Jazz for aficionados

In his autobiography, Basie related how Hawkins went on the bandstand “and he started calling for all of those hard keys, like E-flat and B-natural. That took care of quite a few local characters right away.” Basie did not recall Mary Lou Williams’s presence, but he conceded that he left early and she might have come later. (She did.) But the very fact that he went home to go to sleep, he emphasized, suggested that no real battle was taking place: “I don’t know anything about anybody challenging Hawkins in the Cherry Blossom that night,” he reiterated.

Basie acknowledged how subjective such undertakings could be when he mused, “Maybe that is what some of those guys up there had on their minds,” adding, “but the way I remember it, Hawk just went on up there and played around with them for a while, and then when he got warmed up, he started calling for them bad keys.” He concluded, “That’s the main thing I remember.” Williams’s version of the story is neater and more dramatic than Basie’s, and perhaps closer to what Kansas Citians wanted to believe. But as Basie pointed out, sometimes it was a matter of opinion as to who won a cutting contest.

There is another problem with the accepted version of the tale: Young also told it differently, without making any mention of a cutting contest. He explained that he and Herschel Evans and others were standing outside a Kansas City club one night, listening to the Henderson band: “I hadn’t any loot, so I stayed outside listening. Herschel was out there, too.” Coleman Hawkins had not shown up for the date, so Henderson approached the crowd of hangers-on and, according to Young’s account, challenged them, asking (in Young’s words, which were not necessarily Henderson’s own), “Don’t you have no tenor players here in Kansas City? Can’t none of you motherfuckers play?”

Since Evans could not read music, Young accepted the challenge at the urging of his friends. Young recalled how he had always heard “how great (Hawkins was)�grabbed his saxophone, and played the motherfucker, and read the music, and read his clarinet part and everything” Then he hurried off to play his own gig at the Paseo Club, where a mere thirteen people made up the audience. Young nonetheless savored the memory of his triumph, observing, “I don’t think he (Hawkins) showed at all.”

By Young’s account, his success that night was highly symbolic, given that Hawkins was not even present. After all, with no rehearsal, he sat in the great saxophonist’s chair and played his part, reading the music on sight “and everything.” The basic point of the Williams and Young versions is the same: the new stylist with a local following defeated or matched the champion tenor player from the premier New York City jazz orchestra. Williams’s retelling of Young’s triumph sought to legitimize a new tenor stylist; the detail about Hawkins’ ruining his new car was very likely an embellishment designed to enhance the taste of victory by stripping the loser of a prized possession.

Mary Lou Williams’s account served to validate not only Young himself but also what would become known as the Kansas City style or school. It made the tenor saxophonist’s subsequent attainment of the Hawkins chair in Henderson’s band more meaningful, since this particular jam session was said to have convinced the orchestra leader that he needed to hire Kansas City men such as Young. However, the reputation that Young had earned with King Oliver and his sidemen may have played just as great a role in Henderson’s recruitment of him as the famous story of Young’s defeating Hawkins. King Oliver, Snake Whyte, trumpet player Herman “Red” Elkins, and others spread word of Young’s impressive abilities among fellow musicians. Some time later, for example, Elkins ran into Red Allen and asked him, after he had heard Young play, “What did you think of Lester?” “Oh, he was all right, but he wasn’t no Hawk,” Allen said. Elkins responded to the lukewarm statement by exclaiming, “I know he’s no Hawk. Prez will set Hawk down in a jam session and blow him clear out the room!”