Kansas City Lightning (18 page)

Even so, Charlie kept going out into the Kansas City night of affirmative blues and swing. The music was a refuge, a world of memory and dreams, a field of aristocrats, of aesthetic wizards and sorcerers' apprentices. One of the places he went was the Reno Club, on Twelfth Street and Cherry. It was perhaps fifty by one hundred feet, with a fifteen-foot bar to the left as you came in the door, then tables on either side. Beyond that was a small dance floor, with a gallery overhead for those who wanted to party and drink above the flow of customers, music, and hustlers. At the end of the room was the bandstand, and behind it a door that opened into a yard where prostitutes sat on benches in the summer, waiting to be called into action by a pair of code words: “walk one” meant there was a single john looking for action, while “walk two” signified that there was a duo ready to slump into what might be some polluted pudding.

The house band at the Reno was Count Basie and His Barons of Rhythm. With the exception of Carl “Tatti” Smith, a former member of the great Texas band led by Alphonso Trent, the musicians were the best of the warriors from the Kansas City–Oklahoma City battles of music, veterans of Bennie Moten's Orchestra and the Blue Devils: Oran “Hot Lips” Page and Joe Keyes, trumpets; Buster Smith, alto and clarinet; Lester Young, tenor; Jack Washington, baritone;
Walter Page, bass; Jo Jones, drums; and, on piano, Bill Basie himself. Basie led the band without ever mentioning it; his direction was clear from the moment he landed one of his unforgettable piano introductions—sometimes giddy, sometimes insinuating—and followed it with a series of hot, well-placed chords and riffs, provocatively fine stuff to build an improvised dream on. He and the band were
in there
, swinging all night, playing for the featured dancers, sailing and stomping along with the excruciatingly clear blues and the ballads sung by rotund Jimmy Rushing, taking breathers and laughing when the comedians were on, and waiting for the end of the job, when the jam sessions would start at the Reno, then move to the Subway or the Cherry Blossom.

During breaks, the band cooled it in the lot behind the club. Basie, Young, and Jones engaged in a lingo they had developed that no one else understood. Others nearby took nips, smoked cigarettes, wandered somewhere to light a reefer, joked with the whores, talked shop about their instruments—new refinements and mouthpieces—admired a suit, a pair of shoes, a tie, dreamed of futures in music, recalled some incident from the days of the Blue Devils or Bennie Moten. To younger musicians like Charlie Parker and Robert Simpson, Count Basie and His Barons of Rhythm were symbols of glamour and victory. Everything they did, no matter how simple, had the glow of authority. Those men had been around, had proven themselves out on the road and up on the bandstand. They made that lot and those benches, the cigarettes they smoked, the liquor they drank, the clothes they wore, the colognes they rubbed on, and the instruments they played all part of a myth turned radiantly active through their music, which they summoned into the air with consistent confidence.

Silent but observant, Charlie hung around the yard behind the club, his horn in a sack, his appetite staved off by chicken from one of the local chuck wagons. When his nerve was up, young Charlie would cadge a cigarette and stand off to the side with his hand in his pocket, one leg forward and bent a little, trying to give off the look of an older player swimming deeply but easefully in the nightlife. He spent many a night at the back door listening to the Basie rhythm section's superb introductions, to the blend of the saxophones, the stinging brass.

Blues was the lubricant that opened up the music. It let you get the feeling in.
Lips Page could speak blues words with his trumpet, chorus after chorus, covering the bell with his hand for more precision or with a glass to color each note with expression. Buster Smith rambled over his alto, quick and deceptive, then pushed forward moans that called up melody with a personal but clarion lyricism. Lester Young had an odd sound, part light, part dark, and could work his notes with the skill of a pitcher who could land the ball anywhere he wanted within the strike zone. Jack Washington's baritone was a dancing bull ever ready to bloody its horns. Often placing the blues in the foreground, sometimes letting it play in the shadows, edging the sound of a popular song, the band gave Charlie lesson after lesson. It was always graceful, easy in the rhythm, capable of cheek-to-cheek romance, a smoldering lope, or the running joy of an up-tempo celebration. Yet the celebration was always tempered by the shocks of the piano chords and the smacks of the drums, the odd yelp of a horn, the blue pinch that was always in the story, no matter its exuberance. Basie's music traced the roller-coaster fate of the human heart: rising high, falling low, singing, joking, sobbing, reminiscing, dreaming, cursing, bragging, praying. Everything was
in there
.

