Kansas City Lightning (19 page)

As a result, the aesthetic parentage of early jazz was as complex as the miscegenated identity of the flesh-and-blood culture. Musically speaking, an artist could have a Negro father, a white mother, a Negro sister, a white brother, and cousins who were Christian, Jewish, Indian, Italian, Irish, and so on. The phonograph was particularly important in closing the gaps among regions and races, and a number of Negro saxophonists—like Young's early running buddy, Eddie Barefield, and Buster Smith, his fellow Blue Devil—listened closely to the recordings of Frankie Trumbauer and Jimmy Dorsey, each an important figure during the pioneer days of reed
mastery. This was one of the first moments since the advent of printed books—and, later, newspapers—when a new technology offered a wide audience equal access to information. Logic, sensibility, and technical skill took precedence over social or racial differences.

Lester Young—a light-skinned Negro—took the smooth tone of the C-melody saxophone as played by Trumbauer—a white man with Cherokee blood—and remade it into a sound of deceptive understatement. Himself a dreamer, Young heard in Trumbauer something kindred to his own preference for a world of romantic fantasy and joyous humor. Yet that wasn't enough for Red Young either. He took Trumbauer's high-minded timbre and used it to serve up the low-down options of the blues. Fusing that tonal color with his greatest influence—the floating swing and melodic logic of the most liberated and daring Louis Armstrong—the tenor man with the light sound gave birth to an approach of chameleon plasticity and cool elegance. Stubbornly unique, Young was a melodist partial to shock effects: sudden descents into the lower register; repeated single notes given melodic variety through alternate fingerings that switched around timbres; slithering ideas that arrived in phrases of unpredictable lengths; maneuverings of tonal color for drama; rhythms that jumped inside the beat or held it at bay to create exquisite tension, until the suspense was released with a sweep of lyric defiance or jest or dreaminess, often bowing out with a muffled howl of ambivalent passion.

Young had plenty of road dust in his memory by the time he became the central saxophonist in Kansas City. Reared in Algiers, on the West Bank in New Orleans, he had heard jazz when it wasn't yet twenty years old, listening to the street bands as he passed out leaflets for upcoming appearances. His father, Willis, led the Young Family Band, with Lester playing drums before he switched over to saxophone. They traveled through the South and through the Dakotas, Kansas, Minnesota, and Montana, performing with circuses, on fairgrounds, at dances. The repertoire was popular songs, waltzes, jazz tunes, and blues. Even in short pants Lester was a musical battler: one veteran remembered him bloodying an equally young Louis Jordan, and another saw him jump up on a bandstand to show up a cousin, who had to be restrained from leaving bruises
on his young antagonist.

In 1928, Young joined Art Bronson's Bostonians. He started on alto but went to tenor, he later claimed, because the band's regular tenor player was always holding up the band by taking his sweet time before a mirror, primping almost to prissiness while souring everyone else to the edge of murder. The deeper and broader voice of the tenor immediately appealed to Young, and the style he'd been cultivating—one rooted in swift execution—became an alternately startling and mellow approach on the throatier tenor horn, one wielded so inventively that Young baffled almost all comers in jam sessions, their dreams smothered with transcendently songlike passages the whores called “silky saxophone.” His tone replaced the conventional vibrato with a sound like a light streak; a sense of rhythm that stuttered, balked, and swooped unexpectedly; and a decidedly melodic imagination.

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Young divided his time between Minneapolis and Kansas City, playing briefly with Walter Page's Blue Devils, King Oliver's band, and, briefly, Count Basie's first band. He was often seen roaming the streets of Kansas City, long after dawn broke, in the company of fellow tenor saxophonists Ben Webster and Dick Wilson. Carrying their instruments like rifles—the necks crooked over their shoulders, the body held in one hand—they were constantly on the lookout for another place to go and do battle with their musical imaginations, blowing to goad and challenge, inspire and devastate. There was only one rule: however hot and sparkling one of the others played might be, you couldn't imitate it. You had to find a way to make it a part of your own identity.

