Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Frank Buchman-Moller is head of the jazz archive at Carl Nielsen Academy of Music in Odense, Denmark. He is the author of You Just Fight for Your Life: The Story of Lester Young and You Got to Be Original, Man!: The Music of Lester Young.

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SOMEONE TO WATCH OVER ME

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS

Contents

Preface.....................................................................viiAcknowledgments.............................................................ixIntroduction................................................................xiii1. Kansas City Childhood (1909-1927).......................................12. From Piano to Saxophone (1927-1931).....................................113. From Kansas City to New York (1931-1934)................................184. From Smack to Duke (1934-1940)..........................................305. Golden Years with Ellington (1940-1943).................................576. From Fifty-second Street to Kansas City (1943-1949).....................1007. From Kansas City to Monterey (1949-1959)................................1348. Last Years in the United States (1959-1964).............................1799. First Years in Europe (1964-1966).......................................21310. The Dutch Years (1966-1969)............................................23711. The Last Busy Years in Denmark (1969-1973).............................268Appendix: Ben Webster on CD, DVD, and VHS...................................323Notes.......................................................................327Index.......................................................................347

Chapter One

Kansas City, Missouri-to the jazz aficionado the name rings as romantic and sweet as New Orleans, Chicago, and New York. One imagines jam sessions and small, smoke-filled rooms, where jazz is played till early morning by legendary musicians like Bennie Moten, Andy Kirk, Count Basie, Lester Young, Mary Lou Williams, Dick Wilson-and Ben Webster.

The real Kansas City of the early twentieth century was more mundane. It was an enterprising town, situated where the Kansas River-also called Kaw River-meets the Missouri. It became a junction for Midwestern trade, traffic, finance, and industry. A small trading station in the 1820s, by 1860 the town had grown to forty-five hundred inhabitants, and when a railway bridge over the Missouri was completed in 1869, development intensified even more. By the end of that year, seven railroads led to Kansas City, a number that was to double over the next ten years. As a result, trade with livestock from Texas and grain from the North blossomed. The city's livestock market grew to become the country's second largest after Chicago, as did its meat industry. In the humid summer heat, a heady stench from the livestock markets and industrial chimneys clung to the city.

The grain market and flour production grew to become the nation's third largest. Work was plentiful, and the population exploded. The Kansas City of 1880 had a population of 55,000. By 1890 that number had multiplied to 132,000, to 164,000 in 1900, to 250,000 in 1910, and to 325,000 in 1920. By 1930, 400,000 people lived in the city. From 1910 to 1930, the black population stayed at a fairly constant 10 percent.

Around 1900, the black population, initially spread over the city, became concentrated in an area bordered by Independence Avenue to the north, Prospect Avenue to the east, Twenty-seventh Street to the south, and Oak Street to the west. Most blacks were employed as industrial workers, waiters, janitors, or assistants of some sort.

On March 27, 1909, at 12:02 P.M., at 2441 Highland Avenue, on the south side of the black ghetto, Mayme Barker gave birth to a boy baptized Benjamin Francis Webster.

In the early nineteenth century, one of Ben's great-grandmothers was brought as a slave from Guinea in West Africa to a Kentucky plantation. Her son fled from slavery and settled in Liberty, Missouri. He called himself Missourian Sall. His wife bore him four daughters, one named Alice, another Agnes. Alice married into the Barker family and gave birth to five children, among them one girl, Mayme, born in 1872. Mr. Barker died early and Alice remarried George Ruff, but had no more children.

Alice's sister Agnes (1864-1963) came to play an important part in Ben's and Mayme's lives, helping to raise Mayme and her sister Blanche, as Alice and George Ruff worked to make ends meet. Agnes Johnson was a woman of principle and strong will, a puritan with a good heart. When Blanche left home to marry Harley W. Robinson Sr., Mayme stayed on with Agnes in Kansas City and attended teacher's college, just as her older sister had.

When she was thirty-five, Mayme went to Chicago to take a course at the University of Chicago. At a party in Bob Mott's Pekin Temple at 2700 South State Street she met a tall, handsome man six years her senior. His name was Walter Webster. They were married on Sunday, September 17, 1907, in the hometown of the bride. The ceremony was held at West Point Baptist Church, and Mayme's eleven-year-old niece, Joyce Cockrell, was bridesmaid. The newly married couple moved to Chicago, where Walter was employed as a waiter on the Pullman Company's dining cars.

The marriage was a disaster. Reality proved to be much less poetic than Walter's promises had been. They lived in a one-room apartment on the southeast side of the Windy City's Black Belt, where they shared utilities with three other families. What was worse, the mild-tempered Mayme soon discovered that Walter was a crude, violent, and alcoholic womanizer. In September 1908, a visiting family member found Mayme pregnant, undernourished, and weak. Agnes decided to intervene. In January 1909 she arrived in Chicago, and through her resolution and authority managed to take Mayme back home to Kansas City, where she once again moved into the house on Highland Avenue.

Mayme and Walter were not yet officially divorced when Ben was born, which is why he was given his father's name. Mayme took back her maiden name after the divorce. Shortly after Ben's birth, the three of them moved to a two-story house at 1222 Woodland Avenue close to the corner of Twelfth Street, and after summer vacation Mayme resumed teaching. Agnes presumably gave up her job to raise Ben until he was old enough for school.

Ben was spoiled equally by his mother, whom he called "Mayme," and by Agnes, whom he called "Mom." He always got his way: "I was pretty lucky when I was a kid, very lucky. I should say fortunate," he recalled later in life. "If I wanted a bicycle, my mother would buy it for me. If I wanted a wagon, she would buy it, and if I wanted skates, my mother would buy that for me." Apparently the family had no financial worries; pianist Mary Lou Williams, later Ben's girlfriend and lifelong friend, recounts that Ben "came from a very wealthy, wonderful family of doctors and lawyers and teachers," and that he always dressed in the most expensive clothes.

Spoiling Ben might have been one way of keeping peace in the household. His temper was known to fluctuate from one extreme to the other. "Mayme, his mother, was a very intelligent, quiet, lovely person of high morals," Joyce Cockrell remembered. "And his father was earthy, and he had a high temper, so that was responsible for him [Ben] being a dual personality. Ben could be just as lovely and sweet as he possibly could be, but if you made him angry, he could be violent and almost brutal."

While Ben was still a small boy, Mayme married Frank W. Love, an army officer six years her senior, but Ben never...