Charlie was simultaneously awed and inspired by what he heard. He came every chance he got, staying through the night when he wasn't working a gig of his own, or heading over immediately after he got off. Sometimes, he was found sleeping in the yard come early morning after the jam session was over, having succumbed to fatigue while listening. Eventually he became recognized as a regular, sometimes seen coming through the front door in the company of a young white piano player and sitting down before the band with his horn, as if he was hoping to be invited to play. Everyone knew who he was.

No one ever invited him to play.

The early-morning Reno jam session was the big time, and if you weren't ready, you didn't come expecting to do anything more than listen. It was highly competitive, a place to out-think, out-execute, and out-swing the opposition. This, as Ralph Ellison has pointed out, was the jazz musician's “true academy,” where the novice learned his trade, developed the ability to negotiate various materials, adjust to the beats of different rhythm sections, manipulate the harmonic demands of unfamiliar keys, and eventually take a position as one of the profes
sionals, a player whose individuality and flexibility combined for an artistic personality worthy of serious consideration.

Gene Ramey was there on the night in the summer of 1936 when Charlie Parker finally made it up onto the bandstand. The bassist had come to the Reno with Margaret “Countess” Johnson, a piano player and rival of Mary Lou Williams, who—with her almost roughhouse virtuosity, her intelligent compositions, and arrangements—became the extremely beautiful, dreamy-eyed brain trust of Andy Kirk and His Twelve Clouds of Joy. Ramey loved going to the Reno jam sessions to watch the masters at work, to see them demolish musicians from out of town, black or white, famous or not. Sometimes Ramey's mentor, Walter Page, would say to him, “Baby, come hold my bass.” Then Page would tell Basie to kick something off in the key of C, forcing the terrified Ramey to play. Then, afterward, Page would give Ramey pointers, explaining how to shift the flow of the beat, build tension, relax it, how to work under an improviser, spark him, seek an even beat to fit with the drums and fill the space between the drummer and the piano. Ramey took in everything Page said, but he was glad when he got off that bandstand. It was too hot up there, and those guys—if they had blood in their eyes—would run through the keys on you without mercy. “You'd have to be ready,” he said. “Because they're not going to wait and give you a chance to brush up on this thing.”

One of the most popular musical venues of the era was
The Original Amateur Hour
, a nationwide radio broadcast hosted by a music promoter known as Major Bowes. If you did well on Major Bowes's
Amateur Hour
, you got a prize; if not, however, they let you know by whacking a gong or ringing a bell—a gesture that got picked up and turned into verbal and musical slang in the jazz world of Pendergast's stronghold. “We got so in Kansas City that even if you were talking and you said something that I didn't believe,” recalled Ramey, “I would say, ‘Ring the bell.' That means I'm telling you that I think you're lying. And so we had that thing in playing. If a guy wasn't playing too much, or their beat was goofed up or something, you'd ring the bell.” At the Reno, Jo Jones would hit the bell of his cymbal—
ding, ding
—to tell a novice to back down and try on another night. It became a source of suspense: would you or wouldn't you get the bell?

And so it must have been for Charlie that night when he went up there with Gene Ramey and Countess Johnson looking up at him on that bandstand, where the blood of the vanquished flowed when drumstick hit cymbal. He was a skinny teenager with a horn held together with rubber bands and cellophane, and he was surrounded by men twice his age or more. They were merciless, and they didn't mind making you look like a fool. If you didn't know what you were doing, you might be force-fed a lesson that would make you sick to your stomach. No matter how much you had practiced, the only thing that would save you was functional knowledge. Things you practiced alone wouldn't necessarily work in the mobile situation of the improvising band, where coordinated call-and-response was all. But come soft praise and acceptance, or jeers and disgust, he was up there, and the only thing to do was play.

