Kansas City Lightning (23 page)

Ralph Ellison was from Oklahoma City, the Blue Devils' home base. As an aspirant musician, he saw the Blue Devils walk the streets with the sheen of local celebrity. Working in the local drugstore, he mixed up citric acid with two or three eggs in milkshakes for musicians, pimps, and laymen looking to stand in bed after a long night. He knew Buster Smith, and remembered seeing Lester Young coolly strolling around in a white sweater, carrying an old silver tenor. He also saw the Blue Devils when they performed at Slaughter's Hall. That was where the Negroes gave their dances, though the band headquartered itself at the Ritz Hotel, a white place. As Ellison noted, the sensibility of an era isn't always what we assume in retrospect: “What gets lost when you overstate race is the fact that people aren't always thinking about race. They might be thinking about style, about technique, about information that would allow them to do whatever it was that they were trying to do. Hell, when you went to the record store, you
were looking for anything that could help you achieve your own aspirations; you weren't concerned about seeing yourself in the limited terms that someone else might.”

Ellison perceived something essential about the musicians of the 1920s and 1930s: that they saw music as an opportunity not just to entertain, but to express something of their shared situation. “There is a wide-open sensibility in jazz, and that sensibility made it possible to express so many of the essentials of the national character in the sound and feeling of the music. You hear the wanderlust, you hear the hopes and the dreams; you are given a feeling for the inevitable disappointments and the equally inevitable humor. That is why those bands swinging that music had such significance. They existed in a ritual where the highly demanding aspects of the musical imagination—and the dancing imagination—frequently met, pulling together techniques and expressions of elegance from anywhere they could.”

Like all the Negro bands, the Blue Devils played for everybody who gave them work, and that meant that they performed in many segregated situations. To meet the demands of their white audiences—when those demands fell outside of their jazz tunes and original material—they would stop by music stores and buy stock arrangements of the popular songs of the day, sometimes playing them straight, but sometimes treating them to the creative reinvention that's known in music as arranging. That is how Buster Smith started expanding his skills at composition. Smith had learned to read music in Dallas, but he hadn't made much of it. In the Blue Devils, he started writing music—a process that involved a small parade of revelations.

From early on, Smith knew he had things in his head that could sound good coming out of other people's instruments. As he studied those stock arrangements, though, he noticed something that would change his understanding of how music worked. Until now, the bands Buster had worked in followed the New Orleans style, with each section either playing the same note—in unison—or freely improvising obbligatos to the theme. The trumpet, the clarinet, and the tenor saxophone were all B flat instruments, playing the same line, with the saxophone an octave below the others. The alto saxophone and the baritone saxophone were both in E flat, an octave apart. And the trombone was in the bass
register, down there with Walter Page. The New Orleans units achieved counterpoint purely through improvisation—which could come through very clear, with one voice rising above the fray, or very thick, in a dense cloud of polyphony, but was always vital if the players were capable of more than hopped-up, ignorant noise. Somehow, in those years, audiences seemed able to separate the melody line played by the cornet or trumpet from the improvised responses of the clarinet and the trombone—and to enjoy the new music.

What Smith discovered, in unpacking those stock arrangements, was that there were other, more complex ways to write music for a jazz band. In these professional arrangements, the horns were not only playing different lines, they were also playing different notes. This turned Buster around; it introduced him to harmonizing and pointed him toward a way to give the music his own stamp. Armed with this new knowledge, he sat down at the piano and started working out the chords he would voice in new arrangements for the Blue Devils.

Voicing chords was a whole other kind of business. To master this, Smith would have to study music theory, but he recognized the power such knowledge could give an arranger. Once you understood harmony, you could change your band's entire sound a gang of ways: you could change the intervals you used, switch up the voicings, and with each change the band would take on a different color. “There were many, many nights—stayed up all night studying that stuff,” Smith recalled. “Sitting down at the piano, sitting in the night. I went to sleep at the piano, writing.”