John Hammond heard Young in 1934, when the jam session demon came east to replace Coleman Hawkins in Fletcher Henderson's band; the producer sang Young's praises to Henderson, but the saxophonist was rejected by his fellow band members, none of whom seem to have recognized that his style represented a new—and extremely good—development in the horn's power to project feeling. Henderson, brilliant and well aware of Young's talent, wasn't strong enough to back the tenor saxophonist against the protests of his musicians and those of his wife, who got the new man out of bed every morning and played Coleman Hawkins records for him, hoping to remedy what she
considered the repulsive lightness of his sound. Henderson was said to have tears in his eyes as he reluctantly agreed to push Red out of his band, but even as he did, he insisted to his bandsmen that the tall, yellow, soft-spoken tenor player was the best musician among them.

Young returned to the Southwest, to Andy Kirk's band and then back to Basie's, dejected but still in possession of his individuality, uncompromised and ever ready to speak and swing his piece in his own way. He quickly became the lead demon among the Kansas City musicians, one of the warriors who lay in wait for traveling jazzmen to appear in town expecting to get through a jam session without losing slices of scalp and butt to the locals. Young's position was determined by the steadiness of his imagination. The longer he played, the better he sounded. His ideas didn't stop. They were fresh and aesthetically waterproof. Lester Young was not a man successfully pissed on; he'd cut your head for trying.

As the mystery of Young's style began to reveal itself to Charlie Parker, he began to conceive a new set of goals for himself. Not only would he have to get command of harmony and tempo, he would also have to reach for the level of fluid expertise Young exhibited night after night, jam session after jam session. Charlie couldn't quite have broken through the code of Young's playing just by listening to him on bandstands—he would certainly have known the tenor player's records with Count Basie—but he would have recognized the older player's taste for long melodic lines, the linear inventions that gave lyric quality to his playing. The shape of Lester Young's playing would have a formative effect on Charlie Parker's work.

In its own swinging way, Young's style was a compelling saxophone variation on the legendary improvisations of Louis Armstrong, recordings Parker had been hearing coming out of windows all over his neighborhood since childhood. Those Armstrong records formed an accumulative epic of the imagination; musicians thrived on their ideas, lifting them for their own improvised features, slipping phrases into their arrangements, and emulating their rhythms in order to arrive at the nub of swing.

Eddie Barefield, who worked with Young as part of a two-saxophone band, recalled how profoundly those three-minute recordings could inspire even the
most idiosyncratic musicians. Barefield and Young traveled around the Midwest playing dances, with one of them improvising while the other sat nearby, keeping time and stomping out the rhythm. Many have noted how much Lester Young absorbed from Bix Beiderbecke and Frankie Trumbauer, but Barefield remembered that something else was just as important to his partner: Young had learned the Armstrong improvisations from the Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings of the twenties, and he was also taken by the melodic majesty of the records Armstrong made in the 1930s, when he started expanding the jazz repertoire by appropriating Broadway tunes. Charlie Parker may not have recognized Young's connection to Armstrong's work, but he certainly noticed the rhythmic fluidity of Young's tenor.

After a Halloween dance in 1936, Count Basie and his band left Kansas City on a series of jobs that would lead them, permanently, to New York. Their time as regulars in the sin-for-sale kingdom of Pendergast was over. It was a turning point for Charlie Parker: no longer could the young saxophonist listen to his idol on the bandstand at the Reno Club or in those relaxed but electric after-hours jam sessions, picking up a scrap of music here, a scrap of music there. He would never have the moment of direct communion that fellow saxophonist Frank Wess did a few years later in Washington, DC, when he and a buddy went to Young's hotel to pay their respects—and were called up to his room, where the tenor saxophonist greeted them in his long underwear, hat atop his head, cigarette case filled with reefers, and his horn out. As the young musicians sat rapt before him, Lester Young shared a lifetime's worth of lessons: alternate fingerings, breathing techniques, advice on tone production, the great man a light-skinned oracle right before them.

No, none of that for young Charlie. His unrequited apprenticeship ended when Basie took Pres off to New York City. He would have to find another mentor.

