Jay McShann

? - 2006

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.