By LOREN SCHOENBERG

One of the most intriguing aspects of jazz is that there are still many musicians active today who have direct links to the music's early history. (Remember, like The Juilliard School, the idiom has just turned 100 years old, so the footprints leading back to its creation are still relatively fresh.) One of those artists is Bobby Watson, the bandleader, saxophonist, composer, and educator born in Kansas City (one of the premier hotbeds of jazz activity) in 1953, a mere three decades and change after Charlie Parker. Parker himself was raised in and around K.C., and it's not hard to imagine that many of the sights and sounds that inspired him were still tangible to the young Watson.

Saxophonist and bandleader Bobby Watson performing at the JVC Newport Jazz Festival in August 2004. (Photo © Ben Johnson—CTM Photography)

One of the oldest clichés in the telling of jazz history is that it was born in New Orleans, then went up the river to Chicago and made a stopover in Kansas City before eventually finding its way to its ultimate destination, New York City. As hoary as that tale has become, it holds more than a grain of truth—for it was in those cities that the music evolved at its greatest pace, thanks to a series of burgeoning music scenes created by the demand of a largely African-American population for a vernacular and celebratory music that gave voice to the tremendous challenges of finding their place in the American tapestry of the time.

Robert Altman's 1996 eponymous film about the more seedy elements of Kansas City and jazz comes as close to the truth as Amadeus did to Mozart's Vienna. Those of us in the jazz and classical worlds are usually made to feel as though we should be happy to get any sort of exposure in the major media. But if you want to get a real taste of the swinging essence that made Kansas City, Missouri (not the nearby city with the same name just across the border in Kansas), a place that changed music around the world, you can't do any better than attending one of three concerts that Watson will be doing with the Juilliard Jazz Orchestra this month. The program will be built around the shuffling rhythm known as "boogie-woogie." This usually consists of a bass line made up of swinging eighth-notes that moves up and down, most times in arpeggios that outline the chords of the blues. But the term itself is as incomplete in describing the magic of Kansas City jazz as it would be if we took the main motif of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and called it "da-da-da-dum" music. For as urban as downtown Kansas City was in the roiling days of the 1930s, with nightclubs and the attendant vice all around, it was (and remains) surrounded by a distinctly rural atmosphere. And it was in this intermingling of the urban and the rural that the smooth yet somehow raw sound of Count Basie, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Jay McShann, and Big Joe Turner came to be.

The basic musical text of Kansas City jazz is the blues. As Albert Murray has noted in his essential book on Kansas City jazz, Stompin' the Blues, people did not perform or listen to the blues to get depressed or to despair about their problems. By the very act of putting them into a musical form and then sharing them, the blues were purged. And it was Kansas City's particular innovation to swing them in a way that had not been done before. This came about almost accidentally, when Count Basie put his first band together in 1934. One of the two premier bands up until that point had been the favorite of the political establishment (led by Mayor "Boss" Tom Pendergast, who spent his last years in jail), Bennie Moten's band. Its leader was an ex-ragtime pianist who emphasized precision from his men. The other favorite migrated from nearby Oklahoma City and was led by bassist Walter Page. They were known as the Blue Devils, and were renowned for their hypnotic swing and ability to conjure up arrangements spontaneously that could go on for hours. Basie's band merged the men from these two orchestras, and his drummer Jo Jones always averred that Moten's ragtime-like emphasis on 1 and 3, and Page's more bluesy 2 and 4, came together to form a perfect 4/4 beat, which the Basie band rode to international fame within a year's time after their N.Y.C. debut in December 1936.

Of course, Charlie Parker was not content to stay with the music he inherited as a young man from the Basie band, and he went on to pioneer a new era of jazz. The first big band to really champion this music (known under yet another reductive nickname, "bebop") was led by vocalist Billy Eckstine. Besides Parker, it also featured Dizzy Gillespie, vocalist Sarah Vaughan, and a sheer dynamo on the drums, Art Blakey, who went on to be one of jazz's major talent scouts during his 40-year career as a bandleader himself. Blakey was obsessed with passing the history of the music to his sideman, and encouraging them to do the same for subsequent generations. A short list of his protégés would include Clifford Brown, Freddie Hubbard, Wayne Shorter, Wynton Marsalis, and Bobby Watson.

Juilliard Jazz Orchestra K.C. Boogie-Woogie with Bobby Watson Allen Room, Jazz at Lincoln Center Thursday-Saturday, Sept. 22-24, 7:30 p.m. For ticket information, please see the calendar.

In recent years, Watson has been the director of jazz studies at the University of Missouri/Kansas City Conservatory of Music, and is most proud of his recording project called Live and Learn. As he told Chris Burnett in 2003 for an article on the jazz Web site All About Jazz: "I'm not interested in this notion of just making another jazz record to show how hot you are or how innovative you are. Virtuosity wasn't my main intent here. The main intent was to deliver the melodies as a singer would and to use those vehicles as a springboard into my style. It's music for people to listen to and reflect on and hopefully make them reminisce and remember things in their lives. I'm hoping it'll strike that chord because a lot of music that's out there today sounds like people have things to prove. And I figure at this point in my career I don't have anything to prove, really. I'm happy within myself and I just want a nice vehicle for expressing myself and connecting with people in that tradition of the great records I've listened to all my life like Art Blakey's Free For All, which I put on in the morning to get going or Miles Davis' Kind of Blue, which I put on at night to chill out. In the old country, Africa, music has a function in society. And I've been very interested in that aspect of music instead of just making another jazz record to show how hot you are or how innovative you are."

Now everyone within Juilliard's sphere will have an opportunity to hear this American master interact with the Juilliard Jazz Orchestra in what promises to be a signal event in this year's concert schedule.

Loren Schoenberg, who teaches jazz history, has been on the faculty since 2001.