Kansas City Lightning (24 page)

It was a shock to everyone. Pudgy and confident, Bennie Moten had been carried forward for years on the steam of pure gumption. By diligently pulling new talent into town, he had made himself essential to the Kansas City musical scene. Moten was a builder. Along the way he had grown his band from three pieces all the way up to a jazz orchestra, battling every band he could. His greatest victories had been pulling in old Walter Page himself and then stepping away from the piano to let Bill Basie get that rhythm going. He knew who belonged where. He wasn't just a damn paymaster; he was a leader with big dreams for his music and for his men.

There was no better symbol of what Kansas City was about than the sight of tack-sharp Bennie Moten and his musicians. Always exquisitely dressed, the bandleader could be either cheerful or as serious as an open straight razor. Moten always had his eye on the East; they'd fallen short on the first try, in 1932, but he planned to go after victory there one more time, one more once. Someday, he knew, Bennie Moten's Kansas City Orchestra was going to raise its flag on the musical hill of Manhattan. Under his leadership, the men in his orchestra would have followed.

But it wasn't to be. After Bennie's death, his nephew, Bus, tried to take over, but he wasn't the same kind of man as Bennie. Bus was too quick to anger, too argumentative; no one could get along with him. Everything fell apart quickly, ending any sort of Moten dynasty.

Buster Smith had gotten to know Kansas City as a Blue Devil, and his reputation for taste and craft made an impression. As Jay McShann said of him, “We all knew what we were saying when we called him Prof, and the people before us knew, too. It's just what the man should have been called. He was a professor. . . . He knew a lot of music and he knew how to write his music, and he wrote so great and he could
play
so great.” Trumpeter Orville Minor saw the same thing in Smith: “He wasn't a rough-edged guy. Any time you saw him, he was a tie-and-shirt man. He didn't talk a whole lot of foolishness and all that. Buster Smith was the kind of a man you would look up to. If you didn't, Prof could show you why you
should
look up to him.”

McShann recognized that Smith was one of those players who brought virtuoso skill to the blues. “Buster had a good bringing up. He played correct. He played piano correct, wasn't no wrong chords, and he played
good
. He played clarinet, he played all the saxophones, he played violin. Buster played bass. He was just one of those kinds of musicians.” Even early on, he displayed a proficiency that would be an obvious influence on Charlie Parker. “If you had a chance to hear Buster stretch out, it would have sounded something like what Bird did later on. It's just that Buster didn't care about stretching out. That guy was phenomenal. I think he was so much of a gentleman that he didn't really want to be bothered with what you had to go through to become a star. He knew what he could do.” And that was enough.

But there was also something cautious about Buster Smith, something that kept him in the background, away from the footlights. “He wasn't one to chase after anything. No, Prof just laid it back cool. You had to push him to find out what he could do.” After Moten's death, he teamed up with Bill Basie, at the Reno Club. When John Hammond came along to lure Basie's band back east, though, Buster opted out. Perhaps he was reluctant because of his experience with the Blue Devils, but just as likely it was because he knew how badly Moten's band had done on that eastern tour in '32. They made some great records in New Jersey during that tour—“Toby,” “Moten Swing,” “The Blue Room”—but as good as they were, those sides were cold comfort after the painfully heavy dues they paid along the way, plenty of rocks in their pathway. Plenty. By the end of the trip, they were reduced to eating a rabbit stew off a pool table. The road was fickle, success as fragile as those shellac discs. If two bands as strong as Moten's and the Blue Devils could run into such trouble, why should Basie expect anything more? Buster Smith was skeptical and stuck around Kansas City, safe and sound but ready for whatever came his way.

Orville Minor, who played with both Buster Smith and Charlie Parker, remembered seeing Buster at a jam session before Basie pulled up stakes and rolled on out. “One night Benny Goodman got his horn out and came up on the stand with Lester Young, Jo Jones, Herschel Evans, Buck Clayton at the Reno. Benny Goodman started playing—and that was a night when Buster chewed him up and spit him out! I think it was that John Hammond [who] brought him down there. Benny wanted to hear Basie because the white men knew that if you wanted to learn something you went down there to hear what those colored musicians have to say. He learned something that night. . . . He found out what a whole lot of people found out when they got to messing around in Kansas City. Benny Goodman found out how it felt when being a star didn't mean nothing. You needed to be more than that to stand up against that rough stuff they had for you in Kansas City.”

