Kansas City Lightning (41 page)

119:
Bushell,
Jazz from the Beginning,
25.

119:
Bob Redcross, taped interview at Blue Note, New York, NY, 1985.

121-22
: Gene Ramey, taped interview, 1981

123-26
: Southern,
The Music of Black Americans
; Crouch,
Considering Genius
, 217.

127:
Johnson, Stephen.
Burnt Cork: Traditions and Legacies of Blackface Minstrelsy,
98.

130-31:
Blesh and Janis,
They All Played Ragtime,
38.

131-32
: Harry “Sweets” Edison, interviews about Kansas City and Lester Young, 1985 and thereafter.

132-36
: Marquis,
In Search of Buddy Bolden,
19.

138-40
: Bushell,
Jazz from the Beginning
; Russell,
Jazz Style in Kansas City and the Southwest,
40.

141
: Gene Ramey on Page “balancing” the rhythm section, taped interview, 1981.

142-43
: Basie and Murray,
Good Morning Blues
, 120.

143
: Oliver Todd, taped interview, Kansas City, 1981.

145
: Hammond, John. “Kansas City: A Hotbed for Fine Swing Musicians—Andy Kirk and Count Basie's Elegant Music Spoils City for Out-of-Town Name Brands.”
Down Beat
, September 1936.

146
: Oliver Todd, taped interview about Charlie Parker and Robert Simpson.

147
: Lawrence Keyes and Rebecca Parker, taped interviews, 1981.

148
: Clarence Davis, Gene Ramey, taped interviews, 1981.

151
: Ellison,
Living with Music
, 60.

151-54
: Gene Ramey, on the night he and Countess Johnson heard Charlie Parker humiliated by Jo Jones, taped interview, 1981.

155
: John Jackson, telephone interview, 1981.

157-59
: Lester Young, final interview, 1959. Available in Porter,
A Lester Young Reader,
173.

160
: Eddie Barefield, taped interviews, conducted at his home in the Bronx and at the Village Vanguard, New York, 1981 and thereafter.

160-61:
Frank Wess, interview about Lester Young and the 1930s jam sessions, New York, NY, 1985.

163-72
: Clarence Davis and Rebecca Parker, taped interviews, 1981.

165
: The “woman piano player” Davis mentions was likely George Lee's sister, the singer Julia Lee.

180-81
: Clarence Davis, taped interview, 1981.

182
: Roy Eldridge, conversations, New York, NY, 1985-90.

184
: Horowitz anecdote: Loren Schoenberg, conversation.

186
: Gene Ramey, taped interview, 1981.

187
: Gazzaway, Don. “Buster and Bird: Conversations with Buster Smith,”
The Jazz Review
, 1960.

188-93
: Buster Smith, taped interview, Dallas, 1981.

193
: Russell, Ross.
Jazz Style in Kansas City and the Southwest,
80.

194-95
: Ralph Ellison, conversations.

196-98
: Buster Smith, taped interview, 1981.

198-99
: Ralph Ellison, conversations.

200-202:
Buster Smith, taped interview, 1981.

202-203
: Buster Smith, taped interview, 1981.

203
: Although Ira Alexander “Bus” Smith was actually Bennie Moten's nephew, the bandleader treated him like his little brother, and the idea stuck. “Bennie kept referring to me as his kid brother, so I legalized the name Moten,” he recalls in an interview quoted in Driggs and Haddix,
Kansas City Jazz,
94.

203-204
: Jay McShann, taped interview, 1981.

204
: Orville Minor, interview, 1981.

205
: Orville Minor, interview, 1981.

206-207
: Oliver Todd, interview, 1981.

210
: As he worked on refining his own bracing, vibrato-free tone, Parker must have been affected by Smith's sound. In his September 1936
Down Beat
article about Kansas City, John Hammond singled Smith out: “his technique is unlimited and his tone quite free from the cloying quality which colored alto men took over from the Lombardo tribe.” Quoted in Driggs and Haddix,
Kansas City Jazz,
145.

211
: Orville Minor, interview, 1981.

212
: Doris Parker, interviews, New York, NY, 1985–2000.

213
: Clarence Davis, interview, 1981.

213
: Gene Ramey, interview.

214
: Buddy Jones to Robert Reisner, in
Bird,
124.

214-16
: Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan.
The Sign of Four
, in
The Complete Sherlock
Holmes.
New York: Doubleday.