The instrument seemed heavier, the reed almost the size of a tongue depressor, the buttons on the keys slippery. He could feel his every breath, almost the flow of his blood, the indifferent presence of his nervous system. It was warmer on the bandstand, the lights and the shadows more intense. Everyone seemed to be staring at him, looking at no one else. What tune would they call? Would he know it? He knew he would know it. Would they give him any mercy? He didn't
need
any mercy. He'd listened to them plenty. He was sweating. Everyone was relaxed except him. They were smiling. Were they laughing at him already? His stomach was fluttering. It was hot up there. What tune would they call? He knew better than to suggest something. You didn't do that, not unless they asked. Why would they ask
him
? All he could do was wait, every sound in the club, every color, every smell more vivid than he had ever known. It was a long, long wait. Then they called the tune and he was in the middle of everything, the piano vamping in the song, the bass humming out the harmony, the drums setting a pulsation of metal and skin. He knew it! He knew the key, too. Charlie could hardly hold himself back. This evening he would get it right. This was it. Now was the time.

But it didn't come out that way. The boy wanted to blow, but instead he blew it. “Bird had gotten up there and got his meter turned around,” Ramey remembered. “When they got to the end of the thirty-two-bar chorus, he was in the second bar on that next chorus. Somehow or other he got ahead of himself or something. He had the right meter. He was with the groove all right, but he was
probably anxious to make it. Anyway, he couldn't get off. Jo Jones hit the bell corners—
ding
. Bird kept playing.
Ding. Ding.
Everybody was looking, and people were starting to say, ‘Get this cat off of here.'
Ding!
So finally, finally, Jo Jones pulled off the cymbal and said ‘
DING
' on the floor. Some would call it a crash, and they were right, a
DING
trying to pass itself as under a crash. Bird jumped, you know, and it startled him and he eased out of the solo. Everybody was screaming and laughing. The whole place.”

Humiliated once again, Charlie walked casually over to sit with Ramey and Countess Johnson, his face a mask of coolness fighting to hold back the frustration.

“You got ahead of them,” Johnson said to Charlie.

“Yeah, I got messed up. I just ran my cycles wrong, and I must have rushed it or something.”

“We've got to get with that,” said Ramey. “But above all, you've got to stop playing like you're so anxious, because if you're so anxious like that you're sure to get ahead of them.”

“It's all right. I'll be back.”

But Charlie Parker didn't come back—not for a long time, not until he was sure he would never be so wrong again.

SOMETIME DURING THAT
summer, Charlie later told John Jackson, he had a breakthrough. One night, as he was listening to Lester Young jamming at the Subway, he began to understand what the tenor saxophonist was doing, and he broke out into a cold sweat. From that point, Charlie Parker came under the sway of that tall, light-skinned man, who held his horn out to the side and pumped his ideas into the air of his usual job, at the Reno, and from there to the nation at large.

Born in Woodville, Mississippi, on August 27, 1909, Young was part of a cluster of Virgos who created the environment that inspired or supported Charlie, including Addie Parker (born on August 25), Buster Smith (August
24), and Chu Berry (September 13). In Kansas City, Young was the local demon, a handsome and easy-speaking man whose style was individual to the point of sedition. Not for him the brusque call of Coleman Hawkins, whose vibrato bristled gruffly against his tone. Hawkins had developed a distinctive, arpeggiated style after he heard the piano of Art Tatum and realized the breadth of harmonic color that broken chords could give to the saxophone. Though the thrust of Hawkins would rise into Young's music every great once in a while, he had something else going on in his mind; drawing on influences quite different from those Hawkins put together, he arrived at an approach that liberated the spirit of his imagination.

Young's attitude toward the tenor saxophone was an example of the democratic freedom artists took while on the aesthetic frontier of the 1920s, when everything American touched everything else, sticking or seeping in and inflecting the personal style of any musician who was talented and willing. Jazz musicians, like their counterparts in the other aesthetic arenas of the period, were working to develop a common language of technique and style that could serve as a vehicle for individual expression. Though the richest and most charismatic synthesis came from the Negro community, no one spent much time worrying where something came from if it worked as a compositional device, added tang to an arrangement, or showed you something about your horn. For all the regional pride that is so essential to the story of this country, no one seemed overly concerned where the raw material came from—the north, the south, the east, the west, the academy, the street, the social palaces, the ethnic provinces—as long as it sounded good.