Kansas City Lightning (2 page)

As the Savoy engagement approached, his mood became ever more buoyant. Finally, after a job at the Paradise Theater in Detroit, the Jay McShann Orchestra struck out for Harlem.

It was February by the time they left. They drove through snow and a landscape drained of color: the earth shifted in tone from gradations of charcoal to anemic browns; now and then an evergreen or two moved up and down to the wind's whistling tune. They all knew the importance of driving carefully as they crossed snow or the slick melts that interrupted the chill, dry austerity of winter. No one was anxious to get out and experience the tearful eyes, the running nose,
the ears pierced by needles of cold as they struggled to push a car back onto the road, snow sliding down into shoes or the wetness seeping through, almost guaranteeing a sneezing sickness and an ebbing energy that would set in after the first night on the bandstand, since you knew you
were
going to play. This was the Jay McShann band, rough-and-tumble dance instigators from Kansas City: nobody complained and risked starting a collective decline in confidence. Nobody.

They rode through the cold tar of deep evening, wrapped up tight in blankets and quilts, sipping a little liquor now and then, some coffee, all the while eyeing the pale texture of the headlights against the asphalt. The motors of the cars hummed, gurgled, or rattled, the wind squeezed through some crack in a window, and there was the inevitable snoring of someone long gone to the land of nod, head filled with dreams of such imprecision they registered only as impulses of excitement radiating about the
idea
of getting to New York, walking those big-time New York streets, and seeing those big-time New York things.

It was Charlie Parker who got there first, driving the instrument truck with the valet and trumpeters Buddy Anderson and Orville “Piggy” Minor, all wide-awake and anxious to see the big city they had every intention of making submit to the power of Kansas City swing.

They rolled through the Holland Tunnel, truck filled with drum cases, suitcases, music stands, and Ramey's bass propped up in the back, surrounded by old raggedy cushions. Parker, effusive with excitement, raved to the others about New York—its size, the buildings, the food, the music. They came out onto Sixth Avenue and moved north from lower Manhattan, the pulsation and the blare of this authentic metropolis upon them, Charlie pointing things out and joking. They saw the Chrysler Building, its art deco steeple silver in the light; the Empire State Building, where King Kong had held his last stand; Radio City Music Hall, land of the long-legged Rockettes. Parker decided to drive the truck through Central Park, telling his companions they'd never seen a park this big in their lives.

Somewhere on their way across the park, the truck was stopped by a white policeman on a big horse, his uniform dark with a long strap coming across the chest, boots rising to the knees and feet at upward angles in the stirrups, the pitch
of his voice stern, irritated, and contemptuous.

The policeman told Charlie he knew he wasn't supposed to be driving a truck through Central Park. Orville Minor recalled the saxophonist sheepishly getting out, ambling to the front of the truck, pointing at his Missouri license plate, and saying with calculated ingenuousness, “I'm sorry about that, officer. It's an honest mistake. I'm a stranger in town and a long ways from home.” The cop issued no ticket, just ordered him to take the first exit and get the hell out of the park.

They checked in at the Woodside Hotel, known affectionately as the Wood House, and nationally famous among Negro musicians because of Count Basie's exuberant recording of “Jumpin' at the Woodside.” It provided room, board, and a hangout for Negro talent. It was far from unusual to see buses of Negro revues or Negro baseball teams such as the New York Cubans or the Pittsburgh Crawfords, or the cars and buses of well-known and aspiring musicians in front of the hotel, with Harlem residents pointing from across the street, moving in for autographs of the ones they recognized. From late morning on, the lobby was filled with boxers, dancers, ballplayers, musicians, fans, hustlers, hot girls game to rub up against some talent, and gamblers ready to kick off a crap or card game in somebody's room.

As soon as they got their rooms, Charlie Parker, trembling a bit and with his coat buttoned up tight, took off.