Buster Smith made short work of Goodman that night; he seemed to pop out of the ground with two guns of imagination, hungry for bear. “That night was the Buster Smith everybody respected. Prof was cool about what he could do, but when he got to doing it, he could start spinning and spitting that stuff out. He
could run a cyclone of fire up your butt.”

BY EARLY 1937
, Buster Smith had his own band going. He was working at the Antlers Club, in a section called the West Bottoms, right down on the state line, about a half a block from Kansas. The Antlers Club wasn't far from the stockyards; Swift, Armour, and Cudahy all had meatpacking plants nearby. The Antlers was owned by Bus Pasler, a slender man who “looked Jewish” to the musicians and never hired any white bands. “Colored people was right down his alley,” recalled one of the musicians who worked the Antlers in many different bands. “A white man couldn't get a job from Bus Pasler even if he was paying himself.”

Pasler's club was a beer joint, with one of the longest bars in Kansas City. There were stairs near the entrance that led up to the second floor, where the topsecret after-hours activities took place—but the Antlers didn't serve Negroes, and the musicians couldn't come in the front door. The bandstand was in the middle of the room, surrounded by some space for dancers and then tables that went to the wall.

They played from about nine o'clock to two in the morning, mostly for dancing. “We were playing a lot of things like ‘I Got Rhythm' and blues things mixed in with that,” Orville Minor remembered. “Prof wrote a tune called ‘Blues in D,' and it was a hard key to play but we were down there playing it. Things like ‘Liza' and whatever tunes the dancers liked best were what we were playing. That was for the regular customers. When they were gone, we did the other shows upstairs.”

The time Charlie spent in the Ozarks paid off. One evening, after his little job at Musser's was over, he took his horn down to the Tap Room, where his old buddy trumpeter Oliver Todd was leading a group. Charlie was in good spirits, laughing and joking, reminiscing about how Todd had split his wages with him when they worked together at Frankie and Johnny's and the owner wanted him fired for refusing to get a screw to fix his saxophone.
That was only a year ago, back when he was still being laughed off the bandstand at the Reno Club. But Charlie wasn't crying now. There was a new feeling of confidence in the way he stood, the way he pulled on a Camel cigarette, in the cast of his eyes and the feeling he had about music. Now Charlie wanted to play, and over the scowling protests of the band, Todd invited him up onto the bandstand after the break. It was about 11:30. Todd looked at his friend and asked him what he wanted to play. Charlie Parker chose “I Never Knew.”

The tempo kicked off. Everyone was looking at him, lying in wait and listening. It was warm up on that bandstand, invisible waves of red heat dominating the air. His shirt was beginning to stick to his chest and stomach. As the music floated into the air, Charlie took aim and played what he knew how to play. It might not have been a lot, but it was what he knew. He had struggled for it, and it was right.

That didn't change the hostility in the air. It was there, thick and hard as a mature oak, disdain not about to budge. This kid had him some nerve to step up there with them again, disrespecting the music with his ineptitude and his desire to be seen in the company of professionals. Todd was making a mistake, letting this guy come up there. He was nothing but a drag—a mutilator, not a musician. Charlie had to play through all that animosity if he was to stake his claim for some respect.

The only thing Charlie Parker had now was what he had learned, what he knew he knew, what the sweat and frustration had led to, how the time he'd spent playing had been shaped into the sound of a young saxophonist who clearly felt himself in the presence of his enemies. All he could do was play. He reached for what he knew and held on.

“Before the thing was over,” Todd said, “all the guys that had rejected him were sitting down with their mouths wide open. I had seen a miracle. I really had. It was something that made tears come down my face.”

