Kansas City Lightning (35 page)

The observant Fleet recognized that the saxophonist also felt alienated. “Bird seemed to have been disgusted with musicians who at first didn't particularly care for his playing. They didn't like him at first. Some of them thought he was playing wrong, and I imagine it was horn players who knew something about the instrument. But to me, whatever he was doing, he could do it well, and that made him ace with me. The thing that I loved about Bird is this: he wasn't one of those who's got to write something down, go home, study on it, and the next time we meet, we'll try it out. Anything that anyone did that Bird liked, when he found out what it was, he'd do it right away. Instantly. Only once on everything. Nearly everything that I did that he was interested in, I'd show him once—he had it.”

In particular, Fleet admired Charlie's dexterity. “He could do whatever he wanted to. He was with that horn. People talk about difficult fingerings and all that. There was no difficult fingering with Bird. Bird would blow it out of his horn—one, two, three, on the spot. Then he's got it; you don't have to go back over it. It's there forever. His main trouble when I met him, if it was any trouble, was ideas, because a lot of things that he wanted to do, he didn't know how to approach them harmonically. But once he found out . . .”

Charlie and Biddy were soon spending a lot of time together. In Biddy Fleet's company, Charlie Parker eased into another of the relationships that were so important to his development, getting with that one person who was either already doing what Charlie himself wanted to do or who was willing to join him in diligent pursuit. And as his time with Fleet took him further and further into the refinements and extensions of harmony, it also put Charlie in the company of a man who had similar interests outside of music.

Frank Wess remembers the guitarist as one of those rare people capable of fixing just about anything. “Biddy liked to figure out how mechanical things worked. He could take a light fixture apart and find out why the bulb wasn't working. Biddy was a bitch. He knew how to fix locks. Seemed like whatever it was, he could get it back together. . . . You could say he was a natural handyman, just had the mind for it. Something break and Biddy was around, you can bet if it wasn't broken for good, I mean almost completely destroyed, he
would get it back to working like it was supposed to. . . . The touch and the mind, he was born with it. It was a gift.”

In Biddy Fleet, then, Charlie Parker had a buddy in New York with whom he could trade notes on the technological innovations and developments that were multiplying in the modern age—innovations designed to intensify industrial productivity; improve the speed and quality of aviation; make automobile travel safer, faster, and more luxurious; allow cinematographers to capture human skin tones and the colors of the world on film; and shift Americans toward an ever more comfortable life through the magic of home appliances, like the telephone.

That intellectual camaraderie gave the saxophonist another avenue of comfort as his studies deepened and his ambition broadened. Charlie's own skill at repairing various devices—which he would later put to memorable use when traveling with bands— may first have been picked up from Biddy Fleet and then enhanced by his own digital genius for feeling out the subtleties of balance, weight, and functional rhythm in things mechanical.

Neither of the two was in the musicians union, which meant they did their playing in the underground of jam sessions. They developed a body of songs that were harmonically challenging. “We would work on things like ‘All God's Chillun Got Rhythm'—that had some funny changes in the bridge—and songs like ‘Get Happy' or ‘Nice Work If You Can Get It,' ” Fleet said. “See, all of those difficult tunes was what we worked on mostly. Tunes that had been shunned by a lot of guys. A lot of good musicians just didn't care to play those tunes. We worked on ‘Cherokee.' That was purposely shunned by most of the musicians because of the bridge.” Those “difficult tunes” also had a way of separating the wheat from the chaff, Fleet recalled. “You can use those hard tunes to get rid of the guys who can only play the blues all night. They can't mess with that stuff, and then you can keep right along working on what you want to get deeper into.”

The world Biddy Fleet and Charlie Parker traveled together was no more than fifteen blocks wide. At the far end of their night travels, they might walk up the hill on 145th Street to a place on the corner of Saint Nicholas Avenue, then move on down to Dan Wall's, and end up at Clark Monroe's, where they might hang out until late enough in the morning for
Charlie to go into Buster Smith's place and get some sleep. He had to wait until Buster's wife had left for work. Then he could get some sleep. That was about the only steadfast rule in the Smith household.

