Kansas City Lightning by Stanley Crouch Page A

interested in everything Charlie Parker did. He excited me. I was in love with him. . . . So there I was happy to watch him doing something.
    â€œI was surprised, too. Charlie played every instrument. One time he was blowing the bugle, another time he blowed the same one Dizzy Gillespie blows—the trumpet. He beat the drum. He beat it good, too. You know Charlie had rhythm. Charlie played that big thing you pluck and set on the floor—the bass fiddle. I was wondering what he was doing going from one instrument a little to the next and then another one after that. Charlie was looking for what he wanted to play. He needed a feeling of what he had to do. Charlie was looking for that feeling from his heart, what he couldn’t express in words.”
    At some point, Charlie must have played the sousaphone, because Addie Parkertold Robert Reisner she didn’t like the way her son looked with that big thing twisted around his head. She was glad when he finally got moved to saxophone, and bought him a beat-up alto that cost more to repair than it did to buy. He really seemed to like music, she recalled, and he was always going over to see Lawrence Keyes, a local piano player he was close to at the time, to get more knowledge. As Rebecca recalled, “Sooner or later he settled for the saxophone. That saxophone did it for him. It let him speak his heart. But he didn’t start with it.”
    Neither Rebecca nor Charlie knew what would happen to them after graduation, what the music would have to do with it all. All they knew was that they wanted to have some fun. The excitement blew into them like air into a balloon, and they swelled with it.
    Charlie had never been much of a dancer, but apparently that, too, had changed. “After graduation, we went downstairs in the gymnasium, the junior/senior reception,” Rebecca recalled. “We ballroomed all over the floor. He could really dance. I was surprised. Charlie Parker could surprise. You couldn’t be sure what he knowed and what he didn’t know. If he was interested, he would study. If there was information, Charlie would get it. I don’t know where he learned, but there he was at the reception dancing just as good as he wanted. He danced on his heels. Oh, he was so proper. He really did grow up. . . . The band was playing, and we were just out there on almost every dance, turning this way and turning that.
    â€œIt was a perfect evening. We were so in love. Cupid had shot us good.”
    AT SCHOOL, CHARLIE was interested only in music; by the time Rebecca graduated, he was barely attending his other classes. “I went in as a freshman,” he later joked, “and I left as a freshman.” But it didn’t matter to Addie as long as he was staying home and letting her take care of him, and he was happy with Rebecca living right upstairs.
    Edward Mayfield Jr. remembered Charlie as a difficult character. “He was kind of a bully,” he told Robert Reisner. “He was kind of a mean boy. He pushed you aside and got his horn first out of the music closet in school. If you didn’tlike it . . . you liked it anyway. He was larger than we were. He didn’t stand any kind of pushing around. He didn’t pick on you, but he would pop you in a minute.” But Charlie was serious about his music. “He was a good reader, both words and the dots. He managed to make his music classes pretty regular. He was that type of four-flusher. He mostly associated with older fellows. He was smoking and that sort of thing, and we didn’t smoke. He was just an older type guy.”
    Charlie was moved up to alto saxophone by the school’s demanding music instructor, Alonzo Davis. “Alonzo was really a good musician,” recalled Julian Hamilton, a classmate of Charlie’s. “If you didn’t want to do the music right, you stayed out of there .” Davis put Charlie on alto after he shifted