Kansas City Lightning by Stanley Crouch

Author:Stanley Crouch
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins

9

Playing with Buster Smith had been a dream of Charlie’s since he’d started listening to the former Blue Devil’s broadcasts out in the Ozarks with Clarence Davis. “When you got up there on the bandstand with Prof Smith, you knew you were somewhere,” Orville Minor recalled. At one point, Charlie passionately asked Oliver Todd, “Please get me in that groove,” meaning Smith’s band. But the deal was actually sealed after the Ozarks job, later in 1937, when Smith heard Parker play. In effect, he got himself hired through the quality of his playing.

At that moment, Buster Smith was almost all Charlie cared about. He wouldn’t allow his mind to set on anything else for very long. His mission was nearly sacred to him, and he went at his apprenticeship with the resolute intensity of one converted through revelation. Buster Smith knew that saxophone, and he wasn’t afraid of it. There was something in his work that lay close to Roy Eldridge; it took on the instrument and made things come out no one expected. Smith’s ideas turned corners at a fast clip, and his knowledge of the piano gave his chord structures solidity. There were also the distinctions that writing music gave his playing. The discontinuity that Ralph Ellison observed is also a way of thinking in more than one line at the same time, a way of creating something like a contrapuntal effect on a single-note instrument, playing one voice up here, answering it with another down there, starting an idea at either end of the instrument and taking it all the way to the other extreme, sailing through the ballroom of the music with the audacity of those Oklahoma City dancers in Slaughter’s Hall. All those effects—that internal dialogue, that contrapuntal effect— became basic to Charlie’s mature style.

During his apprenticeship with Buster Smith, Charlie drew on everything in front of him. After putting in his time in the lower grades of learning, now he was in musical college, doing an independent study with a master who also allowed his student performing space right next to him. In Charlie, Smith found himself with a musical son. Wherever Smith was, Parker was sure to come. Charlie studied Smith’s fingering, watched how his mouth worked when he was executing his passages. He listened for every element that connected one thing to another, asked questions about how to shade individual pitches, and worried over his tone. Smith even agreed to practice with Charlie. Master and apprentice sat down, saxophone to saxophone, playing through the lines and improvising on fast-paced pieces like “Dinah,” “Oh, Lady Be Good,” “Sweet Georgia Brown,” and “After You’ve Gone.” Parker stopped by to see Smith as he worked at the Antlers during the day, walking his stooped walk across the floor to join Smith as he worked out chord progressions on the piano.

For the musicians on his bandstand, Smith set an inspiring example. “He liked to sit down and play some chords and talk about things in the world,” Minor recalled.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.