Kansas City Lightning: The Rise And Times Of Charlie Parker (2013) - Plot & Excerpts
Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker Stanley Crouch 365 Pages ISBN: # 978-0-06-200559-5 Harper 2013 Ross Russell, in the cover blurb of his biography of jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker Bird Lives--The High Life and hard Times of Charlie "Yardbird" Parker (Quartet Books, 1973), asks "Why should a white man tell this story?" and proceeds to state the obvious: "Firstly, because [as Ross Russell points out] no black man has done it yet." Now, after nearly 30 years of threatening to do so, columnist and social critic Stanley Crouch has delivered the first half of his two-part biography of Parker, Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker, thereby flipping Russell a well- deserved bird...pardon the pun. Crouch, New York Daily News columnist, jazz expert and cultural critic, is best known for his collections Considering Genius: Writings on Jazz (Basic Civitas Books, 2009) and Notes of a Hanging Judge: Essays and Reviews, 1979- 1989 (Oxford University Press, 1990), proves to be no kind of standard biography. Rather, Crouch casts a well-worn story, many times told, within the frame of an exhaustively-researched social history of Black America surrounding World War II. Add to the the cult of personality that surrounds Crouch's writing, making this biography as much a vehicle for that writing as for telling the story of America's great 20th Century composer. Not that this is bad in any way. Crouch is as much a biographer of Parker as Nick Tosches, another enigmatic culture writer, is of Jerry Lee Lewis in Hellfire (Grove Press, 2002), and that biography is a most festive read. Both men speak with their own singular voice and add their own mirepoix of expertise, knowledge and raconteur spirit to the stories they tell. Likewise, Crouch's biography has more in common with Russell's based on the narrative, story-telling quality of each. Both men spend much time setting a stage, a mood, and a perspective in which to place Parker when telling his story. While, Crouch's story, as would be expected, is more sympathetic and empathetic than Russell's, neither biography replaces the other, each offering their own important perspectives. This is amply illustrated in the opens of both books, where Russell and Crouch each sharpen their respective lenses on a Charlie Parker in full flight. Russell begins his biography with an account of Parker's opening night at Billy Berg's Jazz Club, 1356 North Vine Street in Hollywood. Parker is debuting as part of the Dizzy Gillespie Quintet, who were in residence at the club from December 10, 1945 through February 4, 1946. This was the West Coast's much anticipated introduction to New York City's be bop jazz. The scene opens with a self-indulgent Parker eating two complete Mexican dinners and drinking the better part of a fifth of gin as he cheerfully carries on with Dean Benedetti, the wait staff before Berg himself, finally encourages Parker to do his job and go out and play. Colorfully presented, to be sure, Russell, nevertheless, writes as a modern jazz church father from the perspective of one who had professional dealings with Parker, dealings that did not end well for either party. It was on this West Coast junket that Parker decided to stay after the rest of the quintet returned to New York City, cashing in his ticket home for heroin. Parker dissipated and become strung out on bad dope during this period, resulting in his six-month stay in California's Camarillo State Mental Hospital. This story is told dispassionately by Russell with an emphasis on Parker's progressive and profligate slide into dissolution. In contrast, Crouch begins his story with a slightly younger Parker, then a member of Jay McShann's Big Band in 1941, as it embarked on a stay at the Savoy Ballroom opposite Lucky Millinder's Big Band. A competition between the bands was highlight with Millinder's group portrayed as suave big-city musicians while McShann's band is depicted as hillbilly "western dogs" from the middle of nowhere. McShann brought in his raggedy band, blowing Millinder off the stage. The narrative surrounding this event is scintillating and spark filled. Crouch has always been able to turn a phrase in his own sweet way and he fills his bandstand descriptions with such. Further, what Crouch provides is a dense and terrible level of dignity to Parker's story. There are no lurid or prurient descriptions here, only neutral, accurate characterizations told within a historical framework. Lacking is any shred of Romanticism of the like found in Robert Palmer's superb tome of the American South, Deep Blues (Viking, 1995). {{m: Chet Baker = 3578}} biographer Matthew Ruddick achieved the same descriptive balance as Crouch in his Funny Valentine--The Story of Chet Baker (Melrose Books, 2012), offering a neutral center between James Gavin's fine but cutting Deep In A Dream-- The Long Night of Chet Baker (Alfred A. Knoph, 2002) and Jeroen de Valk's informative Chet Baker--His Life and Music (Berkeley Hills Books, 2000). However, Crouch spares no one when describing the rampant racism of the period, but he does so in as balanced and even- handed way as this history deserves. He pulls no punches when framing this story with Jim Crow America. This, coupled with Crouch's exceptional humanizing of Parker make the biography that much more compelling and real. What previous Parker biographies have lacked is a three dimensional picture of the artist, a fate suffered by the blues singer {{m: Robert Johnson = 8128}}, who, unlike Parker, is still awaiting his proper biography. This first half of Crouch's portrait of Parker leaves off with the artist in 1940 just after abandoning his first wife, Rebecca Ruffins, and just before the vignette that opens the biography. Parker has yet to fully develop and make his seminal recordings that would change the face of jazz. Let's hope that Crouch gets the rest of the story written before another 30 years pass.
