Kansas City Lightning (4 page)

As McShann comes off the stand, Tumino pulls him aside.

“Jay, you better lay everything you got on ‘em. This man [Buchanan] is gonna throw your ass right out of here tomorrow. It ain't bad enough you look terrible, you
sound
terrible to him. You got Lucky Millinder playing opposite you. Blow that son of a bitch right off the stand
tonight
.”

“All right, I think we'll do that,” McShann says, his cool intact.

Millinder doesn't mess around. He opens up with his roughest and most intricate arrangements, aiming to decimate the enemy right away. “We played ‘Prelude in C-sharp Minor,' ” Panama Francis recalled. “It was fast, full of notes, and really exciting. Then we went into Andy Gibson's arrangement of ‘Blue Skies.' We dropped some thunder on them. It was like a prizefighter, looking to shake you up, let you know it's going to be your ass
very soon
.” Millinder is out front, hair perfectly in place, tuxedo tails swinging with the beat, his handsome band playing that well-rehearsed music with a hard but unruffled edge.

Then those ragamuffins start sauntering back up to the bandstand next to theirs, looking unimpressed, readying themselves to play. Millinder doesn't care how they
look
; he knows his band is whipping them in grand style.

When his set is over, Millinder heads downstairs to the dressing room. After a little while, his valet comes running in.

“Lucky, you better get up there and listen to them western dogs.”

“
Out!
” Millinder orders.

Back upstairs, Count Basie has stopped by to cheer on the Kansas City team. He leans over the piano, with a cigar between his teeth, a cold look in his eyes. “It's about time to blow these motherfuckers out of here,” he tells McShann. “It's about time to get them up off that bandstand. Put them in the
books
, baby. Make 'em dig for something.”

“I'm ready,” McShann answers.

“Anything you want, anything you need?”

“Well, Base, how about a couple of hits?”

“You will have them,” Basie mutters through his cigar, then leaves for liquor.

McShann puts blues singer Walter Brown on them, then contrasts him with the blind balladeer Al Hibbler, who perhaps sings “Skylark.” Piggy Minor kicks off “Dexter Blues” with a growl strong enough to scare the entire Millinder brass section to death. Then, when the band is oiled up and the crowd is starting to go crazy—when you can smell excitement coming out of 'em—McShann unleashes the
hot man
on the audience, making it clear that there's hell to tell the captain.

Clap hands, here comes Charlie.

When Charlie Parker stands up, lean, hair glinting from the fusion of grease and light, he has been playing the saxophone for seven years. He started playing clubs in 1935, but he didn't get serious until the following year, when Chu Berry came through Kansas City and pushed his foot through the bell of his tenor and up the butts of the roughest men in town—Lester Young, Herschel Evans, Ben Webster, and Jack Washington. From the spring to the fall of that year, Parker transformed himself from an incompetent into a real player. Kansas City bandleader Oliver Todd, who had fired Parker for his fumbling performance some months earlier, said, “When I heard him come back from a summer off somewhere, I witnessed a true miracle. He could play. Tears almost came to my eyes when I heard him then.”

Over the next five years, Parker worked at a style that he was still developing that night at the Savoy: a new music built with the brass of the saxophone's body, conjured with such poise that his fingers barely rose from the keys.

BEFORE SUNRISE
, the news was on the streets: a fresh bunch of Kansas City musicians was in town, and Lucky Millinder was taking a beating. It was a familiar kind of tale, part of the excitement of living in Harlem. Somebody would show up with a new way of doing it, or would do the classic stuff with such heat it felt brand-new. “It was a shock to everybody, because we had been holding our own with the other bands,” said Panama Francis.

The next morning, McShann had a visitor at the Woodside: Lucky Millinder himself.

“C'mere, you little son of a bitch. I want you to go with me this morning so we can sit down and talk.”

Over drinks and food, Millinder told McShann, “You know, you dirty sumbitches run us out of there last night.”

“Oh, no,” McShann demurred, “you know better than that.”

“Yes, you did. I was going to send you back to the sticks, but you motherfuckers run us
out of there
. Look, you're in the club now. I'm going to take you around town and show you what's what. Here's my card. You ever need to know about something, you call me.”