216
: Buster Smith, taped interview, 1981.

217:
Gene Ramey, interview, 1981.

218:
Orville Minor on “smokers,” interview, 1981.

219-21
: Jay McShann, interview.

222-23:
Gene Ramey, interview, 1981; Jay McShann, interview, 1981.

226
: Clarence Davis, taped interview, 1981.

227
: Tommy Douglas to Robert Reisner, in
Bird,
82-3. Parker was likely closer to
seventeen years old when he played with Douglas.

227:
Jay McShann, interview.

228
: Gene Ramey, interview.

229-236
: Rebecca Parker, taped interview, 1981.

237-241
: Jay McShann, interview.

241
: Harlan Leonard in Russell,
Jazz Style in Kansas City and the Southwest,
174.

242:
Gene Ramey, taped interview, 1981.

243-45
: Junior Williams, interview, 1985.

245-46
: Buster Smith, interview, 1981.

247-248
: Gene Ramey and Jay McShann, interviews, 1981.

249
: Addie Parker, quoted in Reisner,
Bird,
163.

249-52
: Buster Smith, taped interview, 1981.

253-55
: Rebecca Parker, interview, 1981.

265
: Rebecca Parker, interview, 1981.

268
: A former Cotton Club dancer, interviewed for
Village Voice
article about
The Cotton Club
, a film by Francis Ford Coppola, 1984. The dancer recalled traveling to Chicago, where he saw Louis Armstrong at a gangster club in Cicero, IL.

269:
Doris Parker, interview, 1985.

270
: Junior Williams, taped interview.

271
: For detail on Chicago crime in the 1930s, I consulted Tolland,
The Dillinger
Days
; Matera,
John Dillinger
; and Bergreen,
Capone
.

272
: Lincoln, C. Eric.
The Black Muslims in America
. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B.
Erdmans, 1994.

277-79
: Bob Redcross, interview, New York, NY, 1985.

278-79
: Billy Eckstine, taped interview, New York, NY, 1985

280-81
: Dexter, Dave.
Jazz Cavalcade: The Inside Story of Jazz
. Whitefish, MN: Literary Licensing, 2011; Billy Eckstine, interview, 1985

283
: Jacques Butler, interview.

283-84
: Roosevelt, Eleanor.
My Day,
34.

285-86
: For this account I drew on Gelernter,
1939
.

286
: Walter Davis, Jr., interview, New York, NY.

287
: Buster Smith, interview, 1981.

291-92
: Jay McShann and Doris Parker, interviews, 1981 and thereafter.

292
: For a colorful portrait of Harlem at the time, see Smith,
Music on My Mind.

292-98
: Biddy Fleet on Charlie Parker, interview; Frank Wess on Biddy Fleet, interview; both 1985.

303:
Charlie's intense study sessions with Biddy Fleet have become the stuff of
legend, but some particulars of that legend seem to have been altered in translation. In a 1949 article, Michael Levin and John S. Wilson quoted Charlie as saying that, during that period, “I kept thinking there's bound to be something else,” another approach to the music that he wanted to play. “I could hear it sometimes, but I couldn't play it.” Levin and Wilson themselves described the breakthrough in these words: “Charlie suddenly found that by using higher intervals of a chord as a melody line and backing them with appropriately related chord changes, he could play this thing he'd been ‘hearing.'” As Carl Woideck has noted, however, the influential 1955 book
Hear Me Talkin' to Ya
presented that line as a direct quote from Charlie: “I found that by using the higher intervals of a chord as a melody line and backing them with appropriately related changes, I could play the thing I'd been hearing.” (See Woideck,
Charlie Parker: His Music and Life,
16. Woideck notes the possibility that the authors of
Hear Me Talkin' to Ya
were working from Levin's and Wilson's interview notes, but that seems remote.) The quote has been passed on for generations as a kind of key to Bird's music, but at least one highly knowledgeable musician says that the line about intervals “does not make sense” as a way to describe Parker's breakthrough. In an email to the author, Wynton Marsalis observes that “Louis Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins, Art Tatum and others [also] played on the upper intervals of chords. What Charlie Parker did has happened perhaps only once in Western music. After figuring out how to double the velocity of the shuffle rhythm, which no one before him had done, he heard his improvised melodies at high speed and was able to hear Tatumesque harmonies at that velocity on a single note instrument! This can be heard in Chopin and Lizst, but they are considered light composers. Bird aspired to make melody on a heavyweight level, not just 2-5-1 arpeggios, or he would be in that line with Tatum and Hawkins. He is not. He is on the melodic level with Armstrong, which to me, makes Charlie Parker one of the two greatest players in the history of jazz and western music.”

