Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker

Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker by the late Stanley Crouch is a biography like no other I’ve read. Full disclosure here: I’m a Jazz aficionado; and I adore Bird. So it’s fair to say that as I cracked the cover of this book it was with an open mind and a hopeful heart. I wanted nothing more in this world than to like it. Long story short, I did, and then some.But back to my original statement: it’s a biography like no other. Much of the book’s appeal has to do the exceptional writing style of Stanley Crouch. Some of his observations are like mini-reveries that soar like, well, like Bird. Observe:“…at it’s most fundamental level, [jazz] is about victory over chaos, about achieving and maintaining a groove that meets the demands of melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, and timbral inventions in milliseconds.”OR this:“Clarity is what he was after, all of the notes coming out right, none getting lost. Charlie was looking for his way to say it…. Young and skinny as he was, with mysterious bags under his eyes and an appearance just short of an unmade bed, he was the biggest force on that bandstand. When he put the saxophone in his mouth, his music seemed to fill quickly with light.”Peppered with gems like this, Kansas City Lightning feels almost like a guilty pleasure. Yet beneath all the gems there is solid research and a great deal of little-known information about Charlie Parker, the at times awkward but supremely driven young man who grew up on the Missouri side of Kansas City without a father and with a doting sometimes meddling mother. Crouch’s knowledge of jazz is nothing short of encyclopedic. He walks the reader through Parker’s formative years in music and layers it with unflinchingly honest scenes of abuse—self-inflicted and otherwise. And it must be said that the author does not dwell on Bird’s prodigious excesses, which at the time, were merely nascent foreshadows of things to come later in the fluorescent streets of Harlem. Crouch rightly avoids the lure of such tabloid issues, treating Parker’s habits instead as the baggage that they were for a young man seeking to become something more than a mediocre midwestern musician.The nightlife of Kansas City is front and center throughout much of the book, and it becomes almost a character itself within the pages of Kansas City Lightning. Crouch painstakingly yet painlessly lays out the cultural and musical terrain of the Midwest in the late 30s and 40s. And this terrain is peopled with a multifarious cast of individuals who all share one common desire: to swing and swing hard. Over the course of this book, the reader learns names that are typically not known to most followers of jazz—names like Chu Berry and Tommy Douglas. Names like Bud Smith, Charlie’s first and most important mentor, and Biddy Fleet, who helped Parker “map out the harmonic terrain of bebop.”By the time I’d turned the final page of this book, I felt as if I’d attended a feast and felt strangely sated but still wanting more. And I had only Mr. Crouch to thank for that. But then, it’s nothing that a second read can’t fix. Time well spent, as far as I’m concerned.

This biography is more a work of modern art than a documentary. Like most modern art, at first glance many of us will say, "What is he trying to do here." I had the same feeling when I first heard a recording of Charley Parker. So I guess it is fitting that his biography reads the same way. It is not that Stanley Crouch does not know how to write - this is far from his first book on Jazz, or African American History, or many other subjects. Therefore, I must assume he writes this way - flowery excess language, wide forays from the subject into related subjects, then return to the story line, like the jazz player, who leaves the melody to return later after many embellished variations.To understand the storyline or "tune" of this biography, read and memorize Chapter One. It culminates in a New York radio session with Jay McShann's band, recently arrived from Kansas City for a second try at the big time, this time with young Charley Parker - who had not yet shown up for the gig. As the band finished swinging some preliminary tunes and were ready to swing into Charley's now trademarked "Cherokee" everyone held their breath. Charley was well into his second trip with the big H and prone to show or not show. As he finally walked in there was a collective sigh of relief as the band kicked into Cherokee and Charley proceeded to blow the roof off with high velocity rips through complex chord changes, the likes of which no one there or in radio land had ever heard before from a saxophone. This was the pinnacle to which the rest of the book climbed in a winding back and forth path - including grade school, high school band, domineering mother, childhood girlfriend whom he married, Kansas city in prohibition jazz club Prendergast days, Charlie's embarrassing rejections from his early tries to join KC jam sessions, his incredible determination to learn the sax, involving up to 15 hours a day practice. In later years, his dedication to find his own sound, resulted in leaving his wife and baby to go to New York and continue his search. It was amazing to me to find that this supposed musical genius had so much trouble, and not just with drugs, as has been highly reported, but with his music, which he worked on constantly (reminding us of what Edison said about inspiration and perspiration).After winding through Parker's many disappointments, with numerous forays into such things as African and Native American history, history of the railroads, and, of course, history of jazz, the Author takes Parker riding the rails to New York where he finds a guitar player of kindred spirit (Biddy Fleet) and they spend much time practicing complex chord changes. As he comes to that pinnacle experience and the end of the Story, Crouch picks another note in the chord of the tune and says: "During his most satisfying bandstand experience, Charlie Parker knew what every talented jazz musician has, before and after: how to listen and hear, instant by instant, and how to respond to that instant, gone now and never to return."The last twenty percent of the book is about Stanley Crouch, his family history, his many interviews to write this book (which he claims took 30 years), and the many footnote comments (indexed by page, so hard to locate on an e-reader) - that is where we find hidden the reason for Parker's nickname, "Yardbird, or Bird". There is nothing about Bird's further career, his hooking up with Dizzy and inventing Bebop, or his move to California, relapse into drugs and drinking, time spent in the Camarillo mental hospital, recovery, more recordings, then relapse and death. For this part of Parker's life, another book (or Wikipedia) will be required. However, for this reader, who lived not too far from Kansas City when Bird was there but knew nothing about him then, the detailed description of what went on with the Kansas City Jazz scene in those days was very interesting. Crouch's writing style was often as hard to follow as Bird's music. But if you like modern art and you like jazz, you probably will like this book.

Kansas City Lightning relates the story of Charlie Parker from childhood to early manhood in Kansas City to when he was on the verge of making Jazz history in New York. It recounts his childhood, his first musical experiences and his rather unfortunate young marriage (like a lot of driven men, he wasn't a dependable family man), his tragic drug addiction, his first professional appearances and his musical influences (Roy Eldridge, Lester Young et al.).I have to say I was a little disappointed by this book. The colloquial style, whilst providing no doubt an authentic ambience, was sometimes for me a little difficult to follow. I would have liked to understand just what level of formal musical education Parker had, for example. Quite a lot of the book is based upon secondary sources, so I don't think there is a lot of original information in the book.There is no technical discussion of the style Parker developed, nor how this came together with the musicians to produce bebop, but perhaps that is beyond the scope of this book.So a useful book to understand the social background of Charlie Parker, less so to understand his music.

A view of the great one's early days

This book has been in the offing for about twenty years but has not been worth the wait. It is laboriously written with far too much space devoted to sketching in the historical background. Chuck Haddix's recent Parker book is vastly superior

Good paperback, nice travel size, and a cracking price.

I bought the book without knowing that this was written as the first volume of two. So, it all went incredibly well until I hit the last pages.I loved the way this book tells the story, and gives a full background and context in which Charlie Parker's life developed. It came to me as a huge insight in north american history, and black history and culture in specific. I loved and enjoyed that tremendously.So the book ends telling the story until Parker's early 20's.After finishing it, I ran to straight to google for info on Volume 2, but I found no updated info on it since 2012. On a few interviews and articles, it was mentioned that Vol. 2 was supposed to be released on 2014, maybe 2015. Two years passed and still no info on it.