McShann was shocked. “I never met anybody like you.”

“Well, that's the way it is in New York. When you bust your way in, you're in. Let's get out of here and spend some money.”

McShann went along, but that didn't mean a truce; no form of friendship came before music.

In the Kansas City jam sessions, you had to be able to play either brilliantly or boldly. The following night, McShann's organization did both. They played at just the right tempos, an essential element of swing. Half the audience was at the bandstand's edge, listening and snapping their fingers; the other half took to the dance floor, becoming what Dizzy Gillespie called “the mirror of the music.” But the notes and the rhythms that caught the dancers inspired more than a reflection. There were so many different variations going on out there that the musicians were prodded into new ideas as they looked at those Negro bodies improvising on
the music in time.

With their confidence all the way up, the McShann Orchestra had the corner on that dialogue. They were changing their title from western dogs to western
demons
.

“Jay's band was very special because we could play a waltz, a schottische, or whatever,” observed Orville Minor. “Somebody in the band could fit it, and the brass section could sit up and play some harmony behind anybody. The reed section got to where it was that way, too. A cat would know what particular part of the chord to build his notes from. Got to be so good at it you couldn't tell what was written and what wasn't.”

So McShann could send Walter Brown out there with Piggy growling behind him; then Bird would step up a chorus later, slipping arabesques of musical freshness into the gutbucket. Hibbler's sepia ballads would push the men and women together. Then Charlie would rise again, from the romantic cushion of brass and reeds, to manufacture gooseflesh with an improvised melody, a veil of transparent lyricism, in bursts as brief as eight bars that made the dancers hold each other even closer and caused his fellow musicians to shake their heads. And so the McShann band proved it could swing, Kansas City style, lolling into power, tailing behind the beat a little bit, gradually lifting the gear a notch, just a little more, until all within hearing distance knew it was
on
. Building, is you ready? 'Cause we gonna tear you
down
!

ON SUNDAY, AT
4:30
P.M
., a local radio show broadcast a quick fifteen-minute set from the Savoy Ballroom. The producers allowed in thirty or forty people to give the musicians an audience, to make it more than a brief rehearsal. When they got the signal, McShann's band kicked off a blues. “And now, ladies and gentlemen, from that home of happy feet, the Savoy Ballroom, we proudly present the Jay McShann Orchestra, all the way from Kansas City! Take it, Jay.”

They loped through the blues, then went into a medium-tempo song that swung nicely. They intended to take it out with “Cherokee,” Charlie's feature.

But Charlie wasn't there.

Well, that was Charlie Parker. Everyone was disappointed in a familiar way, the way that those who must do business with drug addicts become accustomed to—starting with suspense, as all wonder if this will be another one of those times, then leading eventually to an exaggerated apology or one hell of a story about what made it impossible for him to get there. The men all felt this burden of potential disappointment, and the resentment that came with it. Why did this have to be the guy with all the talent? Why couldn't he be like the other guys who had it—Louis Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Roy Eldridge—able to have his fun while keeping his professional image shining? Why did his private life have to mess up everybody else's plans so often? That was the way it was, and it could seem so pitiful sometimes, make you so angry.

But then there he was, moving across the floor, case in hand.

McShann stomped off a furious tempo. “This wasn't one of those slow-trains-through-Arkansas tempos,” recalled Ramey. “This was like that train between Chicago and Milwaukee. I mean
fast
!”

The rhythm section lit out. The band came in and played the song's ensemble chorus, sixty-four bars of a tune notorious for its complex harmony, all those holes you could break your musical legs in. This was one of those times when the griddle was hot and nothing came up except steam. Arrogant and proud of themselves, the rhythm section reared back and pounced on Charlie's back when he put his horn to his mouth. And his saxophone, in turn, became a flamethrower of rhythm, melody, and harmony. They pushed and drove, chorus after chorus. Then, as professional experience had taught them, they lulled, let him get a little stronger, went back to their basic strategy, and let him dance his hot-footed dance with subtle support. Then they tore into him again, setting fire to his tail.

