Free Kansas City Lightning by Stanley Crouch

for you. Of course, it was crooked, with the mayor in on it, the police in on it, and the public in on it. It was as wide open as you could get. No limits whatsoever. . . .
    â€œAll this meant you could have a good time morning, noon, and night. That stimulated God knows how much music—music of all kinds—and the musicians playing so much they got better than just about anybody in the country. That’s where that Kansas City swing came from. These guys were playing all the time, long hours, and then they went out jamming and might not get home until the next afternoon. A few bucks, a little taste, and they were ready for anything and anybody! It was a good-time town, all right.”
    Clarinetist Garvin Bushell, who heard the city’s earliest bands in the 1920s, noted certain stylistic differences between these earliest Kansas City ensembles and their counterparts in New Orleans, Chicago, and New York. “The bands in the Midwest then had a more flexible style than the eastern ones. They were built on blues bands. . . . They just played the blues, one after another, in different tempos.” Bushell wasn’t sure the Southwest bands were playing at the same advanced level as those he knew from Chicago. But he “heard blues singers in Kansas City, just like Joe Turner sings, and they did impress me.”
    As a reedman, Bushell observed—almost in passing—one other element that would transform jazz’s second generation: “They had also done more with saxophones in Kansas City.” The primacy of the saxophone, paired with the local players’ feeling for the blues, was central to the sound and character of Kansas City jazz. This penchant for saxophones would not only give rise to powerful reed sections that swung, shouted, and crooned the blues, but would also prepare the way for local giants of the instrument, men destined either to blow themselves into the pantheon or to arrive in Kansas City on the whirlwind of legend. After the trumpet, the trombone, and the clarinet, the saxophone was the next horn to contribute to the aesthetic evolution of Negro feelingon wind instruments.
    Invented by the Belgian Adolphe Sax in the 1840s, the brass and woodwind hybrid that is the saxophone spent its early life holding down plebian roles in parade music. But the instrument made a thrilling run to glory around the time of Charlie Parker’s birth in 1920. Like the other wind instruments of jazz, the saxophone was redefined in these years for virtuoso center stage action. The pioneers who used it to work out new developments in phrasing, timbre, and technique eventually elevated it to the same position in American music that the stringed instrument has in European concert work. It became America’s violin and cello, America’s singer of domestic song, as soon as American horn players learned to moan the blues through their mouthpieces.
    First the cornet, then the trumpet, had dominated early jazz, taking the strutting, pelvic swing of the black marching bands, the melodic richness of the spirituals, the tumbling jauntiness of ragtime, and the belly-to-belly earthiness of the blues, and pulling them together into a music that purported to soothe the mournful soul, to soak the bloomers of listening girls, and generally to cause everyone to kick up a lot of dust. But the saxophone, with its cane reed, pearl buttons, and curved body, eventually rose to champion position in jazz innovation—for many of the same reasons that the guitar, with its supple versatility, eventually became more important to blues-based Negro music than the banjo of the nineteenth century. As historian Paul Oliver notes, “The flatted thirds, dominant seventh chords, and whining notes achieved by sliding the strings of the guitar allowed blues players to copy the ‘shadings, the bendings, and the flattenings’ that field hands used in their hollers. The moans of their voices were imitated