Though He Died In 2006, Kansas City Jazz Great Jay McShann Is Live Again On A New Record

At 74 years old, Kansas City pianist Jay McShann was still performing the joyous music that had entertained audiences around the world for decades.
One of those concerts was in Tokyo, Japan, in 1990, where a woman named Yoko Takemura was in the audience.
“People should know Jay McShann much more,” says Takemura, a devotee of Kansas City jazz.
In the city's jazz heyday, McShann competed with the likes of Count Basie as the city’s top bandleader. His stature faded with the popularization of Charlie Parker’s bebop and the advent of rock and roll, but he kept performing as the leader of small groups until a few years before he died, at the age of 90, in 2006.
Takemura knew that McShann's 1990 concert in Tokyo had been recorded by the expert producer Taka Watanabe. In the decades that followed, the busy Watanabe shelved the pristine recording, but he and Takemura never forgot about it.