Geographically, Lee Shaw has come back home, back to Oklahoma for a night on the town.

You know, I feel like I say this to so many people.

I'm so lucky to have grown up where I did.

When I did.

But emotionally, she never left home, no matter where in the world she was performing as one of America's foremost jazz pianist, music has always been her home.

I think in all my life there was nothing else that even entered my mind.

I just wanted to play the piano.

I would rather I would die if I couldn't play.

I would rather play than eat, than sleep, than do, than travel, than have $1 million a Cadillac.

There is nothing on earth that I like better than playing the piano.

It is something Lee Shaw has been doing now for parts of eight decades, and even after all that time, she still gets that special feeling when she plays what some people get from watching football or basketball, or playing football or basketball, or just finding something that you really love, really love.

And that came to me very early.

It was on a street like this, a neighborhood of friendly, nurturing people in Ada where a little girl named Wanda Lee Moore would rise before the sun, sit at the family piano and play.

I used to get up at 5:00 in the morning and practice two hours.

And then the old story.

I walked to school and when I got home from school in the afternoon, I'd play another.

I'd practice another hour.

I loved and love.

Music is the most fun in the world.

The school buildings where she learned, are just faded photographs, now torn down and replaced years ago.

Some things, though, haven't changed.

Teachers were just unbelievable.

Education most and providing the means of education must have been very important to the people who lived there.

It still is at the new high school up on the hill south of town, they honor two of Lee's favorite teachers every year.

The Iona and Wyatt Freeman Award goes to the outstanding student of the arts, the Freeman's, husband and wife.

She taught drama.

He he had the band and the vocal chorus.

He was a taskmaster, and we were afraid of him and loved him at the same time.

And they touched so many of us.

We were very lucky.

There were people who wanted to educate us, and they did.

She could read music, but she learned to play by ear.

By listening to radio shows and to jukeboxes in the soda fountains and malt shops near her home.

She remembers one band trip in particular that began to change her life.

And we did it.

Some kind of a contest in Shawnee.

And on the way back we stopped at a pig stand.

There used to be wonderful pig sandwiches.

I hope there still are.

And there was a jukebox.

And with my nickel, I played this.

I remember what it was.

It was the dipsy doodle.

There wasn't going to be anybody remembers that.

The dipsy doodle, the thing to beware.

And then I got on the bus and sang it on the bus all the way home.

And when I got home, took me about three hours.

But I learned to play it and harmonize.

And that was the beginning.

Like you love I and me love you.

That's the way the gypsy doodle.

Way too much piano.

Okay, she's closer to the end now than the beginning.

And she rehearses with drummer Jeff Siegel and bass player Rich Syracuse, 8690, in the band.

The Lee Shaw Trio has performed around the world for more than 40 years.

Jeff replaced Lee's late husband Stan on the drums.

Rich has been plugging away with Lee for almost a decade.

That familiarity helps with the language of jazz.

The bassist and The Drummer, whom I have now, are so sensitive.

Sometimes they know they sense what I'm going to do before I do it, and I have to be very clear in what I'm playing, so that they understand she going this way or that way.

So it's it's, conversation.

It's like spontaneous speaking.

And the more you do, you know about the subject and the better your vocabulary and your ability to edit what you say the better the performance will be.

Long before she became Hall of Fame jazz musician Lee Shaw, piano player Wanda Lee Moore figured her career would be as an accompanist and teacher.

That changed one night in Chicago, when a friend took her to see a band she'd never heard before.

And one night she took me to hear the Count Basie.

Then, at the Blue Note in Chicago.

I died and went to heaven.

And then I knew what I had to do.

I'd been playing, I'd been improvising, but not playing jazz.

And that she soon would, though, sharing the same Chicago stages with bands who accompanied the great singers of the time, like Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan.

I was at a club called Mister Kelly's on the Nino's Near North Side on Russell Street in Chicago for a year.

Seven Billie Holiday.

And I'd get to know the accompanists, the first rhythm section I ever played with.

It was Sullivan's trio.

I don't know why, but, Phil, if I could, during the time between my having to get on the bandstand and their getting off, I'd ask the question.

I'd think of something I wanted to know and try to ask you a question.

You'd be.

Suppose you want to do.

Nowadays, Lee Shaw is the legend and the teacher.

I don't teach piano.

I teach pianists how to play jazz.

A decade after most people would have retired, Lee still tours and teaches, reaching out to receptive audiences like this one at UCLA's Jazz Lab in Edmond.

How many different?

Every time the trio plays a campus site, they teach a few classes.

The lesson she teaches now is the same one she learned from the legends of her youth.

The most important word in life is listen.

But certainly in music it's listen.

Listen to yourself.

The awareness comes through listening, voicing, allowing yourself to make a mistake without stopping and correcting it, or even realizing that you've made a mistake.

Learning tunes is one of the most important things.

And learning the different ways you can play the same tune.

That's especially important when you perform some of the same songs night after night.

It's like there are synonyms in language.

They're also synonyms for sound substitute changes in music and the musicians that you play with.

Certainly the musicians that I play with know what those substitutes are.

And if I and if I start to play one chord, they understand that it probably won't go to this place, in this place, in this place, but maybe it doesn't.

And they can hear it and they follow it.

It's I think jazz is the most democratic of music because everybody is equal.

Some would beg to differ with her on that point.

Lee Shaw is, after all, in the Jazz Hall of Fame and is considered one of the most influential female jazz pianists to ever sit at a keyboard.

Jazz is a fantastic place to find out who you are.

You cannot lie when you play chess.

If you're pretending to know more than you know that'll that'll show.

People will be able to recognize that, if you're a type A personality, that probably will show.

Also, if you're bossy, that will show if you're, If you feel it very deeply, that shows.

It's like standing out there naked.

This is who I am.

This music.

This is who I am.