Kansas City Lightning not only takes us inside Charlie Parker's life, but into the world of jazz, circa 1930's and 40's. Stanley Crouch's ending is a surprise because he stops in the middle, just as Parker is hitting it big in NYC. At first I felt a little cheated. Hey, this is only half a bio. Then I realized I knew all I really needed to know if I were looking to find out about about Bird, the musician and the man. The rest is more of the same. The same what? Check it out.Crouch opens the book as Charlie arrives in New York with the Jay McShann band for their booking at the Savoy. Their big chance. They're hicks, these guys from Kansas City, trying to do battle with established Harlem bands in the cutthroat world of 1930-40 musical wars. Plenty before them had gone down, returning to KC with their stomachs empty and their tails between their legs. Crouch places this event in musical, historical, and racial context. Joe Louis, Louis Armstrong, Pearl Harbor are all important to how the Savoy got there and to what goes on inside. Sometimes it seems like he's leaving Parker out of it. But he's not. Just as the music always returns to the melody no matter how far the improvisation appears to wander, Crouch's subject is always Bird, every moment.From New York, we go to Kansas City and Charlie's upbringing in a fatherless household by a doting mother. His tutelage under great musicians of his time both in the segregated school system and on the streets. We hear of his romance with first wife Rebecca (Beckerie) in her own words. "My eye fell on him . . . and I knew there was gonna be trouble. I knew I was in love with him." And trouble there was. Clear as she was about what might lie ahead, she can't help herself any more than Charlie can help shooting up his heroin. Parker is no kind of husband and father and really doesn't want to be. He plays at it occasionally, but he brings Beckerie crabs, leaves love letters lying around, and even puts a pistol to her head. All Parker's really good for is music, and sometimes he isn't even good for that--missing gigs, pawning his sax for drugs, falling asleep on the bandstand. There are those who recognize his talent, but believe God made a mistake giving it to Bird--a little like Salieri's attitude toward Mozart in Amadeus. But those folks are not God, and beneath all Parker's apparent deficiencies is a drive toward perfection, toward creating with his horn what he hears in his head. He seeks out mentors--probably Buster Smith is the most prominent--who are educated in music, who can take him through the theory he needs in order to understand the mysteries of the scales and chords and other harmonic complexities necessary to give his improvisations the power he yearns for.Day and night, often going with little or no sleep, Parker works his horn and his mind. Natural talent? You bet. But ultimately what he accomplished came as much from intense study and practice as talent. And all that made it impossible for him to fit into in everyday world. But on the bandstand? Different story, And unlike Gary Giddins in his bio of Louis Armstrong (Satchmo) Crouch never lets his feeling for his material get bogged down in technical jargon, though he doesn't shy away from that either when necessary. Instead, he helps us feel the pulse.With the Jay McShann Orchestra shouting behind him, Parker--a great ballroom dancer himself, whose high-arched feet force him to move from his heels--choreographs his improvised melodies through the saxophone. Feinting, running, pivoting, crooning, he is inspired by the dancers and inspires them in turn, instigating them to fresh steps.And thus, in passage after passage, does this superb writer paint for all of us an intense portrait of the triumph and tragedy of the gift to the world that is Charlie Parker.
What do You think about Kansas City Lightning: The Rise And Times Of Charlie Parker (2013)?
Earlier this month I read Kansas City Lightning, a new biography of the great Charlie Parker by Stanley Crouch.Right away I decided to add a review here, because I love Charlie Parker and his music. But it's morphed into something else. Reading Kansas City Lightning became one of those pleasant experiences where one thing links to another – a six degrees of separation sort of thing; it lead me into other stuff.But first: I enjoyed Kansas City Lightning quite a bit. I can’t remember now where I first heard of it, but when I did I immediately requested it via interlibrary loan. I expected a rather straightforward biography. Kansas City Lightning is not straightforward.Crouch performed a great deal of primary research over many years, including interviews with Parker's first wife. Perhaps the first thing to note is that Kansas City Lightning focuses almost exclusively on Parker’s early life. It ends just as he begins to establish himself in New York, where he became the Bird we know and love. I saw no indication that Crouch intends a second volume. He may, and I hope he does. Crouch is a jazz authority and an incisive social commentator, and a follow-up would be invaluable. But with several other Charlie Parker biographies already extant, Crouch may think his later life is a well-worn trail.In any case, my interest in Charlie Parker again on the rise, I picked up copies, via interlibrary loan, of Celebrating Bird by Gary Giddins, and Charlie Parker: His Music and Life, by Carl Woideck. Crouch’s text directed me to both. It is plain that Stanley Crouch has not only researched Charlie Parker extensively; he also shared his research with Giddins and Woideck, both of whom acknowledge this generosity.If I have any criticism of Kansas City Lightning it’s that Crouch indulges in extended digressions that aren’t always entirely relevant. I didn't mind, though. They provide context, and got me interested in, for example, checking out Jack Johnson, the boxer.One of these digressions got me looking further into the legendary Buddy Bolden. Crouch discusses him over several pages, and references In Search of Buddy Bolden by Donald Marquis. (This meant another trip to the library.) Bolden was a New Orleans cornetist active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He is considered among the first, if not the first, to play the style of improvisational music that evolved into jazz.If only we could hear Bolden’s sound! But Bolden ceased playing around 1906. Marquis describes a near-mythic recording by Bolden and his band, said to have been made on one of those old-fashioned cylinders. In 1939, one of Bolden's old sidemen told journalist Charles E. Smith that the recording “had been made before 1898, and Smith ... began an extensive search for it. [His] leads met frustrating dead ends...” By this time Bolden was dead. The cylinder was supposedly made by one Oscar Zahn. A revised edition of the Marquis book reports that in 1999 Marquis got a letter from Zahn’s niece, who wrote that a shed on her property, containing many of her late uncle's old cylinder recordings, was torn down in the early 1960s – the cylinder collection destroyed along with it.And what about Charlie Parker? Bird lives. Be sure to read Kansas City Lightning.•See a slightly longer version of this review, with informative links and other fun, here: http://bluelung.blogspot.com/2014/01/...