Sometimes Charlie spent time at Fleet's apartment, on 130th Street and Lenox Avenue. Then, when Fleet moved to the Park View Hotel on the corner of 110th and Lenox, “Bird used to come down there all the time. And that's how some of my family met Bird, and they thought he was a jolly type of fellow to be so great. However, I didn't see him as that great. I saw him as different.”

During that period, Charlie had also started listening closely to alto saxophonist “Red” Rudy Williams, who held down a chair with the mighty Savoy Sultans, a unit notorious for its relentless ability to swing. On any given night, Charlie might ignore the radio until the Sultans came on. As Williams's alto sound surged out of the speaker, he would exclaim, “There's
Red Rudy
!” The guitarist was surprised: Williams was a straightforward player, nowhere near as adventurous as Charlie was, or wanted to be. But Charlie was starting to feel conflicted about his musical direction. He knew he wanted to play the different things he was hearing in his head, but he was also becoming dismayed and intimidated by the reception he got when he played in public—especially at Monroe's. As Fleet remembered, “Bird would take his horn and go up to the mike or go out under the spot and play and play and play. But when he finished playing, the audience that used to applaud the different guys, you'd see one look at the other as if, ‘Well, he's finished. Who else is going to blow?' No applause, not any at all.”

Charlie took the blank stares personally. “Bird was hurt by the reception he got. Bird wanted to be liked. Everybody wants to be liked. No one wants to just be treated cold and nasty. But what Bird didn't quite understand then is that if you're going to try to please the public, you will never play your horn. I would say to him, ‘You're doing all right. Don't worry about it. Don't worry about what people think.' ”

Fleet did his best to pump up his new friend's confidence, but there were other musicians around him, too, and he felt equal pressure to respond to what they were telling him. Those other Harlem musicians were rock steady in their visions of jazz. They didn't like his sound, or what he was playing, and they were starting to get up in his face about it. As far as they were concerned, he needed to
change his direction and get with the regular alto saxophone program as they knew it. He needed to slow down all those lickety-split passages, to stop playing those funny notes that didn't add up to a goddam thing.

“Sometimes I wonder if I should play like Rudy Williams,” Charlie mused to Biddy Fleet.

Whatever conflicts he may have felt in such moments of weakness, though, when Charlie actually pulled out his horn he willfully became even more resolute. By now he was infusing his improvised lines with the harmonic connections he learned from Biddy Fleet, enhancing the lonely boy cry of his Kansas City blues with an effective intellectual detail. His playing grew fresher and fresher, merging the primitive and the sophisticated in a way that matched many of the other artistic triumphs of the modern age. Filmmaker Jean Renoir thought that combining was central to the age; he would have enjoyed talking with jazz artists who could articulate the meaning of how their art had evolved.

Neither Charlie nor Biddy Fleet always knew the academic names for the harmonies they were playing, or for the spontaneous variations they were playing through them—a fact that would later convince some musicians who got close to Charlie that he was a kind of idiot savant, unaware of the ingredients of his art, manipulating them merely through intuition. Those people had it wrong. In truth, Biddy and Charlie were following their ears but in a very systematic fashion. They moved through their music note by note, increasing their technical command in much the same way that apprentice mechanics learn the workings of automobiles by lying under them for hours and learning part by part how the engines and transmissions are put together and what makes them function.

In particular, these two young musicians were following Biddy's yearning to give his harmonies more color, adding notes that dressed up the chords so they weren't “naked,” as he said. By this point Charlie had learned the chords that were at the basis of his improvisations, but he would still have had to sit down to work out the specifics of how to work with those harmonies—a kind of analysis that was by no means beyond his capacity but that was happening very much on the fly. Charlie the progenitor was a man in a hurry, an authoritative player who threw out answers, right or wrong, with equal authority, and then went about his
business, even his mistakes enlarging the enigma that surrounded him.

BIDDY FLEET ALSO
noticed certain things about Charlie besides his determination to master his music. Beyond his joviality and his curiosity about all those newfangled tools and products, his young friend from Kansas City could also be surprisingly bold at unexpected times. Charlie might suddenly drop his shy western boy reserve and walk up to a woman he didn't know and begin a conversation with her. Those he approached weren't the typical young women hanging around in a joint, keen to make the most of a potential thrill at close quarters; they might be a little older, spotted on the street or alone in the hall of Fleet's apartment house. Somehow, whether it led anywhere or not, Charlie could get a woman to talk with him, not to ignore his unexpected advance, even smile at something he said. Once in a while, they even agreed to come hear him play.

