"Hootie" is gone at 90

I just heard that Jay "Hootie" McShann has passed on,
and although he reached the ripe age of 90 years, I still feel a sense of great loss.
I feel fortunate to have been able to see and hear McShann a couple of times in the 1970's in Toronto, when he would do a week or two each year at the Chick N' Deli restaurant on Mt. Pleasant Ave.
McShann always amazed me in the power of his singing and the elegance of his piano playing, this was especially admirable when he was in his 70's or 80's. He also had a baby face and a charming smile, maybe that is why it is so hard to believe he is gone.
Rest in peace "Hootie".

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James Columbus McShann: January 12, 1916 - December 7, 2006

Kansas City pianist, bandleader and songwriter Jay 'Hootie' McShann has died in hospital today (Dec. 7) after a brief illness. He was 90 years old. He was the last of the great Kansas City players, and the creator of a style that combined swing and blues and changed the course of popular music. A piano player with a unique and subtle touch, he was a bluesman at heart. His best known composition 'Confessin' The Blues' has been recorded by artists like The Rolling Stones, BB King, Little Walter, Esther Phillips, and Jimmy 'Spoon' Witherspoon among many many others. McShann was born in Muskogee, Oklahama in 1916.


James Columbus McShann was born in Muskogee, Oklahoma, January 12/ 1916. He taught himself piano as a child, despite his parents' disapproval of his interest in music. His real education came from Earl Hines’ late-night broadcasts from Chicago’s Grand Terrace Ballroom. “When Fatha went off the air, I went to bed” he would later state. Jay McShann began his professional career in 1931, playing with Don Byas. He studied at the Tuskegee Institute, and performed around Arkansas and Oklahoma from 1935 to 1936. In late 1939, Jay had assembled a progressive band, which included Gus Johnson, Gene Ramey and Charlie Parker.


By 1940, Jay McShann had his own big band which included a young alto sax player called Charlie Parker. The Jay McShann Orchestra toured extensively and recorded for the Decca label in 1941. The band's most popular recording was a Blues titled 'Confessin' the Blues', but the band performed and recorded many modern compositions which bridged traditional Kansas City Jazz and Bebop. There were hits like 'Hootie Blues', and the Blues classic 'Ain’t Nobody’s Business', debuting a young Blues singer named Jimmy Witherspoon. During this period, he recorded mostly for Aladdin and Mercury Records. Jay returned to Kansas City, where he raised his family, and played locally. During the 1950's, he attended music school at the University of Missouri, KC where he continued his music studies in arrangement and composition. Jay McShann was in obscurity for the next 2 decades, making few records and playing in Kansas City.

In 1969, Jay resumed touring, and has been performing and recording internationally every since. March 3, 1979 was declared 'Jay McShann Day' by the governor of Missouri, and he has received many other awards and honors. He was the subject of the documentary film Hootie Blues (1978), and was showcased in the film, Last of the Blues Devils. He tours internationally constantly and records frequently. He has recorded through the years for Onyx, Decca, Capitol, Aladdin, Mercury, Black Lion, EmArcy, Vee Jay, Black & Blue, Master Jazz, Sackville, Sonet, Storyville, Atlantic, Swingtime, Music Masters and and most recently for Stony Plain Records. Affectionately know as "Hootie" he remains a vital pianist and an Blues vocalist who keeps a classic style alive. Jay McShann was inducted into the Blues Foundation's Hall of Fame in 1987 and received the Rhythm and Blues Foundation's Pioneer Award in 1996. Jay McShann is a Blues force of nature that keeps rolling on.

Toronto was frequently on his tour schedules; jazz musician and Downtown Jazz Festival artistic director Jim Galloway brought him to the now-vanished Bourbon Street club in 1972 and he recorded close to a dozen albums in the city for the Sackville label. His last four albums, including the Grammy-nominated 2003 release "Going to Kansas City", were recorded for the Edmonton-based Stony Plain label; three of them were co-produced by guitarist Duke Robillard. Stony Plain's owner, Holger Petersen, acting as tour manager, frequently accompanied McShann to international jazz festivals in Montreal, Toronto, Monterey, and the North Sea Jazz Festival in Holland. Said Petersen: "Jay had a great uplifting smile and kind words for everyone. He was always a delight to travel with, and had a very laidback, inquisitive and cheerful attitude. I'll miss his smile, and hearing him and saying 'Everything's cool'."And Jim Galloway summed it up: "His passing marks the end of a line. He will be missed." Jay McShann leaves his companion of more than 30 years, Thelma Adams (known as Marianne McShann), and three daughters - Linda McShann Gerber, Jayme McShann Lewis, and Pam McShann.

