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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.
Jay McShann
His death was confirmed by a spokeswoman for St. Luke’s 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.
“You’d hear some cat play,” he told The Associated Press in 2003, “and somebody would say, ‘This cat, he sounds like he’s from Kansas City.’ 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.”
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. McShann’s big band in 1941. Although his presence would ensure the band’s place in jazz history, it was Walter Brown’s vocal on “Confessing the Blues,” 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 ’40s 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 “The Last of the Blue Devils,” 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.
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