Free Kansas City Lightning by Stanley Crouch Page A

by sliding the strings and by the use of what later became known as ‘blue notes’ ”—the subtly shaded “bent” notes that gave Negro music a particular kind of expressive power.
    That same expressiveness, in the hands of a generation of tenor and alto saxophonists—Coleman Hawkins, Johnny Hodges, Benny Carter, Chu Berry, and Don Byas among them—had fueled the rise of the Negro saxophone tradition. In Kansas City, most of the instrument’s practitioners, including Lester Young, Ben Webster, Budd Johnson, Buster Smith, Tommy Douglas, Dick Wilson, Jack Washington, Herschel Evans, and Eddie Barefield, emerged as standouts in asouthwestern scene that also included pianists and bandleaders Bennie Moten and Bill Basie, trombonist-arranger-guitarist Eddie Durham, trumpeter Hot Lips Page, singer Jimmy Rushing, and bassist and bandleader Walter Page. They were the terrors of the territories—those same territories that reached back to the Indian and desperado days, to a time that preceded all contemporary danger, when the repeating rifle of the Plains Wars had given rise to bloodletting much as the Thompson submachine gun had after World War I.
    BY THE TIME Charlie Parker and Rebecca Ruffin were up to their necks in adolescent romance, celluloid cowboys were clouding the air with the smoke of blanks—even as tales of desperadoes who were all too ruthlessly human dominated the press, magazines, newsreels, and radio broadcasts. Only the deaf, dumb, and blind would not have known of them. Contemporary variations on the James, Younger, and Dalton gangs of the Old West, Depression-era outlaws such as Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, Baby Face Nelson, and Oklahoma’s Pretty Boy Floyd were pulling daring robberies and escapes almost weekly, filling the air with the rattle of machine guns in battle with the authorities, and now and then going down in bloody exclamation points. Unknown to local lawmen and the Bureau of Investigation, the outlaws sometimes hid out in rural Negro communities, where no one thought to search for them, observed local resident Emma Bea Crouch, who recalled seeing Pretty Boy Floyd and Bonnie and Clyde in East Texas when she was an adolescent there. Others found they could hide out easily in Kansas City—even have a good time of it, as a little money here and a little money there would protect their sleep and keep them free of handcuffs. By 1929, as biographer Michael Wallis observes in Pretty Boy , Kansas City “had become the crown jewel on a gaudy necklace of lawless havens—a corridor of crime—ranging from St. Paul and Detroit in the North to Joplin, Missouri, and Hot Springs, Arkansas, in the South. A police reporter of that time compared these cities to the imaginary bases used by children playing tag. Once a criminal with local connections made it safely inside one of these cities, hewas home free. He was ‘on base’ and could not be ‘tagged’ by the authorities.”
    Along with every form of kickback he could work out, from construction scams to slot machine concessions, Tom Pendergast had cut a deal with gangster Johnny Lazia that gave vice a high and free rein. Between the two there existed a double bureaucracy of public posture and the dark world of graft, threat, and occasional violence. Never ones to scoff at new potential sources of income, Pendergast and Lazia ran something of an equal opportunity outfit for corruption. They recruited across the ethnic stretch: Irish, Italian, Jews, and Negroes alike functioned within the sector that jibed best with their expertise, their scruples (or lack thereof), their guile (or lack thereof)—or their willingness to accept that working in the underground world of clubs, music, and booze came at a cost. Felix Payne and Piney Brown were the two Pendergast Negroes best known by musicians, the liaisons who befriended them and made the Sunset Club hospitable to their efforts to