Kansas City Lightning (38 page)

What Charlie did with himself after Rebecca refused to leave her mother's home is very clear. He went right back into Addie Parker's house, no longer a boy but a young man who had traveled and had an even stronger sense of what he wanted to do. Perhaps seduced by the comfort of 1516 Olive, Charlie didn't go back to New York, not right away. There in his mother's house he didn't have to worry about clothes, food, paying to get his saxophone fixed, cab fare—anything. All he had to do was walk through that door and he was the crown prince of the kingdom.

But that didn't mean that he had changed his ways. Charlie was now a full-fledged night person. He loved being in the streets, playing until everyone was worn out, pulling a nice new lady next to him, listening to other people's tales, and spinning his own—about Chicago and New York and how exciting everything was. To hear Charlie tell it, if you hadn't been to Harlem, you hadn't been
anywhere. And as he lingered in the easy comfort of his hometown, the discipline he had developed in New York went lax. The Charlie Parker who studied diligently with Biddy Fleet was replaced by the wild one who'd preceded him in Kansas City—addiction and all.

Charlie's return to drugs was apparently assisted by Tadd Dameron, who was hated by Lawrence Keyes, leader of the Deans of Swing and one of Charlie's first musical employers in Kansas City. Keyes hated that Negro from Cleveland for pulling his buddy back down into that snake pit from which so few escaped. Dameron, a composer and an arranger as well as a middling pianist, was a curious man looking for new things to do in music. A romantic, he had been thrilled by the hugely orchestrated melodic scores of Hollywood, the music of Duke Ellington, and the songs of Tin Pan Alley's bigger talents, like George Gershwin and Cole Porter. He also claimed to have studied chemistry, and he knew a lot about the various intoxicants that could derange the senses into a state of euphoria, about potions and powders that were designed to relieve pain but had begun to assume their primary role as a form of illegal recreation.

Charlie met Dameron in Harlan Leonard's band, which he rejoined now that he was back in Kansas City. Leonard still disliked him, but Charlie could play even better now—everybody knew it—and Leonard was able to forgive him his shortcomings because of what he brought to the bandstand. When that saxophone was in his mouth, the band lifted up, the men playing beyond their usual level of skill, pulled along by the hot, lean sound of his daredevil inventions. With Charlie Parker standing there, still as a wooden statue, sweat puddling at his feet, the rhythm section swung harder, the brass and reeds kicked out their parts with more edge and fire, and the whole sound coalesced into a Kansas City storm.

Harlan Leonard could see the boy still wasn't taking care of himself, or taking care of business. He came to work when he felt like it, and when he did get there he looked like an unmade bed. To Leonard's point of view, Charlie's gift was misplaced. It should have gone to a much better man, not this knuckleheaded mama's boy who seemed to delight in the way his fellow band members sided with him against the leader.

As Biddy Fleet noted, Charlie preferred being loved to being hated; he was grateful for the support of his fellow musicians. But nothing any
one thought about his quirks and vacillations meant much to him, so long as no one's conclusions got in the way of his concentration. He was too busy working on his horn and having a good time to be bothered by what some second-level guys had cooking in their brain pans. The world out there was much larger than the provincial minds that surrounded him, and he had already passed some tests in that wider world. His rump was in Kansas City, but his dreams were back in New York.

There was a high-minded, contemplative side to Charlie, too, a habit of wondering how things would feel if the world were vastly different. As fascinated as he was by innovation and invention, he was more intrigued by the inspiration behind the invention—by how some human mind thought of each new idea. He recognized that thought was a pure thing not impeded by social circumstance. It had independent power. A C scale was a C scale, no matter who played it or why, which gave those notes—any notes—a spiritual quality. That was why the bandstand was such a sacred place, and why it would have been difficult to ascertain much about the social conditions of the 1930s while listening to the Negro musicians of Charlie's era. They didn't evade life when they performed, whether in public or private; they entered its condition of freedom through their craft, discipline, and inspiration. In the pure universe of musical tone, they were able to express themselves as exactly who they were, not as the limited icons that others, black or white, might mistake them for.