This new approach to harmony made the Blue Devils sound bigger, gave their music more of a snap. It put something extra on the ballads and lifted the waltzes up from the pedestrian: it provided an escape route, a getaway from the ordinary, the expected. The music Smith wrote was so naturally good it also gave the men something else to ponder, to be interested in. You could surprise them with it, help them find out what range made them sound best. If a man had a good, strong high note, use it; if he had a powerful low note, use it. If one of the musicians sounded good in every register, Smith could achieve different effects by shifting that player's notes around—high, middle, low—as the chords progressed through the tune. Over the next few years, with Eddie Durham, Buster shaped the sound of the Blue Devils, directing a fire hose of intensity—and, often, a garden
hose of finesse—that washed away untold competitors.

This knack for rearranging popular material led the band to expose its bumpkin hindquarters one night when Fletcher Henderson came in looking around and listening, as he was known to do. Out there, dancing in a suit looking as good as material spun from gold, he handled the attention he got from the local yokels with good humor, class, and charm, seeming every inch the nice guy.

Then, when the band started in on a certain tune they'd learned by ear off a record, Henderson danced over to the bandstand with his date. “I wrote that,” he told Basie. “Very good, but it's in D flat. You guys are a halftone off.”

Basie apologized and claimed he'd told Buster the same thing himself.

Prof was having none of it. Rising from behind his saxophone, he answered the apologist. “I had to call him on that, because we both knew old Base wouldn't know a note as big as a house.” Like many of the Kansas City musicians, Basie and his band tended to stick to certain friendly keys. “He got quiet then, and we shared the shame of being that wrong in front of a musician as top-flight as Fletcher Henderson, who was not scared of any keys. None. The four or five keys most bands used meant nothing to him, and I learned to think like that. That was why so many who had played with him were extremely rough customers—the roughest. Louis Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins, Chu Berry, Lester Young, that's four aces right there. You put in Roy Eldridge, and he will show how wild a joker can be, all night long.”

The musicians also kept up by studying the music they were brewing up back east. Listening to those recordings, Smith and others sometimes transcribed arrangements as they heard them—though it was easy to get the key wrong, because phonographs were unreliable when it came to speed. With each new arrangement, though, the Blue Devils sharpened their skills, bringing such a cutting edge to their music that they were able to keep a competitor like Kansas City's eminent Bennie Moten on the run.

The other key to the Blue Devils' ascent came from working dances like those Ralph Ellison went to at Slaughter's Hall. The antiphony, the call and response, the exchange of rhythms between the musicians and the dancers was part of the excitement, and that electric byplay surely influenced the Buster Smith style that later touched Charlie Parker so indelibly. Ellison recalled one bold, quick-
stepping dance, popular in Slaughter's Hall, that had much in common with the double-time playing style that Smith was known for. “It was a dance step called the ‘two and one,' or the ‘two
in
one.' It was a brisk rhythm in which they would dance with and against the rhythm of the bands. There was a lot of improvisation going on out on the dance floor, and these Negroes would go into quite a series of steps that carried them very rapidly from one end of the hall to the other, almost in one huge sweep of feet and bodies in motion. Then they would turn and come back down just as fast as they had gone.

“Buster Smith then had that strange, discontinuous style that one could see was also a reaction to what he was looking at from the bandstand. That discontinuity was later heard in Charlie Parker. But it could easily have some of its roots in Slaughter's Hall. You see, this was where the swing really started, not the East. Out there in Oklahoma City and over in Kansas City something was happening to the rhythm of the music. It had a certain thrust that was different, and when Basie, who was an old, ex–Blue Devil, took that feeling east, it revolutionized the sounds of the bands back there. They hadn't heard anything like that before. . . . But
we
had heard it and we had heard it often. . . . Not only did we hear it, we
saw
it, because you listened to the band swing the dancers and watched the
dancers
swing the band. It happened all the time, this trading back and forth, and old Buster Smith was right up there in the middle of it, working on that style of his and writing music.”