P
laying with Buster Smith had been a dream of Charlie's since he'd started listening to the former Blue Devil's broadcasts out in the Ozarks with Clarence Davis. “When you got up there on the bandstand with Prof Smith, you knew you were somewhere,” Orville Minor recalled. At one point, Charlie passionately asked Oliver Todd, “Please get me in that groove,” meaning Smith's band. But the deal was actually sealed after the Ozarks job, later in 1937, when Smith heard Parker play. In effect, he got himself hired through the quality of his playing.

At that moment, Buster Smith was almost all Charlie cared about. He wouldn't allow his mind to set on anything else for very long. His mission was nearly sacred to him, and he went at his apprenticeship with the resolute intensity of one converted through revelation. Buster Smith knew that saxophone, and he wasn't afraid of it. There was something in his work that lay close to Roy Eldridge; it took on the instrument and made things come out no one expected. Smith's ideas turned corners at a fast clip, and his knowledge of the piano gave his chord structures solidity. There were also the distinctions that writing music gave his playing. The discontinuity that Ralph Ellison observed is also a way of thinking in more than one line at the same time, a way of creating something like a contrapuntal effect on a single-note instrument, playing one voice up here, answering
it with another down there, starting an idea at either end of the instrument and taking it all the way to the other extreme, sailing through the ballroom of the music with the audacity of those Oklahoma City dancers in Slaughter's Hall. All those effects—that internal dialogue, that contrapuntal effect— became basic to Charlie's mature style.

During his apprenticeship with Buster Smith, Charlie drew on everything in front of him. After putting in his time in the lower grades of learning, now he was in musical college, doing an independent study with a master who also allowed his student performing space right next to him. In Charlie, Smith found himself with a musical son. Wherever Smith was, Parker was sure to come. Charlie studied Smith's fingering, watched how his mouth worked when he was executing his passages. He listened for every element that connected one thing to another, asked questions about how to shade individual pitches, and worried over his tone. Smith even agreed to practice with Charlie. Master and apprentice sat down, saxophone to saxophone, playing through the lines and improvising on fast-paced pieces like “Dinah,” “Oh, Lady Be Good,” “Sweet Georgia Brown,” and “After You've Gone.” Parker stopped by to see Smith as he worked at the Antlers during the day, walking his stooped walk across the floor to join Smith as he worked out chord progressions on the piano.

For the musicians on his bandstand, Smith set an inspiring example. “He liked to sit down and play some chords and talk about things in the world,” Minor recalled. “He was an intelligent man. As a saxophone player, he was something. His technique was very good. Buster had the good sound of a lead alto, but he played like he had been schooled good somewhere. Buster was playing all of the modern changes, the chords the advanced people knew. You had to pay attention to him when he was playing.”

Smith took care to usher his young charges into the jazz fraternity. “Prof wrote notes big enough for you to read a block away,” Orville Minor remembered. And he extended himself to Charlie in particular, telling him how he, Lester Young, and Eddie Barefield used to study Frankie Trumbauer, listening to the recordings over and over. He told Charlie how impressed he'd been, in those early years, by the virtuosity of players like Jimmy Dorsey, with his control of
the alto saxophone and his ability to execute difficult passages. He was startled at how quickly Charlie picked up on what he was shown.

As Orville Minor remembered, Smith's protégé could be a playful troublemaker. Now and again Smith would admonish him—“Don't be practicing on my bandstand”—when Charlie started wiggling phrases on his horn between songs or tried to push something through a hole in an arrangement. “Charlie Parker was a guy who didn't like anything according to Hoyle, and if he could bend it, he would bend it quick. He was full of mischief and was one of those people hated a dull moment.” Yet with Smith he generally behaved himself. “Bird was under a microscope with Prof's band, because Prof was a real professional and didn't put up with something if it wasn't right. Buster Smith laid the law down, and Bird paid attention to it. He stayed on Bird's case every night. Buster was somebody he respected. You had to respect that man: he knew too much music, and when he wrote something, he meant for you to read it right and for you to come in when you were supposed to— no missing, no messing around.”