A
round this time, Charlie Parker secured a place in another Kansas City group. Trumpeter Clarence Davis—who would later run an after-hours situation in his home, complete with whiskey and gambling—was a running buddy of his at the time. “When I first heard Charlie Parker, we were both working in a WPA band,” he recalled. “He had got a union card through old man Simpson, Robert Simpson's father, who also played the trombone.” For Charlie and Clarence, any gig was welcome. “But since it was a government band, the money would stop and go. They'd have a contract for so much time, and you played, then you'd be off. It was unpredictable.”

In the fall of 1936, Charlie and Clarence headed east from Kansas City with the band to play at a club called Musser's Ozark Tavern, part of a resort complex owned by Clarence Musser, whom Davis called
“
one of Pendergast's henchmen.” The tavern was “a drive-in thing,” he recalled. “They had little castles where you go to fuck, and [they had] a tavern or something in the middle of it.”

The band was slated to play Thanksgiving, and it was snowing. “The car that Charlie Parker was riding in was behind us,” Davis recalled. “I was riding with Musser in a Cadillac, and the bass fiddle player had a little old Chevrolet following us. We hit a little spot of ice, and the car slid like crazy. I looked back and I said, ‘I sure hope they don't put on brakes.' Just as I said that, the car
hit that ice and did a tumbling thing. That car rolled over like a toy and rolled up an embankment.”

It was a bad accident. “Charlie Parker broke his ribs and broke his saxophone up. Another guy, Ernest Daniels, he busted his drums all up and broke his ribs.” But the worst of it was reserved for the bass player and bandleader, George Wilkerson. “That guy that owned the bass fiddle, the neck was laying across his head; he was asleep. Just broke his neck and killed him.”

The mess was cleaned up, courtesy of the Kansas City machine. “Old man Musser gave us all a couple of hundred dollars, paid for this guy's burial, paid for his car, give his wife a car, and made the insurance company give everybody two or three hundred dollars, too. . . . Pendergast was in power then, and they could bend things the way they wanted them bent. It was a lot of money to us, but wasn't nothing to them.”

Rebecca heard about the accident when the hospital called, and soon Charlie was home again with his ribs taped up. That was when he started sleeping with her again upstairs. He sat up at home all the time, smoking some stuff she found in a bag. Smelled like burnt bacon. Rebecca didn't want none of that. He could have it. But he was back, and they were in love . . . and as soon as he got better—thanks to the attentions she and Addie and Marie and Hattie Lee were lavishing upon him—he was back up and out the door, off to play that music.

Charlie and Clarence Davis worked Ozarks jobs all winter. “We had a nice little swing band,” Davis recalled. “Nothing but a small combination. Me on trumpet, Charlie, Ernest Daniels, a woman piano player who was an older person, and a bass player. When we come back after the accident, Musser bought us a big old seven-passenger car to go back and forth from Kansas City to Eldon, Missouri, on the weekends, which is when we worked. We played from eight o'clock to about eleven or twelve, dependent on how many people were there.

“We had everything we wanted down there, beds to sleep in, a stove, plenty of food. We didn't want for nothing. We slept in one room, in bunks. The woman played piano slept in a room by herself.” Whatever Charlie was smoking back at home with Rebecca, in the Ozarks he seemed to be living clean. “Charlie couldn't have been on that stuff then because there wasn't no way he could get it.
That had to be later, after we come back from there.” Even to a friend like Clarence Davis, he was something of a cipher. “Charlie was very quiet, didn't have nothing to say at no time, unless you were very close to him. He was never talkative or nothing. Only time he talked was when he picked up his horn.”

IT WAS EARLY
afternoon on Monday, April 6, 1937, and the sun was still high in the sky of Kansas City, Missouri. Charlie Parker's new alto saxophone was in the soft blue terrycloth drawstring bag, downstairs on the piano bench in the parlor, next to his mother's room, where he always left it. In a few hours he would be walking up the street to get a ride back to the Ozarks, where he worked from Monday through Friday night. But at that moment Charlie Parker was climbing the stairs to see his wife of nine months. She was slim, golden and beautiful, with long, heavy brown hair, her still-adolescent but maturing features enriched by a heritage that was part British, part Indian, and part American Negro.