Jazz pioneer McShann pleased with where life has led him

Mary Campbell

Tuesday, Aug. 31, 1999 | 9:58 a.m.

NEW YORK -- Some people lead lives. Life has led Jay McShann.

"Whatever happened just happened," the 83-year-old avatar of Kansas City jazz says. "You know how it is, you just take things as they come. You run into a few snags, you try to unsnag them and go on."

Along the way of going on, McShann thought Kansas City would just be a stopover, and it became his home; he figured he'd be a sideman, and became a leader. And he was with Charlie Parker when he got his famous nickname.

He also picked up a nickname himself -- "Hootie" -- long before another one had his Blowfish.

McShann is long known for his blues singing and his compelling solo piano playing with an indefinable blend of blues and boogie. Still going strong he recently played on a sultry summer night with the Duke Robillard Band outdoors at Lincoln Center, then moved on to gigs in New England and at the Montreal Jazz Festival. His newest CD with Robillard, "Still Jumpin' the Blues," was released in May. For the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival earlier this year he put together his own group.

Born James Columbus McShann in Muskogee, Okla., he started playing the piano when he was 12. His parents disapproved, so in high school he'd tell his parents he was studying late although he really was listening to Earl "Fatha" Hines' radio broadcasts from the Grand Terrace Ballroom in Chicago. Hines was an early influence.

McShann got his start by touring with bands in Oklahoma, Arkansas, Arizona, and New Mexico. "Then somebody would make the old sheriff mad and he'd come down and raid the place and we got out of a job," he recalls.

After one raid, he recalled, "I said, 'I've got an uncle in Omaha. I think I'll go up there and see what the cats are doing in Omaha.'

"I got a bus ticket. I had a layover of two hours in Kansas City. I knew Basie had a band at the Reno Club. I thought I'd run over to the Reno. I might know some of these cats.

"A guy in the Reno said, 'This is it, right here in Kansas City.' I said, 'My money is a little low. I don't think I can stick around here too long.' He said, 'Take my apartment key. Stay as long as you want. I'll stay over at my girlfriend's.' "

A couple of days later someone knocked on his door and said, "I'm looking for that piano player just come in town."

McShann, then 18, never got to Omaha, but later spent some time in Chicago and on the West Coast and served in the Army.

McShann, a non-drinker, was snookered into some booze one night when some fellow musicians had the bartender give him a cold drink. "The weather was hot in Kansas City," he remembers. "Every time I'd turn it up it tasted better and better. I didn't know they were spiking it with alcohol. When it came time to blow I couldn't get out of the seat."

Now, he says, "My tasting days are over. But not my playing days."

McShann became a leader when he and two other musicians began to play in a basement club in Chicago. "A union guy came in there raising cane. 'Who do you think you are, coming in this territory, walking in on a job without depositing a contract with the union? Who's the leader anyway?' He asked the bass player. 'No.' He asked the drummer. 'No.' He said to me, 'You're the leader.'

"None of us knew the leader made $25 or $30 more. ... They dropped it on me. I was satisfied just to play. I didn't have any ambitions to be leader."

Soon after that, in 1937, McShann and another musician were walking along 12th Street in Kansas City after a gig listening to the music coming from clubs when he heard something different on a saxophone. "We went in and it was Charlie Parker."

Parker, known as "The Bird," worked for McShann off and on from from 1937 to 1941.

McShann's orchestra toured extensively, and their recording of "Hootie Blues" was the first to document Parker's emerging genius. The band's most popular recording, however, was "Confessin' the Blues," and its many modern compositions bridged traditional Kansas City jazz and bebop.

One day they were on their way to the University of Nebraska to play for a dance after a football game. "Driving along country roads, you pass these farms," McShann says. "Chickens hear a car passing and run out and run along with the car. This particular time the chicken was a little too close and we hit the chicken.

"Charlie yelled, 'Back up. You hit a yardbird!' He got out of the car and got it and carried the chicken on into Lincoln. When we got to the rooming house, the first thing he did was say, 'Miss Josie, we ran over this yardbird coming up here. I wonder if you would cook it for me.' She fixed the yardbird for Charlie and he didn't let nobody else have none of it. That's where he got the name."

It was only after he came out of the Army in 1944 that McShann began to sing. An audience member demanded singing; McShann asked who in the band sang and got no takers, once again he did it himself.

"I figured, well, to shut this guy up I'd go ahead on and sing. That's how that started."