But the good times for the Blue Devils were short. By 1929, even with all the battles of music won and the quality of their players obvious, things went bad. The Depression dried up the free flow of gigs and the pickings soon grew slim. Then Bennie Moten started pulling the best of the Devils away to Kansas City—Jimmy Rushing, Hot Lips Page, Basie, Eddie Durham, even Walter Page himself.

Buster Smith and Lester Young remained, blowing with the diehard verve and defiance that gave the band its reputation. In Cincinnati, Fats Waller heard them and invited the entire band to accompany him on a radio broadcast. A founder of the New York stride piano school, Waller was a monumental force: a composer of many hit tunes, a gourmand who lived up to his nickname, and a mentor
whose influential model touched many players. To show them how much he respected their skills, Waller went out and bought a whole lot of gin, placing a half pint in front of each Blue Devil on the bandstand, then raised his eyebrows, putting his bulbous charm in their faces with a wink, smile, and chuckle. But Waller wasn't offering enough money, so the last of the Blue Devils took off for an ill-fated tour of the Southeast.

They were in Virginia when the stranding came, full stop. It was a familiar situation for the band, getting into unknown territory and being unprepared for failure. Sometimes that was all it took, if the audience turnout was low and the promoters reneged on the band's pay. Smith and his men worked around Newport News, Martinsville, and Blue Point for three months, eventually running out of money, having their instruments confiscated, and finding themselves thrown out of their hotel. A few of them made it home with money sent by relatives, but the others had nothing to help them get moving. They decided the only thing to do was hop a train and ride until they made it back to Oklahoma City.

A friend from Dallas gave Smith $2.80, which he used to buy some Bull Durham tobacco, some rolling papers, and a bag of cold cuts. The friend drove Smith and the seven others to the railroad yard, where they caught a train that seemed to be three hundred boxcars long. Unable to get inside, the last of the Blue Devils had to ride home in the open air, lying down in the coal cars, digging themselves holes and covering up to keep the wind and cold off them as best they could. Smith had started the trip in a black tam and a gray suit. By the time they got to Ohio, his suit was the same color as his beret.

Somewhere along the way, Smith and his men hooked up with some white hobos who took them into a boxcar. One of them wedged a stick in the door to make sure they weren't trapped inside, which could be fatal. There were twenty-one of them, all huddled around a fire built inside the boxcar, their occupations, their skin tones, their education and class backgrounds, their dreams, their fears, and even their individual takes on the Depression and the blues were secondary to the all-American shake, rattle, and roll of the iron horse, whose rhythms were captured in the beat of swing and the drive of the shuffle blues.

At Cincinnati, the train stopped. The white hobos told the Blue Devils they'd better stick around the railroad yard and not go out looking for food. As Smith remembered, though, they were also told not to worry; they'd be taken care of. The white guys went off bumming for grub and soon they were back with pieces of steak, ham, cold cuts, and bread for the Blue Devils. Then the white men took them to a hobo camp where they sat on a rug under a tree and ate a meal cooked in a pot on the ground, with all the necessary dishes and cutlery waiting for them under a sign reading “Leave It Like You Find It.”

With his Bull Durham and his food in a box around his neck, Buster Smith, along with Lester Young and a few of the others, finally made it to Saint Louis, where Bennie Moten sent a car for them. Before the car arrived, someone stole half of Smith's music.
That
was the blow. Buster knew he could write more music, but having his music stolen—that was another nail in the Blue Devils' coffin, another sign that the evening sun was going down on their small empire of swing, insouciant lyricism, humor, and spunk. This last stretch had been long, it had been hard, but it was typical of what was starting to happen as the Depression destroyed a whole world of entertainment and employment the way a prairie fire did a field.

The only way to outrun the fire was to go to Kansas City.

Shortly after they got there, Buster Smith joined Bennie Moten, putting himself back in the regional big time, a member of the hottest jazz orchestra for a thousand miles in any direction. Buster Smith was right at home—and there he would stay until April 2, 1935, when thirty-nine-year-old Bennie Moten died on the operating table while his tonsils were being removed.