The legend in the lounge
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The longevity of the career of Jay McShannis is notable even for a jazz performer
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PIANO MAN Jay McShann is remembered as a blues-jazz pianist with a resounding voice
There's a famous story that tells how Louis Armstrong, coming upon Joe "King" Oliver, his mentor, selling vegetables by the roadside in New Orleans, gave him a hundred-dollar note. Many of jazz's early pioneers were similarly knocked sideways by blows of an unkind fate.
Later generations of jazz musicians perhaps fared better, but they didn't exactly luxuriate in commercial success. Last year, when I discovered that US National Public Radio is one of the channels available on WorldSpace satellite radio, almost my first act was to try to find jazz programmes in its weekly schedule.
Thus it was that I found "Jazz Profiles", an hour-long weekly show featuring one musician. And thus it was that I almost immediately discovered that Jay McShann was alive, if not exactly kicking, pushing 90, and looking back on a seven-decade career.
On the profile I heard the first-person account of an American businessman visiting Canada (let's call him ABC) who walked into a hotel lobby and heard an unusually good jazz pianist. ABC went up to the pianist and asked, "Excuse me, sir. You play awfully well; in fact you sound a lot like Jay McShann."
"I am Jay McShann," said the pianist. "You are? What are you doing performing here in a hotel lounge?"
"It's the only place I can find work," said McShann.
McShann, born in January 1916, belonged to this better-off generation that was spared the ignominy of selling vegetables or worse. His death on December 7 in Kansas City was well reported. But if ABC hadn't found him, he might have remained in comparative obscurity. ABC's intervention was partly instrumental in reviving McShann's career and winning him a nomination from the National Endowment for the Arts as a Jazz Master for 1987.
Self taught
McShann, born in Oklahoma, taught himself piano by listening to the records of Earl "Fatha" Hines on the radio. He started playing with professional musicians in 1931 and arrived in Kansas City in 1936. The city, at the time one of the nerve centres of jazz, was partly responsible for making Count Basie's career. It did the same for McShann, who had a big band by 1939.
The McShann band's recordings are the earliest archive of the work of an alto saxophonist four years McShann's junior. On one such track from 1942, "Sepian Bounce'', McShann and the altoist contribute outstanding solos. This track opens "The Definitive Charlie Parker" (from the series Ken Burns Jazz).
The meteoric rise of Parker and his buddy Dizzy Gillespie, famed for their innovation of be-bop, rather unfairly clouds McShann's career graph from this point. But today McShann's name is well established as a great jazz and blues pianist and composer.
Apart from "Sepian Bounce", some of his other famous compositions are "Hootie Blues" (Hootie was his nickname) and "Confessin' the Blues".
McShann's career did go on after Parker left him. He found a great blues singer in Jimmy Witherspoon in the late '40s. When his own career, temporarily obscured, revived in the late '60s, he discovered that he himself had a vocal talent. Today he is best remembered as a blues-jazz pianist with a resounding blues voice.
Generous soul
Best of all McShann could be remembered for, apart from his music, the fact that he didn't discourage Parker.
The contrast between how he treated the young genius and how Gillespie fared with one of his early bosses, Cab Calloway, is striking.
McShann, in fact, heard Parker before taking him on, and, as he himself reported it, said, "You sound so different," obviously approving of what he'd heard of an already experimenting Parker.
Calloway sacked Gillespie, allegedly for indiscipline (but probably because he didn't dig be-bop, of which he said "That ain't jazz - that's Chinese music").
Parker, on the other hand, came with McShann to New York, later left him on his own, and teamed up with Gillespie when they met in Earl Hines's band in the Big Apple. Yet the Parker connection (particularly "Sepian Bounce") would be a second-hand way of marking the career of a great musician whose longevity, remarkable even for a jazz performer, was just as striking as his music. Appropriately, among his great albums are Big Apple Bash and the fairly recent Goin' to Kansas City.
JAZZEBEL
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