One of the most mysterious things about Charlie during this period is that he seems to have had his drug addiction under control. No one remembers seeing him slip into the wild mire of theft, frustration, and disappearance that went with that old habit. He smoked his Camels, had a little wine or beer, and kept his head clear. The music was all he had serious time for. Now and then he took a menial job to make some pocket money, sweeping up nightclubs or washing dishes. It didn't matter to him as long as the job didn't get in the way of what he was working on. He spent his nights improvising on his horn, grabbing a few hours' sleep before reporting for work, or staying up if he was due at work early in the morning.

At some point, Biddy Fleet got a job working downtown in Greenwich Village, at a club called the Swing Rendezvous at 117 MacDougal Street. Charlie never came down to see him, but after Fleet got off work and took the train uptown to jam at Dan Wall's or Monroe's, the two would usually meet up, Charlie walking that Kansas City Vine Street way, digging into the floor, pulling Buster's alto out of its case. One of those who saw Charlie play uptown in those days was Ben Webster, the great tenor saxophonist who would gain his fame with Duke
Ellington. A big, handsome man, Indian-looking, known to rumble when he got too far into his cups, Webster almost swallowed the mouthpiece when he played, pushing it so far past his embouchure that his lip almost met the screw holding the reed in place. The tone his bulky frame could push through the tenor was elephantine, but he was beginning to put a smoothness to the other side of his shouting and growling style, alternating his pugnacious swing with a lyric, dreamlike whisper that could float the distance of a city block.

Webster was also from Kansas City, but, to Fleet at least, he didn't seem to respond to Charlie's playing. “Ben couldn't hear Bird at first. You can tell without a person saying a word: they're looking at you and wondering what you're going to do next, or why did you do what you are doing, or do you know what you're doing. . . . I could see that in the faces of a lot of musicians.”

Whether or not Fleet was reading Webster's reaction correctly, the very fact that he noticed Charlie was meaningful. Many of the musicians who worked in the upper echelon bands of the jazz world were also volunteer scouts on the lookout for new talent. One morning, after they finished playing, Fleet walked Charlie up to his dishwashing job at Jimmy's Chicken Shack, on the hilly part of 145th Street at Saint Nicholas. Charlie told him, “I'm trying to decide if I should go to an audition for Duke Ellington's band this morning.” Fleet, who knew little of the New York circles Charlie traveled through when the two of them weren't together, was caught off guard by the news.

Such an audition probably wouldn't have been for a permanent seat; Ellington's alto players of that period, Johnny Hodges and Otto Hardwick, would remain in place until 1946. But every band has a moment when a regular member becomes ill, mysteriously wanders off for a short period, or has pressing personal business that briefly takes him away from music. Anyway, Biddy wasn't that interested in big bands; few of them used guitarists in any kind of featured role, Charlie Christian's sublime place with Benny Goodman being the rare exception.

“I'm supposed to go,” Charlie finally said, “but I'm not.” Then he spent the rest of the morning scraping the leavings of the previous night's meals from the plates amd watching the clock tick past his first opportunity to move from obscu
rity into the highest side of the Negro big time.

Why would Charlie Parker pass up an opportunity to join Duke Ellington's band? In both artistry and public attention, no one exceeded Ellington. Yet that doesn't seem to have tempted Charlie. If his claim about the audition was true—if he wasn't just making it up to impress Biddy Fleet as he was wont to do now and then to elevate his image—Charlie may just have had a difficult time imagining how what he was mining out of his imagination, his horn, and his studies with Fleet could have been compatible with the language of Ellington's improvisers. And given his sensitivity, if he were rejected by a body of musicians so universally admired, it could have wounded him as deeply as he'd been back at that Kansas City jam session when he stumbled through “Body and Soul,” with Jo Jones throwing a cymbal on the floor in exasperation and disgust.