it.
Fighting and drumming are both all about hitting and timing. In those early years, I was boxing professionally as a heavyweight to earn a few extra dollars. I fought at Madison Square Garden and I was one of the preliminary bouts at the polo grounds in the Bronx when Joe Louis was the headliner. I carried on fighting until 1949. I boxed a lot of very good fighters . . . who beat the crap out of me! I could’ve made extra money wearing advertisements on the soles of my shoes.
American organized crime was also deep into jazz. Fellow travelers in the cultural landscape, the American Mafia and jazz music were both born in New Orleans and grew up together in Chicago, Kansas City, and New York.
Pianist Mary Lou Williams, who helped develop the Kansas City Sound and was know as the “First Lady of Jazz” remembered the K.C. scene: “Most of the jazz spots were run by politicians and hoodlums, and the town was wide open for drinking, gambling, and pretty much every form of vice. . . . Kansas City boasted everything New York had.”
That included the Mafia. The Kansas City Outfit, bound by the same pinprick to the finger and blood oath that bonded all the families, controlled the police department and operated overtly—as much a part of city life as potholes and parking meters. In the population frequenting their clubs, the gangsters saw a market for something only their well-connected network could provide: pure heroin from overseas. The K.C. family ran what was thought to be the largest ring in the country in the 1930s. They worked with native Sicilians and the Tampa family to import French Connection powder and spread it all over the Midwest. They brought it into their clubs (where musicians could be counted on as reliable consumers of intoxicants), and dumped it in the black neighborhoods, where an aspiring saxophonist named Charlie Parker was only fifteen years old when he got hooked on Mafia heroin and began pawning his mother’s appliances to get his fix.
Parker lived near Eighteenth and Vine Streets, where musicians flocked for late-night jam sessions and highly competitive “cutting contests.” Count Basie, Lester Young, Hot Lips Page, Ben Webster, Jo Jones, Jay McShann, Big Joe Turner, and other heavyweight talents traded punches in the form of fierce and emotional improvisations. Bassist Gene Ramey offered his take on the scene: “Jam sessions in a sense were constant trials of manhood. Different sections of the band would set difficult riffs behind soloists, and, sometimes, they would see if they could lose each other.”
It was at one such jam session that young Charlie Parker summoned the courage to sit in and blow. Drummer Jo Jones, acting on behalf of all the cats, abruptly ended Parker’s participation by throwing a cymbal at the teenage saxophonist. In jazz lore, it is one of the great story arcs in the history of the music—a humiliation that would later be avenged beyond anyone’s musical imagination.
“This gave Bird a big determination to play,” remembered Gene Ramey. “‘I’ll fix these cats,’ he used to say. ‘Everybody’s laughing at me now, but just wait and see.’”
When the time came, Stan Levey would be in Charlie Parker’s corner.
I’m about seventeen, still working for my old man in the daytime selling cars, fighting when I get a chance. Before he left, Dizzy and also a very light-skinned black guy named Carl Warwick, great guy—we called him “Bama”—they told me I should come to New York, that they’d help me once I got there. I’m really ready to go.
I’m a pretty strong kid. I always looked older than I was. I’m big. I’m walking down Market Street, which is the main drag where the Earle Theater is. Then I turn onto Eleventh and I’m just strolling into midtown, and as I’m walking by, there’s a guy. I don’t see the guy, but I hear, “Hey, get over here!”
I just hear it, I don’t know what he’s talking about. “Hey, get over here!” Like that, so I turn my head to see what’s going on. “Who? What?” And he says, “You!” This guy—big guy, a starker—standing in a doorway with a hat on, a snap-brimmed hat, and I look at him real close and he says, “Yeah you, come here.”
So I don’t move. I freeze. I’m thinking, “What the hell is this?” So he comes over to me and I’m still standing near the curb. I haven’t answered him. I don’t know who he is. He says, “Get over here, now.” I see the look in his eye. I’m starting to get worried.
He grabs me. He puts his arm around my neck and somehow gets my left arm bent up in my back, that kind of a hold, and he’s struggling with me, and I say, “What the . . .” I can’t believe what’s happening to me. Can’t believe it. I yell, “Who are you? What are you doing?” I can’t believe this guy. He says, “Shut up!” Everything races through my mind. Am I being held up in broad daylight? People are looking, people are stopped and looking. I’m saying, “Get off of me, you son of a bitch!” He says, “Shut up!” He doesn’t identify himself. Nothing, nothing, zero.
We’re struggling and struggling. I’m a strong kid, and we work each other down to the ground. As we hit the pavement, we’re half on the curb, half on the street, and he’s got a chokehold around my neck. I’m thinking, “I’m gonna die, I can’t get any air. I’m being murdered. This guy is crazy.” I have my right arm free, but I can’t breathe, I feel his body right up behind, so I take my right arm back and I hit him a shot in the ribs, God, I really give him a shot. With that, his hands release on my neck.
In my mind, at that second, I know I’ve got to kill him ’cause I’ve got a man that’s trying to kill me. I turn around. I’m very quick, and he’s on the bottom, with his legs on the street, body on the curb. I’m looking at him. Do I know him? I work my way up to my knees and he’s still hurting pretty good but he’s still got a hold of me. He’s got me by my collar and I can’t get away, and I see that he’s lying halfway down. His knee is on the curb and it’s half on the street, and see, there’s only one thing I can do. My legs are free and I bolt upright and I slam my foot down on his leg and I hear a crack. I break his leg, man.
I get up and I’m trying to get my breath, can’t believe what is happening. Now I’m getting out of here, I don’t want to know who he is. He says, “Stop! Police!” And he’s hurting. He goes inside his coat, he’s fumbling, and he pulls out a badge. He says, “Stop or I’ll shoot!” Now everybody hears it, everybody splits and I start running down Eleventh, and he shoots. Creased me right here on the ankle. He could’ve killed somebody. I’m bleeding pretty good. In those days, that’s what they do. Could’ve killed me if he hit me right. He never identifies himself. I must look like somebody in a poster. God knows, that’s all it could be. I don’t know him, he don’t know me. If he says, “I’m a policeman, let’s go downtown,” fine, let’s go downtown, there’s no problem. But they don’t do that. They do whatever they want in 1943.
That shakes me up. It was the worst thing that had happened to me in my life, up to that point. I know I’m in trouble. He doesn’t know who I am, but I’m scared to walk downtown. They all have a description, they’re looking for that description. Regardless of whether I did anything before, now I did something.
I’d been planning to leave anyway and this is a definite exit number. My friend, Ellis Tollin, we’ve been talking about it. He wants to go to New York. I say, “Fine, let’s go.”
When I tell my mother I’m going to New York, she does a fake, “Ohhh, you can’t go, that’s a terrible city. You can’t go.”
“I’m leaving Thursday, and you’ll hear from me.” And I just go. And I know she does a sigh of relief once I leave.
Ellis is ready. Good buddy. He has a nice drum set. His father drives us to New York and we take a top-floor room in the Schuyler Hotel on Forty-Sixth. First thing I do is hit “The Street.”
Fifty-Second Street evolved from a row of gangster speakeasies into the jazz capital of the world in the 1940s. Clubs lined