Kansas City Lightning (36 page)

Charlie may have feared having to answer the exquisite tone of Johnny Hodges with his own, more strident sound, which had come under so much criticism from those New York Negroes. He may also have realized that his music would demand more improvising leeway than he was likely to get in a jazz orchestra so filled with star soloists. And he would have known that touring with Ellington would have meant parting with Biddy Fleet, the one player who was totally sympathetic to his musical research, giving him support he couldn't find among other musicians. Whatever the reason, Biddy himself was startled when he realized that Charlie had skipped the appointment. “The average musician would say, ‘Man, I'd like to play with Duke!' ” he chuckled years later.

After Charlie finished his work at Jimmy's, the two men walked over to 135th Street and Lenox and eased into a place on the corner where they could get a mug of root beer and a hamburger for seven cents. Charlie seemed as relaxed as ever, talking about the music they'd played the night before, at home in their two-man homemade laboratory of discussion, practice, and performance.

AT SOME POINT
during this period, Charlie moved out of Buster Smith's apartment. He started hanging out at the Woodside Hotel, where the liveliness and variety of the New York jazz scene always put an exciting spin on things. He
didn't actually have a room—he was just floating around—but a bright and well-trained piano player named Rozelle Claxton, who knew Charlie from Kansas City, introduced him to his fellow members of the touring Ernie Fields band; thereafter, Charlie was able to bum a place on the floor, on a couch, or in a chair. (“Carrying the stick,” they called it.)

Living in the Woodside gave him another chance to move further into that aspect of the city, just as he was doing in the after-hours world of jam sessions, even in the menial restaurant and nightclub jobs that gave him a more thorough sense of how things worked: how professional cooks got ready for business; how memory was everything when it came to being a good waiter or waitress; how, no matter how good the night in a restaurant might be, an evening of fat tips and receipts also meant the filth and the disorder of dirty dishes, bathrooms, and floors after the doors were closed and all the customers had gone home. Some were hired because they were willing: standing up to the mess made them essential. No good room could make it without them. Charlie's father had embodied the truth that the luxury of good service was nothing to be ashamed of; for a busboy, the end of a shift—with all external filth removed—was an unnoticed sunrise of pride.

Trumpeter Jerry Lloyd told Robert Reisner that he met Charlie through fellow trumpeter Benny Harris while the saxophonist was staying at the Woodside. Lloyd took his new friend to jam at MacDougal's Tavern down in the Village. “I got Bird one of his first jobs in New York,” Lloyd recalled. “He was desperate. Some days he'd go without eating. I got him a job in a joint called the Parisien Dance Hall.” It was a taxi-dance establishment.

Decades later, Claxton laughed loudly as he remembered how people's opinions of Charlie changed when they heard him play. “One time he asked one of Ernie Fields's alto men to let him play his horn. . . . So the guy let him play his horn, and he was shocked because Parker played so much stuff! Maybe he didn't have anywhere to stay, but I mean he knew how to play alto saxophone! . . . Man, that horn had never been played like that before!”

Claxton's recollections reveal much about how information moved from place to place, musician to musician, in those days. Born in 1913 in Bartlett, Tennessee, near Memphis, he was one of eight children from a highly musical family. His mother and father played by ear, but the Claxtons made sure that their four boys and four girls learned music formally. The Claxton children all played and sang in the choir at First Baptist Bartlett, where Rozelle's parents were deacon and deaconess. For six years Rozelle studied concert piano under three different teachers.

He described his most important instructor:

Woodruff also taught Claxton how to use minor seventh and dominant seventh chords and their harmonic extensions:

Woodruff's ear was so good that when she heard a device Art Tatum used—modulating up a half step, then resolving his improvisation back into the original key—she taught that to Claxton as well. After performing under Jimmie Lunceford at Manassas High School, Claxton went to Kansas City in 1933, where he worked with the band of Clarence Davis, the trumpeter who played and roomed in the Ozarks with Charlie Parker. At one point, W. C. Handy used Davis's group when he came through Kansas City, and encouraged Claxton to leave for New York. Young, dumb, and plumb in love with a local girl, Claxton remained.

Claxton met Charlie Parker in one of those 1937 jam sessions when things were changing. The two worked together in Harlan Leonard's band not long before Charlie finally hoboed the hell out of there. During one session, somewhere in 1938, Claxton used Tatum's shrewd technique. “How do you do that?” Charlie asked, his eyes gleaming in wonder. “Would you please do that again?” Claxton taught him how it worked, and before long the half-step shift became a permanent tool in Charlie's approach.

Now, in the summer of 1939, the two were reunited in New York—Claxton an employed professional, Charlie still a scuffling vagabond looking for his niche. Charlie told Claxton about the musicians in New York who impressed him, young guys who were getting it together in the Harlem sessions. They talked about the hierarchy among piano players: Tatum first, of course, though Charlie was just as interested in Teddy Wilson, who was influencing many Manhattan piano players. But Charlie's greatest admiration was reserved for the saxophone players: first Lester Young, then Ben Webster and Herschel Evans, Basie's other tenor man.

When Charlie left the Woodside, he found himself a place downtown in the Stuyvesant High School area, renting a space where he could sleep and practice. Whose horn he had or how he got it is a mystery. The son of the woman who was his landlord recalled to jazz scholar Phil Schaap that Charlie gave his name as Charles Christopher Parker, an expansion that Rebecca Parker had never heard
from Charlie or his mother. (The affectation may have been a way of saluting his lineage: Christopher was the middle name of his grandfather on his father's side, Peter Parker.) He got a job washing dishes in the Stuyvesant area but did all of his playing uptown, gradually turning ears in his direction.

