing tonk with the guys at the 208, though he later admitted he didn’t always love hanging around with the unemployed.

  When Charlie Parker approached the guys outside the 65 Club, looking to bum a cigarette—this kid’s pants would fit three people, Redcross thought—another who noticed him was Redcross’s buddy Billy Eckstine. A twenty-four-year-old singer from Pittsburgh whose good looks and high cheer masked a willingness to knock a joker out if necessary, Eckstine had a honeyed glow that was almost irresistible to the opposite sex. Eckstine could easily have been a pimp; he had plenty of street women offering to go out and lay down some love for sale on his behalf, content to do the sweating and squealing for a Negro that pretty—high brown with almost oriental eyes, with those football player’s shoulders and that good hair lying down like that. But: forget it. Too much hassle. Music was on his mind. He didn’t avoid street-corner banter about dancing the poontango, but the pimp walk wasn’t for him.

  Eckstine’s show-business mentor from a distance was Duke Ellington, but his singing model early on was the bandleader and showman Cab Calloway. Eckstine used to imitate the Hi-De-Ho Man, whose perfect diction and high-powered Harlem jive sold many, many records, and even broke into the world of Betty Boop cartoons, where figures like the Old Man of the Mountain were animated to emulate Calloway’s dancing style. But now the young Eckstine was starting to close in on his own sound, a personal way of crooning that was rising out of his body more clearly every day. His real dream was to become a romantic balladeer, to use his low, dark baritone to liquefy the hearts of the ladies. There was no place for that in t
he musical landscape of the time—not produced in the dark side of town, anyway—but that was what he wanted, and he sensed he could get it. Good male singers, from opera to pop, became the romantic force throbbing in the hearts of women. Young Billy Eckstine knew he was a good singer and was always ready to prove it.

  Charlie stood there quietly for a while with Redcross, Eckstine, and the others, taking in the surroundings, looking for his opening. When the guys went back inside, he followed them. It was swinging hard in there, very hard, trumpeter King Kolax’s band riding through the air in musical triumph, laying down that Chicago momentum of strut and shuffle, colored by the taint of true blues. Charlie sized up the landscape in an instant, all that Kansas City groove within reach of muscle memory. He might have looked like something time forgot, but Charlie was in no way afraid to ask to play. When he told the guys in the band he played the alto saxophone, Goon Gardner, who was at a table flirting with a girl, turned around in his chair and slid a horn across the floor to Charlie, its neck and mouthpiece twisted safely up off the ground. Charlie picked up the instrument and turned the neck so that it was ready to play.

  IN JANUARY 1939, Jay McShann and Gene Ramey went to Chicago for a two-week engagement that ended up lasting six weeks. A friend of theirs, a Down Beat writer named Dave Dexter, had heard them with Jay’s small group in Kansas City; he loved their sound, gushing about them in print and paving the way for them to nab one of the magazine’s awards. Soon they were called on up to Chicago, where McShann and Ramey put down a heavy line of Kansas City groove, giving the beat enough personality to lift and rock and swing the room.

  Dexter had also met Charlie Parker in Kansas City, though he saw him only as a liar, a pickpocket, and a spoiled, selfish boy. To Gene Ramey, however, Charlie’s name meant something different. Almost as soon as he and McShann got to Chicago, he later recalled, they started hearing about this skinny saxophone player from Kansas City who had come in there and shocked the hell out of everybody who heard him. In no time, this Kansas City nobody had come into the South Side jazz world and blown everybody out. He had a stump to fit anybody’s rump.

  According to Eckstine, Goon Gardner was so impressed by Parker that he invited him to come live at his place—though that ended soon enough, with Gardner short some of his belongings and Charlie gone off to God knew where. But Ramey was proud of what Charlie had done, bringing the Kansas City message to Chicago and letting those men up there know that swing hadn’t died when Basie left for New York. He didn’t know where Charlie had gone to, but he was getting used to the fact that mystery was part of his young buddy’s story.

  12

  Nineteen thirty-nine, while a very good year for jazz and for Charlie Parker, was also the year that Adolf Hitler finally pushed the globe into another world war. Negroes were well aware of what Hitler represented; they had welcomed, with whatever misgivings, the sight of Jesse Owens and Joe Louis triumphing literally and symbolically against European fascism and the junk science of eugenics. Trumpeter Jacques Butler, who was from Washington, DC, and had played with Jelly Roll Morton in New York, remembered how Negro jazz musicians in Harlem made a joke of Third Reich philosophy by calling any light-skinned person with autocratic tendencies “Master Race.”

  The odd position of black people in America was made quite clear in January 1939, when the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to allow the world-renowned contralto Marian Anderson to sing at Constitution Hall in Washington because she was Negro. First lady Eleanor Roosevelt—who had invited Anderson to sing at the White House three years earlier and was the hot force for Negro rights in the presidential circle, constantly urging her husband to use his authority to enforce a greater degree of racial justice—found the DAR’s decision not only racist but also a personal insult, resigning from the organization in protest.