The rhythm section had him by the tail, but there was no holding or cornering Bird. Disappearing acts were his specialty. Just when you thought you had him, he'd move, coming up with another idea, one that was as bold as red paint on a white sheet. When the band started throwing up stock riffs behind him, Parker sidestepped the familiar shapes, issuing his responses from deep in left field. “Boy, did that man hate riffs,” said Ramey. “He would do anything to get out of the way. Soon as he knew it was coming, he would duck into silence and come up squawling to kick it in the butt as it went past him.”

Each chorus was getting hotter; it was clear, from the position of his body and the sound of his horn, that Charlie Parker was not going to give in. All the nights he had worked on it, the flubs, the fumblings, the sore lips, mouth, and tongue, the cramped fingers—they all paid off that afternoon. Suddenly, the man with the headphones was signaling McShann,
Don't stop! Don't stop! Keep on playing!

That afternoon, sixteen miles away from Harlem, bassist Chubby Jackson was working at the Adams Theatre in Newark. He was playing with the big band led by Charlie Barnet, who had had a hit with “Cherokee” two years before. While on break, Jackson decided to see if that new band playing opposite Lucky Millinder was showing anything special on the Savoy broadcast. As soon as he turned on the radio, a sound that was almost brutal shot out of the speaker. The song was “Cherokee,” but the sound leading McShann's version was that of an alto saxophone almost completely devoid of vibrato, notes flying thick as buckshot, slapping chords this way and that, rambling quicker and with more different kinds of rhythms than his band had ever heard from a saxophone. Everybody stopped talking, fiddling with their instruments. Who the hell is
this
? Oklahoma trumpeter Howard McGhee, who was there that afternoon, chuckled at the memory: every musician standing there with his mouth open knew where he was going
that
night.

Back in the Savoy, the few people in the audience started moving up toward the bandstand as this saxophone player leaned forward, sweating like a waterfall, delivering his message as though he were on a mountaintop. Even Charlie Buchanan ambled up there, caught by the sound, the fury, the determination, the swing that had the radio man jumping. Parker, completely sparked, ran through the changes like a dose of Epsom salts, unwilling or unable to repeat himself.

Stretched out like that, with the rhythm section after his scalp and the cyclical traps of the harmonies ever before him, Bird reached down and called upon all his skills and instincts, all the gifts for perception in emergency that he had developed over the years, even at this tempo making coherent statements, playful variations, and mocking responses to the musical ideas by which he was surrounded, supported, attacked. His obsession with shifting, deceptive rhythm re
sulted in endless ways of toying with the beat that jelled perfectly with his desire to create melodies accompanied by harmonic surprise. In his hands, a single note functioned on five levels: its individual pitch was melodic; it was a brass-balled harmony note; it was given individual texture through his control of color; its voicing was dictated by the register in which it was played; and it served a rhythmic function within its phrase. As Ramey said, “Bird knew how to dance in and out of that meter,
with
the tempo, and still get back when Mama comes home for dinner. He could take a chord that had a bastard relationship to the rest of the harmony, and, before you knew it, he has woven that bastard into the flock like it was supposed to be there all the time.”

As they got the signal to take it out, the McShann band really started to roar behind Parker, and he lifted his brittle sound up over the thickness of the brass and the reeds, over the awesome marching of the rhythm section, and slashed his way home. They'd romped their way through at least forty choruses, but these weren't like the evanescent choruses heard only in backstage jam sessions or on some inspired evening at a dance in a little out-of-the-way town. These choruses had been sent out over the local radio waves, and everybody interested in swinging bands was listening. This unknown saxophone player was putting the world on notice that there was another way of looking at everything.

THAT NIGHT, MCSHANN'S
men had to push their way through the crowd to get to the Savoy bandstand. The customers were tucked as close as the cylinders of paper and tobacco inside a cigarette pack. That 4:30 broadcast had drawn hundreds who hadn't already been convinced by the talk of this new band that was chastising Lucky Millinder. There were droves of musicians trying to get near the bandstand, trying to find out the name of the anonymous saxophone player who'd run all that melodic lightning through “Cherokee,” swinging his butt off all the while. Some sort of history was being made and they didn't want to miss it.