Kansas City Lightning (32 page)

Among musicians, Chicago was famous as the town where Louis Armstrong had come up to from New Orleans in 1922 to join his mentor, King Oliver, for a red-hot engagement at the Royal Gardens Café on Thirty-First Street. The King Oliver band played the blues fast, medium, and bunny-hug slow as young Negroes danced—and equally young white jazz musicians came to hear the real thing. Armstrong became a center of attention, and he soon received an offer from Fletcher Henderson that took him to New York, which he shook like a box of loose screws in a buckboard on a bumpy road. But he soon returned to Chi
cago, recording ever more imposing trumpet improvisations with his own small groups and in duets and ensembles with Earl Hines, the piano revolutionary whose line had much in common with the inventions of his trumpet. Armstrong was long gone by the time Charlie Parker got off his freight train, empty-handed, but Hines was still there—held hostage for ten years by gangsters, broadcasting with his big band from the Grand Terrace Ballroom, unarguably challenging the New York outfits, and making records, but denied mobility under threat of death.

Charlie's first stop was at Thirty-Ninth and State Street, where he hung around at the black musicians union, Local 208, trying to get into the scene. There were jitneys everywhere, ready to carry people to clubs farther into the South Side, and the El made stops where the clubs were, at Thirty-First Street, Thirty-Fifth, Forty-Third, Forty-Seventh, Fifty-First, and Fifty-Fifth. The union was only a few blocks from the DuSable and the Morocco, the two hotels on Cottage Grove at Thirty-Ninth Street, where local artists like Hines congregated and traveling Negro entertainers took rooms. But that was the big time; Charlie wasn't ready for any of that, not yet. He had plenty of nerve, but he also understood protocol. For now, Local 208 was good enough.

With no horn to blow, looking like any other ragamuffin, he wasn't exactly shunned at the union, but no one really knew what he could do. Still, it was warmer in there than it was outside, and he could bum a cigarette or watch the guys playing tonk, telling stories, and waiting for jobs to come in over the phone or some bandleader to walk in or send a man down ready to hire. On any given evening, some gig might need a bass player, another a drummer, another a piano player, a rhythm guitar, or a small group to do a job. If you didn't have a job, the union was where you got in line to get what was coming.

Harry Gray was the head Negro at the 208. He was about five nine and one hundred and sixty pounds, light brown, and always well dressed, his clothes carrying the scent of cigar smoke. When you saw him, even if you didn't know who he was, you could quickly tell he was in charge of something; Gray had the unmistakable demeanor of one who decided the fates of others from a position of absolute security. His eyes were compassionate, but his temperament had sharp angles; if pushed too far, he might unashamedly become one of those Chicago
Negroes who would shoot enough holes in you to guarantee your horizontal position in a funeral parlor. In the teasing atmosphere among Negroes at the time, everyone knew not to bump Harry Gray too hard.

By his second day at Local 208, Charlie knew the only thing that would get him anywhere was to go out and jam, to borrow someone's horn and see if he could break into the scene. He had no intention of staying in Chicago; he just wanted to play. Then, when he felt rested up enough, he would make that last hoboing stretch to New York and find Buster Smith. Some of the Chicago musicians remembered Buster from the time he'd spent in town after Basie went east—played a whole lot of good saxophone, they said, could run you crazy on the blues— but there wasn't much they could find for Charlie until he found a horn and some clothes that prevented him from looking as though he put the big T in tramp.

That was it: Charlie had to find a place to play. The music would smooth his path. For the moment he didn't have much choice about how he looked, but when they heard him play they would know what choices he had made, how'd been spending his time. Not too long ago, people had been following him around the streets of Kansas City, waiting for him to decide where he was going to pull out his horn. Now was the time to get that kind of respect in this man's Chicago.

NEGROES IN CHICAGO
had their own excitement going; they weren't always that thrilled about musicians coming in from other places. They were proud of their town; the feeling seemed to steam out of their clothes, evident in the way they stood waiting for public transportation or drove their cars or walked the streets, wrapped up in overcoats, complaining about the weather or listening as someone told them a story, their eyes wet from the wind. They existed in that perfect American intersection where the first-class machinery of the Northeast turned and reached all the way down to the cultural bass notes of the South. If you weren't heading as far as New York, but you wanted to know what it meant to
get next to something modern, you went straight to Chicago.