  The Constitution Hall concert was eventually supplanted by an event that took on far more importance than the recital it replaced. It made the movie house newsreels, so we can assume that anyone who wasn’t dead or buried must have seen it. On a cold Easter Sunday, in front of the Lincoln Memorial, Anderson was introduced by the secretary of the interior, Harold Ickes, with these words: “In this great auditorium under the sky, all of us are free.” Then, brown and dignified in a mink coat, Anderson thrushed forth her gifts before an integrated audience of 75,000, not a ragtag type visible in the photographs. As she often did on the other side of the Atlantic, Anderson sang both European concert selections and Negro spirituals, the music of the Old World and the New. The Philadelphia contralto resurrected the dream of the country by kicking off her twenty-minute recital with “America” and encoring with “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.” It was one of those great American days.

  And yet this was also the year when Gone with the Wind premiered in Atlanta, just before Christmas, and swiftly became the highest grossing movie of its time. Starring Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh, this paean to the plantation South offered a sentimentalized vision of its destruction in the Civil War—the second instance, after Griffith’s racism-mottled The Birth of a Nation, in which Hollywood busted the bank wide-open with a period tale in which the rapacious Negro, foaming at the mouth, was central to the narrative. Though Hattie McDaniel would win an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress the following year—the first for a Negro—Gone with the Wind was proof, in many ways, that the nation had not yet been reborn.

  BY THE TIME Charlie Parker arrived in New York that winter, he’d been wearing his shoes so long that his feet and legs were swollen out of shape. He had come the hard way, freezing in boxcars between towns, getting a roof over his head and breakfast from the Salvation Army, then taking to the rails again. But he took the bumps, scrapes, and pricks of his journey in stride, because he’d finally gotten to the place at the far end of the country where he wanted to be. Slight or acute, pain was a traveling partner by now. He’d learned the weight that hypocrisy and chaos brought to his sense of life; how it felt to be alone and the target of contempt; how to bear the soreness that came with mastering his instrument. He’d discovered the almost intolerable excruciation that went with his drug habit, with loving Rebecca but losing her and little Leon to the saxophone and the magnetic demons that so easily drew him in, chewed him up, and shat him out, drained, remorseful, and filthy.

  He knew he had to be willing to suffer for what he wanted, and it was starting to look as though he were earmarked to suffer, whether he was willing or not. All the exaltation of Kansas City was far behind him now. In that Manhattan winter, walking the streets on those very sore legs and feet, he went in search of new adventure as a form of illumination that simultaneously muted his hurts and neutralized his anxiety.

  He couldn’t have arrived at a better time. The New York World’s Fair was to open in April, with its theme, “Building the World of Tomorrow,” and word of the event was everywhere: on posters, on broadcasts, in newspapers, in magazines, filling the newsreel screens of the movie houses. The country’s insatiable appetite for innovation and sophistication—the flip side of the American love for the pastoral, the down-home, and the steel-wool cocoon of the conventional—was about to be given its head. Thousands upon thousands would soon be driving their cars, grabbing buses, or zooming in the subway out to the exhibition fairgrounds in Queens, where the newly completed Triborough Bridge connected the borough to Manhattan and the Bronx.

  Come springtime, pavilion after pavilion would be swarmed with visitors, stunned or thrilled by the grand industrial promises of a sterling tomorrow. It was the era of bigger, better, and faster—the perfect moment for a young musician entranced by things mechanical and the mathematical laws behind them, which had nothing to do with race, class, religion, or the various bugaboos that made life dangerous and unnecessarily irritating, if not humiliating. As a boy in Catholic school, before he moved across the river to Missouri, Charlie was drawn to the purity of modern machinery. He was fascinated by the physics, electronics, and technological secrets
behind modern life in the late 1930s: radios, automobiles, skyscrapers, elevators, bridges, dams, airplanes, traffic lights, rapid transit—all the inventions that were pushed at Americans by competing manufacturers. He even foresaw what we know today as sampling: In 1952, he told pianist Walter Davis Jr. and some fellow musicians, “Someday in the future, they’ll be able to put your music in a can. Then, whenever they want to, they’ll do it just like they were using a spoon to take out as much of you, or as little of you, as they need. After they have done whatever they want to do with you, with your sound, they put you back. Your future, my dear fellow, is in a can.”

  When Charlie Parker got to New York, however, he had a much more immediate concern than divining the future: finding his mentor, Buster Smith. We know that Smith had finally written Charlie, which must be how the younger man knew to turn up at Smith’s apartment on 135th Street and Seventh Avenue. Answering the front door, the older man knew something immediately: the boy had obviously been whipped down by his travels. This wasn’t the spoiled young man Smith had known, who had almost always taken care to be neat and alert when he sat next to Smith on the bandstand at the Antlers Club in the West Bottoms, awed and warmly affectionate. His looks brought back to Smith the hard, dark memory of those Blue Devil days in Virginia, which left the band worn out, covered with dirt and coal dust, and fearful of the Eastern Seaboard.