On Music
COOK, BRUCE
On Music FROM BLUES TO BEBOP by bruce cook A little life left jazz when it lost its regional flavor. Today it is barely possible to speak of the distinctions among practitioners in different...
...McShann blew Mil-linder right out of the Savoy in a battle of bands that is still talked about...
...But grand as the Basie band was, future musicologists may well conclude that the most important man to come out of Kansas City was pianist Jay McShann...
...The Charlie Parker story has a tragic end...
...He cut his first records with McShann a year and a half later and was featured soloist on two of the six sides recorded?Hootie Blues" and "Swingmatism," both McShann originals...
...Soon afterward, he got into deep, deep trouble with drugs...
...After the War, with the big-band era over, McShann went to the West Coast where he fronted several small groups while doing a lot of recording...
...Having gotten a taste for the life, grueling as it was, he decided to put together an outfit of his own...
...Drugs became his life, music only a means to that end...
...Happily, the post-Camarillo pieces again present a Charlie Parker in control...
...Eventually he returned to Kansas City, and except for an occasional out-of-town gig (like the one last month at Michael's Pub in New York) he has remained there, playing in various clubs...
...Night after night, following his last set at the Savoy they would take him out to jam in order to try to figure out at closer range just what he was up to...
...Today it is barely possible to speak of the distinctions among practitioners in different parts of the country...
...From that gem of the prairie, which stands hard by the border between Midwest and Southwest, there issued forth a whole movement, not merely a style...
...and Bird himself played with an urgency and intensity he seldom matched before or after the session that produced the single...
...It has only clinical interest: If you want to find out what Parker sounded like when he was doped to the gills on phenobarbitol, then this is your chance...
...For in addition to retaining that solid blues feeling he first demonstrated on those early Decca recordings, on some of the tracks, particularly the ballad "Just for You," he reveals a deftness and a delicacy that is quite unlike the piano-pounding, hard-driving style that secured his reputation...
...All these sterling old KC qualities—the instinct for the blues, the ability to swing and play at breakneck tempos—are very much in evidence on a new double-LP set of Charlie Parker, The Very Best of Bird (Warner Brothers 2WB 3198...
...That is where filmmaker Bruce Ricker found him for the documentary, The Last of the Blue Devils...
...It would have been better had he broken the masters instead: that way "Max Making Wax" could not have been reissued on this album...
...That he did in 1939, when Count Basie was already well established and Andy Kirk and his Clouds of Joy and Harlan Leonard and his Rockets (the other two major Kansas City organizations) were also nationally known...
...McShann made up for lost time within a couple of years with a series of hit records featuring singer Walter Brown...
...By the time he showed up for his next recording date in midsummer of that same year, there was a heroin panic in Los Angeles and he was strung out, trying to come down...
...Yet not so long ago there were separate schools that had their origins in many of America's major metropolitan areas—New Orleans jazz, Chicago jazz, even Detroit and Indianapolis jazz...
...Still, all this leaves unanswered the essential question: What made Jay McShann's band the most important to come out of Kansas City...
...But by that time —he died in 1955 at the age of 34—the revolution that he had begun back in Jay McShann's band was complete: Jazz had been turned around and sent off in a new direction...
...Even at that early date, he was one of its top soloists and was helping out with the arranging...
...The hornmen?trumpeter Joe Newman and tenor saxophonists Paul Quinichette and Buddy Tate—play as if they just happened to jam one afternoon and somebody managed to get it all on tape...
...Not the leader's artistry as a soloist—because good as he sounds even today on The Last of the Blue Devils, he is essentially an ensemble player...
...He lost touch with what it was of Kansas City that he carried inside him...
...The War was on...
...Recording success brought the group to New York at last in January 1942, and it opened at the Savoy Ballroom on the same stand with the more prominent Lucky Mil-linder Orchestra...
...He then spent the mid-'30s out on the road with a lot of bands you never heard of, one-nighting across the Southwest and Midwest...
...For while some are very good, others were cut just before Parker's drug-related breakdown and consequent commitment in California's Camarillo State Hospital...
...along with Basie's steaming standard "Jumpin' at the Woodside," and (appropriately enough) the old Lieber-Stoller rhythm & blues hit, "Kansas City...
