Kansas City Lightning (28 page)

When Charlie got home, he went upstairs to see Rebecca. He was obviously upset; Rebecca noticed him pushing his tongue against his lower lip, the way he did when things troubled him. Yet to Rebecca it seemed as though he was about to cry. She felt as if there were no air, only emotion pushing at them from every direction. That emotion on her side turned to pain, and she began to wince as a large clot of blood made its way out with what was not a distorted baby but a string of flesh, not yet developed enough to be recognized as an unborn child. There was no time to think about that; within moments, the immobile string of flesh was followed by a gushing. Charlie was moving to assist his wife. He took the clot, dropped it in the bedpan, perused it very quickly, and stepped to the toilet. Then it was gone.

Coming out of the bathroom, Charlie was fully a man somehow; in the moment of crisis he summoned full authority, shouting to Parkey that Hattie Lee had to call a cab
now
. Terrified or not, he rode with Rebecca, trying to soothe her as she continued to bleed. At the hospital, he told the staff it was an emergency and signed his wife in.

Rebecca was in the hospital for four or five days. Charlie never visited her there as she was mending, nor did he touch the wire.

When it was time to go back to Olive Street, Addie Parker came with Francis Leon and took her daughter-in-law home. There Charlie treated her just as he had before, never talking with her about what had happened, not even with his eyes.

Surrounded by the familiar and the mysterious, Rebecca was relieved. Already nearly driven crazy, she realized now, clear as a bell, that she never again wanted to have another child with the sort of man Charlie Parker had become. Not with all she had gone through, with the signs and the pain of her body's aborting, the strip of flesh and the blood clot, the gushing, the cab ride to the hospital, and all the days to think that followed. Not in this life would she allow that to happen, the good way or the bad. So help her God.

I
n April 1938, Jay McShann took the first Negro group out to Martin's-on-the-Plaza, a club where particular white people congregated—the rich. It was a small unit that had come about in the way that things often happen in jazz, when McShann, who'd been playing around town for a little more than a year, learned that Walter Bales, a wealthy white man, wanted him to come to his home. Without knowing much about what Bales wanted, McShann made the trip, hoping another job might come out of it—another opportunity to keep some grits and gravy on the table. It turned out that Bales had made some money backing Count Basie, and he was interested in hearing whether McShann might have what it took to follow in Basie's footsteps, to become more than just a good piano player, to take those giant steps. No one knew who would. Any chance to get somewhere was better than looking down the throat of a potential gift horse. Walter Bales did not have the sound of jive in his voice. That was good enough.

The meeting was fortuitous. It began with playing. Nothing else for four hours except sipping a bit as they went along, becoming relaxed enough to drop some suggestions. Bales played well enough himself that he felt able to give McShann some advice, to counsel him to calm down and not pound the piano. He could slip into his ideas gently, controlling the pace, avoiding the temptation to rush. Then he could pull more colors out of the keyboard by refining his touch. All
of that sounded good to McShann, who recognized informed talk when he heard it. This rich fellow had a real feeling for the art of jazz, for how to inspire professionals who wanted to take their playing down as many corridors as they could effectively run. And McShann was certainly a buoyant guest; he could have been having as good a time as Upper Crust Walter, the one accustomed to hearing this new guy from Muskogee, whom some were already calling a meathead, as he sat there playing all night in the clubs, trying to hold up the swing and keep the groove in place, and dealing with all the boredom he had to triumph over; anything that helped expand what he was trying to do, he would listen to quick, in a hurry.

Like most, high or low, Bales took a liking to McShann, and the two men started getting together regularly, either at Bales's home or in Kansas City proper, where he would rent two pianos at Jenkins Music Company. Those sessions, with the liquor, the jokes, the talk about who came from where and who had seen what, edged into the music itself, keyboard conversations in which familiar phrases and tunes were approached respectfully or with parody. Bales would show McShann something he had picked up from Basie; McShann would show Bales things he had heard or figured out for himself. Together they swung, romped, and put down the rhythmic figures that defined the pulsation of their world, in Kansas City and across an America full of people who spent their days looking in store windows, peering up at movie marquees, listening to radios, watching the forward march of technology, and feeling the melancholy of the Depression challenged by the musicals, the dances, and the tall-tale dreams of the era.