THE WOODSIDE WAS
on Seventh Avenue and 141st Street. This part of Seventh Avenue was known as Black Broadway, “the Great Black Way.” It was the widest boulevard in Harlem and the scene of the neighborhood's famous Easter Parade, which Kansas City bandleader Andy Kirk called “the most beautiful thing I ever saw in my life.” Here was where the cream of the crop and the cream of the crooks showed off their taste and their finery or attempted to bring some polish to the scurrilous ways in which they made their livings. The bulk of those seen on that thoroughfare personified the viscous vitality of the music—a beauty so rich it stuck to the mind. The skin tones of the residents rambled the gamut, inspiring the Negro people to say of their race that it was like a flower garden, including “everything from lily-white to blue-black.” There were Negroes from all over
the world there, some from as far as Africa. The aristocracy of taste and individual grandeur set styles and walked heads up, sometimes in crème-colored shoes, sometimes in suede, sometimes in alligators or leather soft as the proverbial baby's ass. They seemed the royalty of their race.

Beat from two days of travel, the McShann band dropped off their bags and headed off to set up their instruments at the Savoy Ballroom, right around the corner on 141st and Lenox Avenue. The Savoy was owned by two Polish Jews, the brothers Moses and Charles Galewski, who had changed their surname to Gale. Opened in 1926, the dance hall was fronted by manager Charlie Buchanan, an uptown real estate agent who played owner and supplied the Negro mask for the public window.

The Savoy was built for continual ritual. Inside its mammoth dance hall, two bandstands stood side by side, so that as soon as one band's set was over, the next could pick up without a pause. The music went on from nine until two. The Savoy had become
the
dance hall in New York—because of the bands that played there, but also because of its customers, whose reactions to the bandstand rhythms set standards for style, giving rise to dance steps that would spread across the nation. As the Savoy grew in fame and popularity, its clientele spread to include rich whites, movie stars, visiting Europeans, and Negroes from out of town who came to find out what all the noise was about.

The Savoy was quiet that afternoon, except for those working to get it ready for the evening's program. Even empty, though, it was still impressive with its huge maple dance floor waxed and polished to a series of shifting gleams and thick carpet covering the half of it where dancers could cool out at the tables or watch the action from settees. The McShann players started setting up their music stands and drums, got the bass in place, and soon they could hear the illusory sound of the hall—a sound that would change so much once so many bodies had crowded into the room, absorbing their notes, adding sound of their own. You had to play two or three or four times louder during a show than you did in a light rehearsal. Charlie Buchanan gave them a few snooty looks. But
they knew they'd soon put his doubts to rest.

When they returned to the Woodside, McShann's men were met by a spontaneous delegation of musicians from Kansas City, there to set them straight on the ways of New York: the best eating places, the most efficient repair shops for their instruments, the cleaners who did the best and fastest work. The musicians were warned to avoid pickpockets—to carry their wallets in the breast pockets of their shirts, hidden under their jackets—and to avoid crowds, because New York was full of barracudas looking for country boys to separate from their money. “If you look like a square, they're going to converge on you,” one band member remembered being told. “They sit back and watch for a few minutes, analyze your activities and your characteristics, and then they fly into you with some old kind of persuasion. The next thing you know is you're either beating off an assault or you have succumbed as a victim.”

The men who greeted them with advice in the lobby that Thursday afternoon were old friends, veterans of the nightlong Kansas City jam sessions and the territory bands. They were also part of an artistic tradition, one that had been eroding stereotypes for years by using music to express emotion in terms that were both brand-new and continually evolving. Though the music was filled with references to inside stuff—a particular person, a street corner, a club, a nickname—the penetration of the rhythm, the swing, the harmony, and the melody made it one with the external world. Once there were physical replies to the music in the form of dance, the beat had such irresistible vigor that it transcended all lines.

Travel was one of the many complications in the jazz musician's life. Performing in town after town, city after city, state after state, had taught these Kansas City players that the world wore many faces after dark and in private. They had seen the high and mighty get low-down and dirty, the low-down and dirty get high and mighty. They learned a great deal about what music did to women and what those women might do for the excitement of experiences with men of the world, these colored fellows who appeared free and drifting on a cloud of glamour, gifted with the ability to shape moods with sound. There was always a lot to find out when people gathered to pursue happiness—dancing, romancing, soaking up the atmosphere of joy.