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Funeral services will be announced shortly; plans are pending for a musical celebration of his life to be held in Kansas City early next year. For further information please contact:
Richard Flohil at 416 351-1323 Holger Petersen at Stony Plain Records 780 468-6423

Floyd Dixon is no longer with us

Floyd Dixon was a sweet man who had a double career - once in the 1950's as a hot new item on the Blues scene, and a sort of comeback career in the 1990's as a living legend. I highly recommend the early Specialty recordings, re-released on Fantasy Records. Bless his soul...



OBITUARIES
Floyd Dixon, 77; Blues Singer, Pianist Influenced Ray Charles
By Geoff Boucher, L.A.Times Staff Writer
July 28, 2006

Floyd Dixon, the singer and jump-blues pianist who dubbed himself "Mr. Magnificent" and became an influential figure in the burgeoning R&B scene of 1950s Southern California, died Wednesday of cancer at Chapman Hospital in Orange. He was 77.

Dixon's best-known song was the raucous "Hey Bartender," which was made popular by the Blues Brothers. His other notable recordings included "Wine, Wine, Wine," "Call Operator 210," "Telephone Blues" and the early Jerry Lieber-Mike Stoller song "Too Much Jelly Roll."

His career found him taking on a variety of styles and sounds: mournful blues, R&B ballads, ribald bar songs and even a channeling of Little Richard on late 1950s tracks such as "Oooh Little Girl." But his strongest suit was jump blues, which added a grit and vigor to the smooth blues lessons he absorbed from his major influence, Charles Brown.

"I liked Charles Brown's style more than just about anybody's," Dixon told an interviewer two years ago. "People told me I sounded like that before I even heard him."

Dixon was born Feb. 8, 1929, in Marshall, Texas, not far from the Louisiana border, where he taught himself to play the piano and soaked up the region's blues, gospel and rural music styles. At age 13, his family moved to Los Angeles during World War II and found, as did so many arrivals in that decade, that the growing city was a place of much promise and easy disappointment.

To pay the bills he worked at a drugstore and caddied, but his young eye was pulled toward other pursuits — he took courses in hotel management and considered a football career. Always, though, he sang and longed to make it into a living. In 1947, he made his first recording, "Dallas Blues" for Supreme Records and after that, it was all about the music.

Again and again, he was told that he sounded like Brown, who was known for his mellow blues and burnished stage performances. In 1948, Dixon won the big talent show at the Million Dollar Theater and some people in the audience thought that he was Brown — except for those who noticed that Brown was seated up front, watching.

"That was something," Dixon told the San Diego Union-Tribune in 2004. "The people just screamed and yelled and laughed, because they thought it was Charles and they didn't know it was me."

Brown would help the younger man's career. Dixon would pass on that mentorship, famously to Ray Charles, B.B. King and Robert Cray as the decades went by. Charles would become famous for melding gospel and R&B into the potent concoction called soul music, and some music commentators say that in the hoarse, church-born vocal style of Dixon, Charles may have found a compass point for the direction that made him famous. Before going on the road with Dixon, Charles' sound was far closer to that of the polished Nat King Cole than to the raw soul sound he would later create.

The late 1940s and early 1950s were a feverish time for black music in Los Angeles, and its reach and accomplishment were historic. The confluence of styles in jitterbugging postwar years found up-tempo blues, sophisticated R&B and swing merging into a music that would become the protean sound of rock 'n' roll.

The rock 'n' roll era took its toll on the older R&B musicians and, though he toured into the early 1960s, the end of the decade found Dixon fading from the limelight. He made a significant comeback in 1975 with a European tour, and in the following decade he was commissioned to write a blues song for the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles.

The next decade found more success as he won the 1997 W.C. Handy award for comeback blues album of the year for "Wake Up and Live!," a concert recording that veered from the ribald "450 Pound Woman," his famous old tune "Hey Bartender" and the forlorn "Don't Send Me No Flowers in the Graveyard." The album was hailed by reviewers as a late-career declaration of self-worth. Last year, Dixon recorded with fellow piano heroes Pinetop Perkins and Henry Gray for an album scheduled to be released this fall by HighJohn Records.

Bruce Iglauer, president of the blues music label Alligator Records, which released "Wake Up and Live!," said Dixon's hits from the 1950s did not earn the man a lasting memory with the public, but that for students of the tributaries of American pop, he was a notable figure.

"All that music came together and he was right at that pivot point," Iglauer said Thursday.

Iglauer said Dixon never flashed the bitterness of a maestro who had felt cheated of his rightful spotlight.

"He simultaneously knew that he was a quite an important figure in music, but he was also a somewhat neglected one," Iglauer said. "But he felt he had a good life and a good time in life. He was very gentle and jolly. He liked being the life of the party."

Dixon, who never married, is survived by two first cousins, Marie Banks of Los Angeles and Mary Dixon of Marshall, Texas.

There will be a public memorial service from 1 to 3 p.m. Monday at Grace Chapel on the grounds of Inglewood Park Cemetery at 720 E. Florence Ave.