The Negroes had come, up from the Mississippi Valley mostly, delta moons and limber vitality in their looks, gazes filled with impenetrable solitude and humor; their speech rhythms could be as swift as the Chicago piano of a machine gun or as thick and oily as homemade peanut butter. They were answering the call that went up with World War I, when the city's mass production businesses could no longer rely on the dirt-cheap immigrants who'd been arriving from the East for decades, ready to work in the stockyards; to pour, forge, and cool steel; or to make their way up into the higher grade of American poverty by drawing their pay in the packing plants. Now all those European workers were back across the Atlantic within the battling nations, or heading back to war, leaving plenty of work behind them. Down yonder, a generation of country people—black, brown, beige, and bone—looked north for another chance to get in on the promise of the land.

These Negroes saw a new chance to rise up from under the blood-encrusted glare of home, to pack their lives and savings into a cheap suitcase, tied up with a rope or a belt, climb on up those train steps, and watch the Delta country get behind them. They filled the colored sections of the trains, carrying biscuits dipped in molasses, fish sandwiches, ham sandwiches, fried chicken, preserves, cornbread, jars of greens, and the delicious pot liquor they drank after the greens were slurped down.

Some arrived looking as country as the mouth of the Mississippi. Others wore their down-south Sunday best, causing the red caps to laugh and the hustlers to lick their chops. However they looked, whatever they thought, their arrival in numbers changed Chicago—and Chicago changed them.

The participants in the Great Migration were met by much of the same hostility their immigrant predecessors had experienced in the second half of the nineteenth century. The rejection, the violence, and the crowding didn't stop them, any more than it did those Europeans, any more than those industrial skyscrapers stopped Chicago from being a hometown to the blues. They became part of the energy of the city, earning their positions in urban life through their factory and trucking jobs, their work packing meat or making household gadgets, and their hours on assembly lines knocking out one tool or
product after another in that town where stores were as large as dreams.

And there were other kinds of work in Chicago, in the homes of white folks who needed their floors mopped, their windows cleaned, their rugs walloped, their dishes made spick-and-span, their floors polished, their beds done, their laundry washed and ironed. When the blues craze spun off of turntables in the twenties, some white women tried to forbid their colored cleaning girls from listening to that indecent music while on the job—only to see the girls throw their heads up and walk out. But most of them kept their jobs, working through the impossible summers, the heat held in the concrete, and the winters that put white mounds in the streets, forcing them to wade through snow up to their waists. Spring was sweet, and during July or August you dreamed of autumn.

It was late autumn when Charlie Parker sidled up to one of the guys standing outside the 65 Club, on Fifty-Fifth Street at Michigan Avenue, and no one thought he might be dreaming about music. They gave him a look that was short on contempt but long on experience. These were night people, men in possession of the electricity, the anarchy, the pride, the suspicion, and the doubt of the times. They knew how it went. Whatever it was, they saw it coming. They lived in that part of the night known as after hours, when the streets were wandered by only the most intrepid party spirits, by musicians looking for someplace to pull out their instruments and jam, by johns ready to barter with some whores, and by the homeless, who had to keep in motion to hold back as much of the cold as they could.

One of the guys out in front of the 65 Club was a young Negro named Bob Redcross. Redcross, at that time, was a hustler by his own description. He worked hard at moving whatever he could and had a gift for clothing design that would come in handy later when he started suiting up entire dance bands. Light-skinned, thin, about five feet nine, Redcross had the spark of wit in his eye, but it was matched by an iciness that could be unnerving. When he went to New York in 1937, hustling the backside of the Apollo Theater with the notorious ruffians and desperadoes of 126th Street, people were heard to say: “Leave him alone. That's a Chicago nigger. He'll shoot you.”

Redcross also loved music. He was a serious collector, the kind who was there to help out famous musicians who were looking for a recording they'd made
back in the day but which was no longer in print and was scarce on the ground. If it was good, chances were Redcross had it tucked away carefully in a brown paper sleeve inside a record-album book, practically brand-new. Records were easy to break back then—they were made of shellac—but in Bob Redcross's collection, everything was in order and protected with a do-or-die attitude.