Charlie Parker, no matter how highly talented, was not greater than his idiom. But his work helped to lead the art form to its most penetrating achievement. Jazz, as a performing art, is about navigating a landscape in which spontaneous creation whizzes by in layered stacks, and about creating a fresh and continual response to that landscape. The music is about more than merely making something up; as drummer Max Roach often said of playing jazz, it is about creating, maintaining, and developing a design.

Today we might call this multitasking, but at its most fundamental level, it is about victory over chaos, about achieving and maintaining a groove that meets the demands of melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, and timbral inventions in milliseconds. During his most satisfied bandstand experience, Charlie Parker knew what every talented jazz musician has, before and after: how to listen and hear, instant
by instant, and how to respond with aesthetic command to that instant, gone now and never to return.

Trumpeter Bobby Bradford once said that whenever people heard jazz, and understood how the elements within it were lining up and working in coordination, its emotional and intellectual power was strong enough to convince them that they had been dreaming. Maybe that was what the brain taught us: that a dream team could make its art by dreaming together—mutualizing Apollo and Dionysus—until nothing but the fact of their instruments separated the players from one another.

Charlie Parker was another dreamer, ready to enter that large and mutual dream.

I
n the 1980s, on a visit to Chicago, I met the saxophonist Joe Daley at Joe Segal's Jazz Showcase, a venue then in the Empire Hotel, a building where musicians from out of town could take rooms and play the job downstairs. Daley and I stood on the rug outside the club shortly before it opened for business and talked about what he had seen there in the late forties, when Parker came to Chicago. Daley was struck by the effect Charlie's music had on local musicians and listeners alike, who sometimes reacted as though they were at a revival.

At one point in our conversation, we were joined by another saxophonist. He was a stranger to me, but he joked easily with Daley, who clearly respected him as a friend, and as one who knew the lore of jazz through his own eyes. He said his name, but I did not write it down and don't remember it today. He surprised me: I thought I was aware of all the respected alto and tenor players in town, but he said enough about music—including some insightful things about Lester Young's fingering—that I was convinced he knew what he was talking about.

A few minutes later, the saxophonist made a comment that surprised me even more. He claimed he had seen Charlie Parker in a “soundie”—a kind of proto–music video, five or ten minutes long, that was popularized in the early 1940s. In the film, he said, Charlie was playing not a saxophone, but a clarinet, as a section player in a big band. At first he said the band was Harlan Leonard's—and Charlie is known to have played with Leonard's band in 1939 and 1940—but I questioned what he told me, because he said the
soundie was a film nobody else he knew had ever seen. Daley hadn't seen it either, but he knew the man well enough that he took the story seriously.

Like Gene Ramey, anyone who spends time investigating the life of Charlie Parker must come to terms with the mysteries that decorate his story. What we know of Charlie's life during the months between his departure from Kansas City in early 1939 and his return from New York in 1940 remains fragmentary despite the work of many scholars. His itinerant lifestyle can make him seem more a movie character—a figure caught in glimpses, in jump cuts and slow dissolves—than a flesh-and-blood human being. He was leading a busy and productive life, full of adventure, arrogance, and humbling discipline, including the discovery and conquest of himself. The fact that he'd managed to break his drug habit, for a while at least, seems to have given him a strength that must have helped his optimism, though it could not have extinguished his despair.

His chameleon ability—not to change color, but to fit in very quickly through mimicry—allowed him to be as comfortable in the backwoods, with its rustic flavors and ways, as he was in the city, amid that middle-class-to-upper-crust milieu his father, Charlie Sr., had evoked when speaking to his son about the people he and his fellow porters treated to fancy service on the trains. And we know he learned to emulate skills with an intensity that made his personality as rubbery as his facial features.

