Ida McBeth returns to the spotlight at the Broadway Jazz Club

“Look at me, with this cane,” Ida McBeth says. She laughs. “You must think I’m so old.”

The jazz icon extends a hand without rising from a stool in her living room. We’re in her spacious East Side home, where she’s recuperating from a recent injury that broke several of her toes. Her face is immaculately made-up, her dark hair in loose curls. She’s dressed in black velvet and bright-red jewelry, diva regal at 61.

It has been two years since McBeth quietly slipped into semi-retirement after 17 years of regular nights at the now-closed Jardine’s. She was ill — she’s vague on the details but says doctors gave her a “60–40 chance” of survival — and wasn’t sure if she would sing again. But she says she’s now in the clear and ready to get back onstage.

Kansas City is ready, too — that much was clear March 15 at the Blue Room, McBeth’s first “comeback” show.

“It was like I was throwing a party,” McBeth says of her Blue Room gig. “I was just scared all day long, but that night, when I was in my dressing room, one of my girlfriends came in and said, ‘Oh, Ida! They’re lined up all around the block!’ And all the fear just left me. And then when I got up and came around the corner, I saw it was standing-room-only, and I saw all these heads way in the back. It just makes me have chills, even now.”

McBeth sounds genuinely surprised to have discovered she still has fans. And she’s eager to meet them at the Broadway Jazz Club, the venue that, following her March 29 performance, becomes her “new home.”

“It’s really some of my favorite people there,” McBeth says of the club, which opened last year. “Pat [Hanrahan] — he’s the manager there — he used to own half of Jardine’s, which is the club that I used to sing at before I stopped. And one of the girls that used to be a manager [at Jardine’s], she’s back. So it’s like going home, in a sense, but it’s a different area.”

McBeth starts her regular Saturday-night showcase at the Broadway Jazz Club April 19. She’s preparing a revised songbook for the dates.

“I’m doing a whole lot more ‘easy listening’ jazz-standard tunes,” she says. “I’ve got tunes from some of Kansas City’s greats, like Julia Lee — she was known as the Empress of Kansas City. I’ve always done some of her stuff, but I’m digging further. Pearl Thurston — she was one of the greats here in Kansas City. She passed not too long ago. Some of her stuff, she gave to me. She gave me two or three of her tunes that I really, really love. And Priscilla Bowman — she was well-known in her day. She wrote songs like ‘Hands Off.’ I love that old song! So I’m doing some of that stuff.

“People know Kansas City for its jazz, but I think the history needs to be kept alive,” McBeth adds. “I hope that, 50 years from today, somebody will be playing my albums or some new singer will be out there singing my stuff. I don’t want to go die and be forgotten. And that’s why I plan on keeping it alive.”

McBeth is in no danger of being forgotten. Her legacy stretches over three decades, and she’s known among local jazz musicians and beyond as a Kansas City treasure. Even in the sedate, midafternoon setting of her home, McBeth exudes a generous, room-filling energy. She recounts stories as fluidly as she might deliver a song, with equal parts sass and heart, making it impossible not to feel what she feels. When McBeth laughs, you laugh. When she tells a story about performing the song she wrote for her autistic son, Jason — “You and Me Against the World” — and her voice thickens with emotion, you feel your throat closing, too.

“There was one particular day where I had had a tremendously hard evening with him before I went to work, and I was so filled up with pain, and I just had to sing his song,” McBeth recalls. “And when I got done singing that song — I never will forget it — two women came up to me, to the stage, and both of them were just streaming with tears. And we grabbed each other in a three-way bearhug. It meant so much to me that I could share that with someone. Their hearts reached out to me, and my heart reached out to them. And when I sing, I have a tendency to pick what they want to hear. I’ve always been able to feel if someone is struggling with someone and they need to hear something. And I can feel what the audience wants to hear.”

McBeth has missed this most, this sharing of experiences with an audience. Now, she says, she’ll hold nothing back.

“I’m blessed to finally feel so comfortable onstage,” McBeth says. “Sometimes, when I was growing into the business, there was a certain thing that I said or did, but now I can just be Ida.” She smiles. (I smile.) “I can look each and every person in the eye [from the Broadway Jazz Club’s stage]. I want them to feel comfortable and welcome because I want to feel comfortable and welcome. If I throw my heart out there like a baseball, I want them to throw theirs right back.”