It was through Bales that McShann met Count Basie—a thrill, to see the master of Kansas City piano right there in the brown flesh, his clothes store-bought, the ragged days behind him, the dry humor and appetite for ribs and good spirits all intact. And it didn't stop at one meeting. Soon Bales was renting three pianos when Basie was in town, so they could all go at it together until they were satisfied. “Walk three,” as the order used to come at the Reno Club.

Bales started hiring McShann for private parties. And he started suggesting that this relatively new Kansas City musician start thinking of himself as a bandleader, not just as a member of pickup duos and trios. McShann liked Bales, he could see that he was a white man who enjoyed picking himself a Negro to
groom and help, to present and push. Profit wasn't part of the deal; it was the satisfaction of taking one's money and adding something, separating from simple, flatfooted privilege, and moving forward as a member of an aristocracy, insiders sensitive to blues and swing as they were right there, right then.

Walter Bales, and those like him, were patrons of homemade art. They were as natural as the musicians they often loved. In some extraordinary way, these people sensed the wonder of a music that had no academic credentials, no long history, and was being made up day by day, tune by tune, on bandstand after bandstand, in one dance hall or nightlife joint after another, disappearing into the air more than 99 percent of the time or else leaving a short stack of recordings to speak for thousands of hours of effort, struggle, dismay, excitement, and success. Those like Bales were part of the tradition of true believers, often wealthy, who have stepped in with assistance when an art form needs them—as they did for George Balanchine when New York City Ballet was built, or for the Museum of Modern Art when it was planned and formed. True believers arrived, sometimes just in the nick of time, to bring a new movement in the American arts to fruition. Patrons were often reaching down from above, but they just as often knew how to pick up the dice, blow their hot Olympian breath on those bones, and roll them.

At that point, Jay McShann had made no recordings at all. He was just a man who had come into Kansas City after roaming the territories in second-string bands, and who'd gotten a bit of local experience in Buster Smith's small group and big band. He was jolly, round-faced, and loved him a chance to sip until he was mellow. But there was something else there. McShann could swing, could swing very hard. He knew how to accompany a singer, how to support, nudge, lay back, underline something, hold a groove, and help somebody get out of a song if things got knotted up. Bales heard promise in this young man with the flat Oklahoma accent, the spiraling light in his eyes, the big laugh, and the feeling of anticipation that always purred under the skin of musicians who could swing. Walter Bales intended to see just how much promise stood right before him, and he started testing McShann immediately.

When Bales told McShann that a friend of his wanted to bring a band into Martin's-on-the-Plaza, McShann put together a group for the occasion, but its
personnel kept changing as the gig went on. One evening, McShann was listening to the Sunday broadcast from Lucille's Paradise, where Buster Smith was working. Smith was whipping up a hurricane of swing, spinning through those tunes and turning them into splinters. McShann shook his head in wonder at his old bandleader's work, and when he saw Smith a short time later, he was delighted to tell him how much he'd enjoyed the broadcast.

“That wasn't me,” Smith said. “That was Charlie Parker.”

McShann was shocked, but it was true. Smith had refused to perform that night after some hassle over money. Charlie had played in his place.

“That's when I woke up to how much Buster was in Bird,” McShann said.

McShann encountered Parker when he took a small group to do battle with Harlan Leonard, a veteran of Bennie Moten's band. Charlie was among the opposition. Another alto player, Leonard had made his way up through the Kansas City system, had gotten his early discipline at Lincoln High from Major N. Clark Smith, had solid command of his horn, and wasn't about any foolishness. He was a sophisticated player, with one blind spot: he wasn't very good at setting tempos, which kept his repertoire from swinging as much as it could—but he had a sense of how the music should go. Leonard had first shown his independence in 1931, when he and a group of musicians broke away from Moten, convinced that he was getting too much of the money from their jobs—and that he had become too enamored of the eastern style. Leonard and company thought the band should stomp, stomp some more, and keep on stomping. As the leader of the saxophone section with his alto, he brought a big sound, precise reading abilities, and a willingness to become a tonal part of the rhythm when a riff was set.