308:
Jerry Lloyd to Reisner, in
Bird,
137-8.

308-10:
Rozelle Claxton, interview, 1985.

310
: Phil Schaap, conversation.

313
: Joe Wilder, interview.

316
: Idrees Sulieman, taped interview, 1985.

318-22
: Rebecca Parker, interview, 1981.

323
: Lawrence Keyes, interview, 1981.

325-26
: Bobby Bradford, conversations.

329-30
: Bob Redcross, taped interview, New York, NY, 1985. See also Woideck,
Charlie Parker
, 68, 250.

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A

Abercrombie, Gertrude, 330

Africa, 124–25

Allen, Red, 182

Anderson, Buddy, 11

Anderson, Marian, 283

Annapolis, 313–17

Antlers Club, 205–6, 210, 216,
218–19, 257, 267, 287

Armstrong, Louis, 30, 38, 98, 99, 117–19, 140, 145, 157, 160, 181–85, 198, 222,
268, 272–73, 278, 331, 334

Aspects of Negro Life
(Douglas), 173

Attucks, Crispus, 48

B

Bailey, Pearl, 313

Balaban and Katz Circuit, 5

Balanchine, George, 239

Bales, Walter, 237–40

Barefield, Eddie, 62, 145, 156, 160,
211

Barnet, Charlie, 32

Basie, Bill “Count,” 12, 20, 24, 26–27, 35, 62, 141, 142–46, 149–52, 158–61, 179, 186, 193, 198–200, 202, 204–5, 229, 237, 239, 241, 248–51, 274, 281, 289, 290, 310

        Orchestra of, 16, 85, 60

bebop, 100, 140, 227, 315

Bechet, Sidney, 140, 184

Beckett, Fred, 242

Beiderbecke, Bix, 160

Bennett, Gwendolyn, 79–80

Bergreen, Laurence, 271

Berry, Leon “Chu,” 27, 62, 155, 183, 185, 198, 224, 232, 242, 244–46, 253, 255, 291, 297, 312, 313, 332–33

Birds with Human Souls
(Rowland), ix

Birth of a Nation
, 73–75, 284

Blake, Fanny, 43

Blesh, Rudi, 130, 131

Blue Devils, 24, 85, 140–43, 145, 149, 158, 186, 187, 191–204, 209, 250, 287 blues, 16, 60–62, 103, 113, 117, 118, 138, 139, 150–51, 263–64, 276, 277

“Body and Soul,” 87, 246, 306, 317, 330–34

Bolden, Buddy, 133–36, 331

Bonnie and Clyde, 63, 68

Bowes, Major, 152

Boxley, Hattie Lee, 106–7, 164, 236

Boyd, William, 72

Bradford, Bobby, 325–26

Braud, Wellman, 140

Broch, Hermann, 116

Broken Blossoms
, 74

Bronson, Art, 158

Brown, John, 316

Brown, Piney, 64

Brown, Walter, 27, 29, 35

Bryant, Sterling, 48, 49, 51–52, 87–89,
105, 179, 232, 257

Buchanan, Charlie, 13, 14, 22, 25, 26, 32

Buffalo Soldiers, 41–42

Burney (Robinson), Banjo, 314, 315, 317

Burns, Tommy, 97

Bushell, Garvin, 60–61, 119, 137–38

Butler, Jacques, 283

Butts, Jimmy, 298

Byas, Don, 62, 297

C

Cabeza de Vaca, Álvar Núñez, 38

Calloway, Cab, 100, 245, 279

Capone, Al, 117, 271–72, 317

Carter, Benny, 62, 183, 224, 253, 296

Caruso, Enrico, 222

“Cherokee,” 30, 32–34, 300

Cherry Blossom, 69, 123, 149, 312

Chicago, 267–68, 272

        Capone in, 117, 271–72

        conflict between Irish and
blacks in, 272

        Great Migration and, 275–77

        jazz style of, 117, 118, 122

        Local 208 in, 273–74

        Parker in, 270–81

        Parker's move to, 253–57, 265, 267–70

Christian, Charlie, 306