—John
Super book about one of my ultimate favorite jazz musicians. "What he gave the horn, it gave back. What it gave him, he never forgot."The ultimate reading day for me includes the following: rain (which we get a lot of down here in the south), a cup or two or three of strong black coffee (no pods -- I love freshly ground) and most important, the jazz music playing in the background. One of my favorite musicians is Charlie Parker, about whom this book was written. I have been wanting to read a biography about Parker for a long time; when Kansas City Lightning was published last year, I scooped it up. But here's the thing: this is less of a biography than I thought it would be. At first I was disappointed, but I kept flipping back to the book cover with its subtitle "The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker," and came to terms with the fact that a standard biography was not the author's intention. I say that up front so that if you start reading and Parker disappears for long periods of book space, don't despair and keep going. The end product as a whole is informative and frankly, quite a ride, one not solely for the jazz lover. It also speaks to African-American culture of the time, and expands out into a look at blues, swing and jazz in the context of a wider American culture. Starting out at New York's Savoy Ballroom, the "Madison Square Garden of the battles of the bands", the story takes you back in time to the Kansas City and the origins of Parker's eventual rise to fame. It was a place where musicians held court at 18th Street and Vine, where the blues morphed into a new form of jazz. The book is filled with the people, music, culture etc that influenced Parker, often related via interview by people who were there who had a connection with him. There are also times where the author goes off on serious but informative tangents and not just in the world of music: he spends time talking about the Buffalo Soldiers, the impact of D.W.Griffith's "Birth of a Nation," which portrayed African American men as the white man's worst enemies vis-a-vis white women; there is a also a brief history of minstrelsy which eventually serious African-American musicians refused to be a part of; the rise and downfall of boxer Jack Johnson and his later betrayal of Joe Louis among many others. But it's when he's into the music and the musicians that the writing shines; the descriptions of after-hours jam sessions where musicians were free to be themselves are amazing. Even though there are a number of gaps in Parker's personal life story here (as the author notes, it's largely because so much of his early years remain undocumented), the beauty of this book lies in the world surrounding Parker and how it influenced his near fanatic drive to create something new, something already inside him needing to come out. While sometimes the writing meanders, when he's ready to bring Parker back into the scene, he's in tight control. Some of these parts are reimagined, while others are based on personal memories and research. At the same time, he lets the reader know when discrepancies arise -- for example, stories told by Parker's first wife Rebecca don't always mesh with the eyewitness accounts of her sister. But while in places the writing might strike an off-key note (for me there were a few, especially when he equates "Charlie's curiosity about narcotics" to his affection for Sherlock Holmes mysteries) taken as a whole, the book has a cool flow to it, filled with vivid jargon in a style that is truly his own. Reader response has been generally favorable toward this book; after perusing several professional reviews, the same is true on that level as well. I also discovered that Kansas City Lightning is just one of a two-volume set, so I'll sit tight and eagerly anticipate the next book. In the meantime, I can very highly recommend this book, especially to fans of jazz and of Charlie Parker, but also to anyone who is into African-American history. A definite no-miss.
—Nancy Oakes
The first thing to note is that this book sets the cultural scene in Kansas City in which Charlie Parker grew up and then covers his early formative years just up until his New York debut with Jay McShann's band at the Savoy Ballroom in New York around 1940.Crouch spent many years researching this book and interviewing Parkers' surviving family members and musical peers. If you at all interested in Parker, it is required reading.That said, it often feels like there is a hole at the center of this chronicle, and that void is a true sense of Charlie Parker himself and his motivations.Crouch portrays his characteristics along the lines of Autism Spectrum Disorder, Asperger-esque. Unwilling and uninterested in participating in who and what is going on around him unless it has something to do with his abiding passions of scoring junk and making music. Maybe.The highlights of the book for me were Crouch's portrayals of the debauched and lawless culture of early 20th Century Kansas City. The cutting contests and clubs which spawned Basie, McShann and their peers.I eagerly await volume two, in which Parker, Gillespie, Roach, Monk, and others create the music we call BeBop.
—Erik
