[Dixielandjazz] R.I.P. Myra Taylor - Kansas City Star, December 9, 2011

[Robert Ringwald]

Kansas City Jazz Icon Myra Taylor Dies
by Timothy Finn
Kansas City Star, December 9, 2011
Myra Taylor, one of the final living links to Kansas City's heyday as a jazz mecca,
died Friday afternoon in Kansas City. She was 94.
Taylor had been under hospice care at the Swope Ridge Geriatric Center, 5900 Swope
Parkway, for more than three months, said her manager, Dawayne Gilley. Her final
performance was on July 24 at Jardine's, 4536 Main St., where she performed with
the Wild Women of Kansas City, a jazz vocal quartet.
Taylor was born Feb. 24, 1917, in Bonner Springs and moved with her family to Kansas
City as a young child. In the 1930s, she became a regular in the clubs in the 12th
and Vine, 18th and Vine and 12th and Woodland districts, where she performed along
with musicians as a dancer. There, she mingled with the likes of Big Joe Turner,
Pete Johnson, Bennie Moten, Lester Young, Jimmy Rushing and Count Basie.
Her career as a singer began in the early 1930s in Kansas City, which led to a stint
through the Midwest with Clarence Love and his band. In 1937, she moved to Chicago,
where she worked with jazz greats Warren "Baby" Dodds, Lonnie Johnson, Roy Eldridge
and Lil Hardin Armstrong.
In a 2004 interview, she told The Star: "People ask me, 'Myra, are you a jazz singer?'
Or 'Myra, are you a blues singer?' I always say I'm a swing singer. A swing singer
with rhythm. And I got my rhythm right here in Kansas City. Because Kansas City blues
always had a beat. Blues with a beat. That's Kansas City."
"Wherever she sang," Gilley said, "people could tell she was from Kansas City. She
developed her own style, but it was very influenced by the Kansas City sound."
She returned to Kansas City in 1940, where she joined Harlan Leonard and His Rockets
and recorded an uptempo version of the song "I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire,"
later to become a hit as a ballad by the Ink Spots. Kansas City is also where she
recorded her best-known song, "The Spider and the Fly." In a 2003 interview with
The Star, she recalled Charlie Parker and those days:
"He was such a wonderful guy. Some days (in the 1940s) we didn't get off work 'til
4 in the morning. We'd come down to a restaurant at 18th and Vine. After they would
eat they would go to Paseo Park and have a jam session. They would play till 9 or
10 in the morning. You could see cars lined up watching whoever was in town -- Charlie
Parker, Hot Lips Page. People just sat on the grass and listened."
Taylor traveled the world from the mid-1940s on, including a USO tour with Eubie
Blake in the mid-1940s. She spent nearly the entire decade of the 1950s in Juarez,
Mexico. In the 1960s, she toured Europe relentlessly. In the early 1970s, she lived
in Frankfurt, Germany, where she owned a nightclub called Down By the Riverside.
In the 1970s and '80s she lived in southern California and did some acting, including
three episodes of the sitcom "The Jeffersons."
She returned to Kansas City for good in the early 1990s, where she recorded her final
album, "My Night to Dream," and became a regular in nightclubs, especially with the
Wild Women quartet. Gilley said Taylor got to fulfill a wish on her "bucket list"
this summer, when she returned to Chicago in July.
"She performed at a place called Andy's Jazz Club," he said. "She hadn't performed
in Chicago in about 60 years."
Her career was long and durable, Gilley said, but "she never quite became a household
name. She was always kind of under the radar. The '40s were good for her; so was
her time in Juarez. She was a big name there. And the 16 years she spent here in
Kansas City were good to her, too."
She was proud of her hometown and its heritage. In that 2004 interview, she told
The Star: "I sometimes think we don't know how important our music is to the rest
of the world. I lived abroad for 16 years and everywhere I went in Europe people
knew as much or more about Kansas City music as I did. They knew the exact street
address for the Mutual Musicians Foundation. They knew the names of all the bands,
of every player in every band."
She can count hers as one name that deserves as much recognition and respect as most
of the others.
-30


--Bob Ringwald
www.ringwald.com
Fulton Street Jazz Band
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