Though he was only in his mid-twenties, Bob Redcross had show-business roots going right back to the start of serious jazz in Chicago. From the time he first heard King Oliver and Louis Armstrong, sitting inside his mother's coat in the Royal Gardens checkroom, he'd known them both on stage and in private—the musicians and singers, the dancers and comedians. A curious man, a voracious reader and conversationalist, who consumed Will Durant's
The Story of Philosophy
as a young man, Redcross was also a sociable type who liked playing tonk with the guys at the 208, though he later admitted he didn't always love hanging around with the unemployed.

When Charlie Parker approached the guys outside the 65 Club, looking to bum a cigarette—this kid's pants would fit three people, Redcross thought—another who noticed him was Redcross's buddy Billy Eckstine. A twenty-four-year-old singer from Pittsburgh whose good looks and high cheer masked a willingness to knock a joker out if necessary, Eckstine had a honeyed glow that was almost irresistible to the opposite sex. Eckstine could easily have been a pimp; he had plenty of street women offering to go out and lay down some love for sale on his behalf, content to do the sweating and squealing for a Negro
that
pretty—high brown with almost oriental eyes, with those football player's shoulders and that good hair lying down like that. But: forget it. Too much hassle. Music was on his mind. He didn't avoid street-corner banter about dancing the poontango, but the pimp walk wasn't for him.

Eckstine's show-business mentor from a distance was Duke Ellington, but his singing model early on was the bandleader and showman Cab Calloway. Eckstine used to imitate the Hi-De-Ho Man, whose perfect diction and high-powered Harlem jive sold many, many records, and even broke into the world of Betty Boop cartoons, where figures like the Old Man of the Mountain were animated to emulate Calloway's dancing style. But now the young Eckstine was starting to close in on his own sound, a personal way of crooning that was
rising out of his body more clearly every day. His real dream was to become a romantic balladeer, to use his low, dark baritone to liquefy the hearts of the ladies. There was no place for that in the musical landscape of the time—not produced in the dark side of town, anyway—but that was what he wanted, and he sensed he could get it. Good male singers, from opera to pop, became the romantic force throbbing in the hearts of women. Young Billy Eckstine knew he was a good singer and was always ready to prove it.

Charlie stood there quietly for a while with Redcross, Eckstine, and the others, taking in the surroundings, looking for his opening. When the guys went back inside, he followed them. It was swinging hard in there, very hard, trumpeter King Kolax's band riding through the air in musical triumph, laying down that Chicago momentum of strut and shuffle, colored by the taint of true blues. Charlie sized up the landscape in an instant, all that Kansas City groove within reach of muscle memory. He might have looked like something time forgot, but Charlie was in no way afraid to ask to play. When he told the guys in the band he played the alto saxophone, Goon Gardner, who was at a table flirting with a girl, turned around in his chair and slid a horn across the floor to Charlie, its neck and mouthpiece twisted safely up off the ground. Charlie picked up the instrument and turned the neck so that it was ready to play.

IN JANUARY 1939,
Jay McShann and Gene Ramey went to Chicago for a two-week engagement that ended up lasting six weeks. A friend of theirs, a
Down Beat
writer named Dave Dexter, had heard them with Jay's small group in Kansas City; he loved their sound, gushing about them in print and paving the way for them to nab one of the magazine's awards. Soon they were called on up to Chicago, where McShann and Ramey put down a heavy line of Kansas City groove, giving the beat enough personality to lift and rock and swing the room.

Dexter had also met Charlie Parker in Kansas City, though he saw him only as a liar, a pickpocket, and a spoiled, selfish boy. To Gene Ramey, however, Charlie's name meant something different. Almost as soon as he and McShann got to Chicago, he later recalled, they started hearing about this skinny saxophone
player from Kansas City who had come in there and shocked the hell out of everybody who heard him. In no time, this Kansas City nobody had come into the South Side jazz world and blown everybody out. He had a stump to fit anybody's rump.