Kansas City Lightning (16 page)

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 de
veloped 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.

E
ven 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 customers 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.

Moten's bands, starting with three pieces and moving up to twelve, detailed the evolution of Kansas City dance music and the arrival of blues as an element strong enough to supplant the sentimental foam of sweet hotel tunes commonly served up for audiences who weren't yet attuned to the swing, humor, and stark feeling basic to Negro art. Yet Moten admired the sophisticated arrangements that characterized the best of sweet music, and he was intent on combining that skill with the sound shaped in the streets and at the Negro gatherings where musicians were starting to adapt the blues shadings they heard in the work of singers like Bessie Smith.

In
Jazz Style in Kansas City and the Southwest
, Ross Russell writes of the kind of instrumental insights that Moten—like all serious bandleaders thinking about jazz—derived from his players:

Moten's ambition was to assemble a band whose music made it larger than the provinces where it played. At the start of his recording career, his ensembles were clearly influenced by King Oliver, including references to some of the trumpeter's famous improvisations. By the end of the twenties, Moten was reflecting the influence of Duke Ellington, in one case even lifting a riff directly from the Eastern bandleader. This was not unusual: the Midwestern musicians measured themselves against the sounds coming first from the Chicago work of Oliver, and then from the bands in New York, which everyone rightly considered the jewel in the crown of jazz. It was in New York that the complexities and subtleties of show music were combined with the instrumental and compositional innovations of Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, and Jelly Roll Morton.

Yet the musicians of the Midwest were doing more than merely aping either the New Orleans musicians or the Easterners. They were nurturing ideas that would reshape the very thrust of the music. Moten was in the middle of it all, struggling upward as his reputation grew, and he became ever more ambitious. In almost every photograph one sees of him, Moten is dressed beautifully; he has the look of a well-fed man enjoying the elevator ride and dreaming of the view from the penthouse.

Moten's archrival was Walter Page, whose band, the Oklahoma City Blue Devils, had developed a reputation by the late 1920s for musically removing the scalps of the opposition and leaving their bodies for the buzzards. Page's background touches on nearly every element in the story of pre-bebop jazz. He studied under Major N. Clark Smith at Charlie Parker's Lincoln High School; Ross Russell reports that Page switched from bass drum and bass horn to string bass at Smith's suggestion. Russell also says that it was after hearing Wellman Braud's powerful bass tone, during an engagement of the Elks and Shriners Circus in Kan
sas City, that Page had a kind of epiphany about the instrument's potential. He went on to gain a degree in music from the University of Kansas in Lawrence, a city that had been burned to the ground by Quantrill's Raiders during the days of the Civil War renegade. Page was a student not only of the bass fiddle but also of piano, voice, violin, composition, and arranging.