[Dixielandjazz] Jay McShann - NY TIMES OBIT

[Steve Barbone]

Jay McShann, 90, Jazz Pianist, Bandleader and Vocalist, Dies

By PETER KEEPNEWS
Published: December 9, 2006

Jay McShann, a jazz pianist known for his hard-driving, bluesy style but
probably best known for giving Charlie Parker his first big break, died
Thursday in Kansas City, Mo. He was 90, according to most sources (including
Mr. McShann himself and his family), but 97 according to some others.

His death was confirmed by a spokeswoman for St. Luke¹s Hospital in Kansas
City.

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, when Kansas City was a hotbed of jazz
activity, Mr. McShann was in the thick of the action. Along with his fellow
pianist and bandleader Count Basie, the singer Joe Turner and many others,
he helped establish what came to be known as the Kansas City sound: a brand
of jazz rooted in the blues, driven by riffs and marked by a powerful but
relaxed rhythmic pulse.

³You¹d hear some cat play,² he told The Associated Press in 2003, ³and
somebody would say, ŒThis cat, he sounds like he¹s from Kansas City.¹ It was
Kansas City style. They knew it on the East Coast. They knew it on the West
Coast. They knew it up north, and they knew it down south.²

Born in Muskogee, Okla., Mr. McShann was already a well-traveled musician
when he settled in Kansas City in 1936. After a club where he was performing
in Kansas was closed in a police raid, he boarded a bus for Omaha, where he
had family. But during a layover in Kansas City he ran into some musicians
he knew and, learning that work was available there, decided to stay.

He formed his own small group a year later, and in 1939 he expanded it to
big-band size. Among his sidemen was a teenage saxophonist named Charlie
Parker. Within a few years Parker would emerge as the leader of the musical
revolution known as bebop, but it was Mr. McShann who gave him the training
he needed in the basics of swing and the blues.

Parker made his first commercial recordings with Mr. McShann¹s big band in
1941. Although his presence would ensure the band¹s place in jazz history,
it was Walter Brown¹s vocal on ³Confessing the Blues,² recorded that same
year, that gave the band its first and biggest hit, and the McShann ensemble
became best known for its blues records.

After a triumphant performance at the Savoy Ballroom in New York in 1942,
Mr. McShann seemed poised to take his place among the leading swing
bandleaders. While that never happened, primarily because he was drafted in
1943, he did have some success in the nascent field of rhythm and blues in
the late ¹40s with, among other recordings, the first by the singer Jimmy
Witherspoon. But he spent most of the next two decades back in Kansas City
and out of the limelight.

His career picked up momentum following a successful European tour in 1969,
and for the rest of his life Mr. McShann ‹ working solo and leading
ensembles of various sizes, this time handling the vocals himself ‹
performed and recorded frequently, both in the United States and overseas.
He was also featured in a number of documentaries, most notably ³The Last of
the Blue Devils,² a 1980 film about Kansas City jazz.

Among the many honors Mr. McShann received late in his career were an
American Jazz Masters grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1986
and a Pioneer Award from the Rhythm and Blues Foundation in 1996.