By late 1939, Charlie was playing with more confidence. There is some mythic talk that, while working at Jimmy's Chicken Shack, he listened at close range to Art Tatum, the harmonic grand master of jazz and the most startling virtuoso the music ever produced, who had a long engagement there. Biddy Fleet never heard Charlie mention studying Tatum in person, but like every player familiar with the pianist, they were both in awe of Tatum's approach: his unusual impositions and resolutions of harmony, his complex conception and sparkling execution.

Tatum had astonishing rhythmic imagination, perfect time, and absolute swing. His playing combined the digital fluidity of European masters like Liszt and Chopin, the honky-tonk and barrelhouse line that led to ragtime, and the hotel and cocktail sound of sentimental ditties and Tin Pan Alley standards. In his book
Stomping the Blues
, Albert Murray observed that jazz musicians used Tin Pan Alley as a kind of folk source, and that idea was never better illustrated than in Art Tatum's playing. He remade popular songs into miniature American concerti, arrived at through a style built upon Earl Hines and the Harlem kings of stride such as James P. Johnson, Fats Waller, and Willie “The Lion” Smith. Given Charlie's appetite for fresh approaches, if the alto saxophonist had been lucky enough to watch Tatum in action nightly at Jimmy's Chicken Shack, Biddy Fleet would surely have heard all about it.

Another player casting a large shadow in New York at the time was Coleman Hawkins, who'd just returned to the States after five years abroad, where he had lived the life of a celebrity unencumbered by race. Across the water he did what was not always possible in the United States. Yes: driving fast cars, skiing, and coupling up with pretty women, no matter what hair textures or skin colors were involved. Slick and strong enough for whatever New York had to offer, Hawkins was out to reclaim his title as the king of the tenor saxophone from innovative upstarts like Chu Berry and Lester Young, that tall yellow demon who had perpetually bested him during a December 1933 jam session at the Cherry Blossom
with his light, melodic fluidity, sailing up as he extemporized. But that was then and that was all right: this returning innovator, the man who had given the tenor saxophone its position in jazz, had something for them,
all of them.

On October 11, 1939, Hawkins recorded a version of “Body and Soul” that succeeded in simultaneously rattling and inspiring his fellow musicians. To the surprise of everyone—and despite the fact that Hawkins never quite stated the tune's familiar melody—the recording became a big hit, the force of his saxophone line making an enormous impact without ever resorting to familiarity, gimmicks, or simplification. In one three-minute recording, Hawkins had given his horn a wholly new identity, drawing on Art Tatum's sophisticated arpeggiation but repurposing it in the service of his own frontier mind.

“Body and Soul” was the talk of the town. It was one of those marvelously odd moments in American aesthetic history, a burst of complex invention that managed to capture the public imagination. It was everywhere—on record and on the radio, crooning triumphantly through windows, walls, and doorways all over Harlem. And it was a subject of ongoing analysis among musicians, who argued fiercely over whether Hawkins was gaining new ground or leading them all into a bog of inaccuracy.

None of this was lost on Charlie Parker. The style he was in the midst of forging, through constant practice and contemplation, certainly drew on Hawkins and Tatum, as well as Lester Young, Buster Smith, Chu Berry, and Roy Eldridge. Yet it went beyond the fusion of such different influences: the sharp edge of his sound, his bubbling rhythmic intensity, and the aggressive velocity of his technique conspired to create something fresh that was inspiring talk very different from when he'd first arrived in Harlem. He was starting to get work on bandstands—paying jobs!—and to attract a tight circle of younger musicians who recognized that there was something to what he was doing. Charlie Parker was starting to get with the groove of New York, and the Big Apple was beginning to get with him. It was peeling pleasantly, sweet and tasty. His dream was closer than ever.

IN THE SPRING
of 1940, a young trumpeter named Joe Wilder traveled down to An
napolis, Maryland, with a band from Philadelphia called the Harlem Dictators. Annapolis was on the circuit then, and people from Washington, DC, and Baltimore would go there to hear the bands at two hotels, the Washington and the Wright. The crowds were thick, and sometimes you might see a handful of white people out there listening or dancing, but the dominant ethnicity by far was Negro American. Wilder was on vacation from Philadelphia's Mastbaum School, a home to other players, including clarinetist Buddy DeFranco and trumpeter Red Rodney. Years later he couldn't recall which hotel his band worked in, but he remembered that Pearl Bailey was also on the bill, singing and doing comedy, though still unknown to the greater world.

During the day, the musicians would get together and jam. Wilder went to one of the sessions and learned that the musicians working the other hotel were employed by a showman known as Banjo Burney Robinson, as part of a large revue of singers, dancers, and instrumentalists. Burney was about the size of Count Basie, but his reputation was far different: Burney was known for taking revues out on the road from New York, paying everyone in full the first week, coming up with half the money and a story the second week, and then disappearing with all the money at the end of the third week. (Biddy Fleet had a trick for getting even with those kinds of bandleaders: he would steal the sheet music for the first-chair parts from the saxophone, trumpet, and trombone books—leaving no one to play the melody and thus making it virtually impossible for the band to play the arrangements.) For the moment, though, things were looking good in Annapolis. Banjo Burney had uniforms for his instrumentalists and costumes for the singers and dancers. It was a very professional-looking outfit. And one of the guys in his band was Charlie Parker.

When Joe Wilder first encountered Charlie, he was struck by the way the young man played the saxophone: thrusting the horn straight out, not holding it to the side or with any of the posing associated with the big boys of the instrument. No visual sauce, no extras, just a deadpan stare that earned him the nickname “Indian.” He “reminded [them of] the cigar store Indians that you used to see in front of the tobacco shops . . . because he held it right in front of him and he had features somewhat like an Indian.”