Pianist, singer and bandleader Jay McShann died Thursday, one month before his 91st birthday. Fittingly, he passed away in Kansas City, Missouri, his adopted hometown and one of the most significant incubators of modern jazz.
During the early twentieth century, jazz developed largely in brothels, speakeasies and night clubs.
While the pre-World 1930s have passed into popular consciousness, the outstanding is less widely appreciated.
of factors, including its role as a commercial center for livestock and other commodities produced in the great American Midwest, in the Negro Leagues, the Kansas City Royals and the thoroughly corrupted administration of the Democratic political machine, led by Boss Tom Pendergast.
City to work in its clubs, dance halls and assorted hangouts.
By the mid-1930s Kansas City was home to, among many others, boogie-woogie piano master Pete Johnson, blues shouter Big Joe Turner who Lester Young, the first player to suggest the modern jazz style of the 1940s and 1950s.
Born in Oklahoma, where he taught himself piano, McShann moved to Kansas City in late 1936, the year before the Basie band was discovered there by jazz impresario John Hammond, for national tours and recording sessions. By the end of 1938, the Kansas City jazz style extremely hard swinging and bluesy, On December 23, Hammond, a supporter of the Communist Party, made Swing concert, which sold out Carnegie Hall in New York the Spanish Civil War.
Eventually, McShann would fill the void Basie left in Kansas most notably, a teenaged Kansas City native and budding alto saxophonist named Charles Parker, Jr. In the opinion of many jazz aficionados including development, despite his struggle with substance abuse and premature demise at the age of 34.
In later interviews, McShann relished telling his version of shortened to Bird.
Supposedly, a car in which they were both riding to an engagement killed a chicken, and Parker insisted they pull over, so he could retrieve the yardbird and have it cooked for his dinner.
By 1939, work began drying up in Kansas City as a result of state and federal crackdowns on the political machine, with Pendergast penitentiary. Parker left for New York City, where he worked as a dishwasher, while honing his skills in Harlem jam sessions.
McShann kept his band together by touring throughout the Midwest, with occasional stops in Kansas City dancehalls still operating.
Parker in late 1939. Parker rejoined McShann the next year band in 1943, a group that included Dizzy Gillespie and several other jazz modernists.
In 1945, Parker and Gillespie made the seminal early recordings of bebop-style jazz, which overwhelmed jazz into its modern form.
series, aimed specifically at black audiences are among the impact on his peers. They make great listening today.
Hootie example, includes all the best elements of the Kansas City style, McShann s skillful piano introduction, a chorus of riffs from the band, Parker s passionate blues solo, an excellent vocal by bluesman Walter Brown ( Well, hello little girl, don t you remember me? ) and a final riff chorus.
Unfortunately, although the Jay McShann Orchestra excelled at popular songs, the success of Brown s vocal on Confessin The Band that Plays the Blues.
Live recordings, unearthed decades later by collectors Frank Driggs and Norman Saks, reveal a much broader repertoire than those on the commercial recordings, an extended, and extremely modern, Parker solo.
McShann was drafted in 1943, bringing his classic swing band to an end. He unsuccessfully attempted to establish a viable jazz orchestra after his discharge, but times had changed.
While bebop took leadership of the jazz world, McShann became a more commercially oriented rhythm-and-blues performer. He scored a huge hit backing McShann returned to Kansas City in 1950, where he raised his trip, made occasional recordings and settled comfortably into the role of an elder statesman. He was prominently featured in the excellent 1980 homage to the Kansas City golden age, Last of the Blue Devils, was interviewed in Ken Burns uneven 2001documentary Jazz, and performed during the piano On recordings, McShann displayed a high degree of piano skill, melodic improvisations.
He never developed the more modern sound of his Kansas City contemporary, Mary Lou Williams, however, and sounded increasingly dated as the years rolled on. Eventually, he began singing as well, sounding remarkably like Walter Brown.
McShann was a tireless advocate of his musical tradition.
You d just have some people sitting around, and you d hear some cat play, and somebody would say, This cat, he sounds like he s from Kansas City, the Associated Press quoted to Kansas City, which received a Grammy nomination in the traditional blues category. It was the 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.
health made it impossible for him to continue.
It was only a few days before his death, however, when he entered St. Luke s Hospital in Kansas City complaining of a respiratory infection.
chapter in the history of jazz, I strongly recommend Kansas Driggs and Chuck Haddix (Oxford University Press, 2005).
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