Charles the younger seemed able to remember voice patterns, accents, and dialects as accurately as he did pitches. He could summon the notes of the human landscape and reproduce them as clearly and accurately as he could the notes and phrases of songs and the way they were harmonized. None of this made him superhuman, but it prepared him to handle unexpected emergency, to retain an ingratiating resourcefulness that complemented what he was learning in his trade as a bandstand improviser. We do know that Charlie surfaced in Chicago before Jay McShann arrived in January 1939, and then again in the spring of 1940. Could he have appeared in a soundie on that second trip? Perhaps he held on to Goon Gardner's clarinet along with his clothes; perhaps some other musician got him the clarinet job and lent him the instrument. We know he learned the licorice stick back in his hometown days, from his school band instructors. Certainly by then his digital memory was so
swift and strong that this young guy, both timid and brazen, was capable of getting prepared to play a dance band book in a couple of hours.

It was on one of these stints in Chicago that he first encountered Bob Redcross, who became a longtime associate. Redcross may have been a hustler, but he was a principled one who prided himself on giving a sucker an even break and on his ability to make fast friends with a peer—even that skinny kid from Kansas City who walked up out of nowhere and cadged a cigarette, standing there talking after the smoke was lit, his leg crooked like the out-of-towner that he was.

Redcross and the stranger soon found they had a connection. It was the kind of intellectual curiosity that brought them together as friends who had both feet in the jazz world, though they found themselves taking distinctively different paths through pages of books, newspapers, and magazines. Their literacy and curiosity often coaxed them into music quite different from jazz, and into museums that cost nothing but provided plenty. Some of those public institutions were more than ready to make a pair of young Negroes feel like interlopers, but Charlie and Bob were too optimistic to let that distract or discourage them.

“Over the years,” Redcross told me years later, “Charles and I would get to something like an art museum—like when he was having a ball with that painter Gertrude Abercrombie. But in the early times we just wanted to discuss things that interested us, smoke a little, drink a little, and listen to as many records as I was willing to play until Charles fell asleep, or I did. Then it started all over the next day. It was that wild and crazy in one room, because men with intelligence and energy, and a lot to explore, know how to keep busy. It wasn't that we were bored to tears; we were always on the lookout for things that were informative and could make us think deep and distant thoughts.”

The earliest recording of Charlie Parker, the first document we have of his playing, is sometimes said to have been captured by Clarence Davis, though Bob Redcross also claimed responsibility for all of Parker's earliest recordings. Whatever the case, one thing is certain: the player is Bird. It is a four-minute solo recording of the young saxophonist playing two songs, “Honeysuckle Rose” and “Body and Soul.” Parker fans have since come to know the performance as “Honey and Body.” Many have assumed it was recorded in May 1940, but it
may have been made earlier—which would make some sense of how Parker sounds on the recording, much closer to 1939 than some have suggested.

The recording is a fleeting moment in time made memorable by technology, discernible through a haze of popping and hissing, an audible window screen against which his face is pressed. In those four minutes, we hear Charlie Parker confronting himself, confronting both what he knows and what he is still trying to work out. He stands alone, keeping time in his body, maintaining tempo all by his lonesome, with no audible measurement from a metronome or a drummer, a guitarist, a bassist, or any other rhythm player. In usual jazz circumstances—regardless of style, from New Orleans jazz to last week—the featured player is constantly responding to the inventions of others, all aesthetic notions in motion, all attention acutely on one another. On “Honey and Body,” though, there is no band. Not at that moment, not on that recording. There is only Charlie Parker.

This—the sound of the moment before ignition—is what people have long hoped to find in searching for recordings by Buddy Bolden, the New Orleans cornet player thought to have brought together enough functional understanding to begin jazz, or to get so close that others knew what to do. In Bolden's case, we have no voice of the dead; we have only a photograph, Bolden with his band, in his playing context, handsome and charming but as still as written notes on manuscript paper. We can only surmise that he is holding closed a secret, invisible box, waiting to pull something out that will allow him to turn the world around.