The Woodside welcoming committee that day included some very important Kansas City musicians. There was Oran “Hot Lips” Page, a master setter of riffs on his trumpet; Walter Page, who had invented the modern way of phrasing a bass line and had almost single-handedly organized the jazz rhythm section for ultimate swing; Pete Johnson, perhaps the king of boogie-woogie piano; Eddie Durham, one of the greatest Kansas City arrangers; and members of Andy Kirk's band, an organization that had gotten national attention in 1936 with the hit song “Until the Real Thing Comes Along,” one of the first recordings of a Negro using the romantic ballad tradition, as opposed to blues. But the musician who was probably given the most respect happened to be Count Basie's tenor saxophonist, Lester Young, known in Kansas City as “Red,” a Negro nickname for those light-skinned enough to change color when the blood rushed to their faces. In New York, Young had made a series of inspiring recordings with the singer Billie Holiday, and she had given him another name, one that expressed her equal admiration for Young and for President Franklin Roosevelt, who was as popular among colored musicians as he was among Negroes in general (though his wife, Eleanor, was appreciated even more for speaking out against racism). Now Young was known as “Pres,” for president, and his smooth yet determined air was a bit more refined than it had been ten years earlier.

The McShann men, who were as far from fantasy as they were from Kansas City, knew they wouldn't have two years to whip their listeners into shape the way Basie had. They would either make it or break it, collapsing in defeat the way Harlan Leonard's band had when it came to New York in 1940, cow-flopping at the Golden Gate Ballroom on the corner opposite the Savoy. Yes, they were told, New York was a big town and different from Kansas City. The corruption wasn't as obvious here as it had been under Pendergast back home, but the gangsters walked softly and carried big guns. And there were other differences: integrated couples walked in the streets during the day, for instance, and it wasn't unusual to find Lana Turner, Greta Garbo, and other movie stars at the Savoy, dancing or enthralled by the motion on the floor. As they relaxed in their rooms, drinking or smoking joints rolled from the red Prince Albert can of marijuana Pete Johnson had brought, they all wondered how they would do out there on the bandstands at the end of that shining maple floor, soon
to be covered by hundreds and hundreds of Negro feet.

BUT THE THINGS
his fellow band members were thinking about were of no consequence to Charlie Parker. He had his mind on other matters. Getting in touch with other musicians was high on his agenda, but first Parker had to deal with the condition of his body—to establish connections of another, more urgent kind. Then, and only then, would Charlie Parker the musician take over.

At this critical point in his development, the twenty-one-year-old Parker was possessed by his music—by a ravenous need to improvise, to learn new tunes, to find new ways of getting through the harmonies with materials that would liberate him from clichés. Once he did, his new ideas so excited him that he would play around the clock, looking for another bandstand to test them on as soon as each night's paying gig was done, and yet another if the after-hours players wrapped things up too soon to satisfy him. To McShann, Parker seemed to have a crying soul, a spirit as troubled by the nature of life as it was capable of almost unlimited celebration. But the saxophone was all he really had: it provided him with the one constantly honest relationship in his life. What he gave the horn, it gave back. What it gave him, he never forgot.

But there were plenty of other things to forget. The world had constantly disappointed Charlie Parker. For all the satisfactions of his music, for all the light jokes and deep laughs on the road, he was basically a melancholy and suspicious man, a genius in search of a solution to a blues that wore razors for spurs. And, like a tight number of younger musicians, he found it so much easier to relax, to tame his perpetual restlessness and anxiety, when he rolled up his sleeve and pushed a needle into his vein. That winter afternoon, Parker likely walked the few blocks from the Woodside to Monroe's Uptown House on 133rd Street and Seventh Avenue, where he knew he could always taste from a big pot of food on the stove—and find his old friend Clark Monroe, who knew all the hustlers, who knew who had the dope, how much it cost, and how dependable they were.