...Yet these tracks —originally issued on Ross Russell's small and now defunct Dial label...
...It was hard to keep the musicians together, harder yet to travel and downright impossible (after the American Federation of Musicians' wartime recording ban) to make money from records...
...In a brilliant beginning as a leader, Parker put together an excellent band that included Miles Davis on trumpet and Lucky Thompson on tenor...
...No, what made the McShann band so exceptional was the presence of a moon-faced kid in the saxophone section named Charlie Parker...
...may not quite live up to the title...
...Relaxin' at Camarillo" and "Stupendous"?where he sounds as strong and confident as that kid at the Savoy who had just blown in from Kansas City—are particularly fine...
...Think about it: When Count Ba-sie, for instance, left Kansas City for New York, he brought with him saxophonists Herschel Evans and Lester Young, trumpeter Buck Clayton and drummer Jo Jones...
...He was the youngest (19) member of the orchestra when it was organized in 1939...
...He knew the blues inside out, and demonstrated at the Savoy that there were more things that could be done with a simple chord progression than the Benny Goodmans and the Jimmy Lunce-fords ever dreamed of...
...The resulting performance was so bad that, according to Ross Russell himself (later Parker's biographer), Bird threatened to go to record shops that carried the Dial label and break every copy issued from that session...
...In effect, his was a teaching mission and the most promising pupils in his class became the nucleus of that revolutionary party that took control of jazz at the end of the War in the coup d'etat called bebop...
...One of these, "Confessin' the Blues," sold half a million copies —considered a real superhit in the days before the War...
...It is an album remarkable for its easy, relaxed feeling...
...Second, his piano playing will surprise a lot of people...
...McShann is joined by a small contingent of mostly ex-Basie sidemen, and together they do a little home-cooking on a bluesy set featuring a generous selection of his old material?Confessin' the Blues," "Hootie Blues," "Hot Biscuits," etc...
...Precisely because Bird sounded so startlingly new to anyone hearing him for the first time, it was easy to overlook a lot of the homely Kansas City virtues his music possessed...
...Happily, however, you do not have to wait until the movie comes out next year to hear how McShann sounds these days...
...The feature-length film on Kansas City jazz, though still in post-production, has been shown to a number of music critics, myself among them, all of whom have come away raving about the way Ricker has captured the spirit of the town in general and the sound of its music in particular...
...And certainly it wasn't Walter Brown, for while his nasal voice and deadpan style may have sold records, they contributed nothing to music...
...Glorious as that engagement must have been, it also was the beginning of the end for the band...
...Perhaps none, though, was as influential as Kansas City jazz...
...And he would play them at tempos that left many of the musicians who tried to sit in with him dizzy and gasping for breath...
...One of a host of distinguished jazzmen born in the eastern Oklahoma town of Muskogee, McShann had a trio at a downtown bar when he first came to Kansas City in 1933...
...When and if you do see the film, you will have a pleasant exposure to McShann, as well as to a group of good local musicians brought together by him especially for the occasion...
...Bird achieved almost instant celebrity among the jazz musicians in Harlem...
...He was on booze and pills, suffering from alcoholism and malnutrition...
...When the band finally made it to New York, the engagement at the Savoy was as much a personal triumph for Charlie Parker as for McShann...
...He had decided to stay in New York and conduct his legendary nightly seminars jamming at Minton's Playhouse...
...McShann himself was drafted ' and the band broke up for good in 1944...
...Listening to "Ornithology" and "Night in Tunisia"—recorded in the spring of 1946—one can see why everybody was excited by them...
...The veteran of hundreds of cut-throat Kansas City jam sessions, Parker was capable of taking a dozen choruses of any tune or set of chords you might care to name without once repeating a single phrase...
...An album which is not the soundtrack, despite its name, The Last of the Blue Devils (Atlantic SD 8800), has recently been released...
...they came to listen and realized they were hearing something rare and altogether new...
...Parker did not move on with the Jay McShann Orchestra after its Savoy engagement...
...As for McShann himself, at least two things need to be said: First, he sings his own songs and those of others so well that you wonder why in the world he ever thought he needed Walter Brown as his big-band vocalist...
...Each had something individual to offer...
Vol. 61 • September 1978 • No. 18