In an interview with Ross Russell, Leonard made it clear that he understood what made jazz the force that it was. “You could divide jazz musicians into two classes, the trained men, like myself, and the people I call ‘naturals'—those with
natural
ability, who were usually self-taught and used unorthodox fingering, embouchures, reeds and so on. You needed both kinds in a strong band. For example, Basie later on had to hire trained men like Ed Lewis and Jack Washington to steady his sections, even though he had great natural players like Buck Clayton and Lester Young. A band's intonation and sound quality depended a great deal
on accurate section leadership. I always thought of myself as a trained man, a good sight reader and section leader, not as a hot soloist or highly gifted improviser. Some of the great naturals were Prof Smith, Eli Logan, Snub Mosley, Fred Beckett, Lester Young and Charlie Parker.”

Harlan Leonard may have understood band dynamics, but Jay McShann knew how to swing and find the right tempo for it. McShann's six-piece group, with Gene Ramey on bass and Gus Johnson on drums, ran over Leonard, swung him against the wall. The force of McShann's rhythm section held up, showcasing and inspiring the featured players. The pianist knew how to get down into the cracks of the blues, using a groove so rich it popped the right notes out like slices of bread in a toaster.

Charlie was startled by how good they sounded. He was sounding good himself, playing with a hard, intense sound that wasn't yet satisfying him, but that kept his fast passages from running together, turning to mush. Clarity is what he was after, all of the notes coming out right, none getting lost. Charlie was looking for his way to say it. He had something of Chu Berry's snapping attack, but there was a different urgency in his playing. Young and skinny as he was, with mysterious bags under his eyes and an appearance just short of an unmade bed, he was the biggest force up on that bandstand. When he put the saxophone in his mouth, his music seemed to fill quickly with light. Harlan Leonard looked at him with appreciation and disdain, a cold respect.

Before the gig was over, Charlie came up to McShann. “I like that rhythm section! Can I join you?” McShann knew big talent when he heard it, but he didn't want to be bothered with Charlie Parker's problems—problems that were already all over the Kansas City grapevine. The word was, Charlie was great as long as he was blowing his horn, but once he put it down—bad news. McShann declined to bring him in. He was trying to build something solid, and he didn't want anything to do with unreliable musicians. Charlie Parker sounded fine, but he would have to keep sounding fine somewhere else.

On those spring evenings when Charlie was working with Harlan Leonard at the Dreaming Club on Cottage and Vine, a younger kid named Junior Williams used to wait for him to get off, and they would walk the streets together. Sometimes Charlie bought a quart of orange juice, nearly finishing it before passing it
to Williams for one last gulp. Sharing didn't come natural to Charlie, but Williams didn't care. He wanted to play the alto saxophone, and he'd been following him ever since word started getting around that Charlie Parker was turning into a hot force, just a step or two below Buster Smith and Tommy Douglas. Williams recalled passing Lincoln High after school, back when Charlie was still a student there, and seeing him going over some music lesson with Miss Marson. That was only a short time ago, but now it seemed a small point on the rearview mirror of memory. Charlie had whizzed right up out of the gutter of disrespect to take a real place in the ranks of local musicians. Little crowds of younger men like Williams would follow him as he strolled the streets, deciding where he was going to jam. There was something miraculous about it all.

Though not yet a king, Charlie was a prince of Kansas City, and his dominion extended as far as his sound carried. To those who heard him at this point, it seemed clear that some sort of serious crown would someday rest on his head. He was still shy, but there was something both charming and lumpy in his demeanor. Though he still displayed the nervousness of his youth—and his condition—the young man was starting to walk with a different feeling, no longer the jerky dig of the kid who left home every night wondering if he would be rejected before the night was over. He was starting to hold his saxophone case with the confidence of a young doctor carrying his medical bag, one who knew well that his skill and what he did with his tools could keep pain at bay.