Kansas City, Mo. ? Claude “Fiddler” Williams played jazz when jazz was cool. He played it with Nat King Cole and Count Basie. He played it in Chicago and played it in New York. He played in it in Kansas City when Kansas City was jazz and jazz was Kansas City.

And at age 95, Williams is still playing.

Although Williams’ music may not be found at most music stores, musicians and historians know “Fiddler” is a legend.

Jazz fans — including former President Bill Clinton and Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft — have written Williams notes praising him for being a genius, an innovator and one of the last living links to the roots of jazz.

“Look, he is the complete history of jazz, walking around town, still playing every now and then,” said Chuck Haddix, a jazz historian at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. “He is the legend.”

Williams was born in February 1908 in Muskogee, Okla. He grew up listening to his brother playing the piano and his brother-in-law playing the mandolin and banjo.

By age 6, Williams was playing the mandolin. By age 10, he was also playing the guitar, banjo and cello — and making money.

“We played at barbershops,” said Williams, the son of a blacksmith. “Sometimes we played on a person’s front porch, or just on the street. And for pay we’d pass the hat. I remember we’d make six dollars a night sometimes. That was good money back then.”

Williams is pretty sure it was sometime between the end of World War I and 1920 when he first heard Joe Venuti play the violin, headlining a community concert in Muskogee’s city park.

Claude Fiddler Williams is shown at the Swope Ridge Geriatric Center in Kansas City, Mo. During his long career, Williams played in bands alongside greats such as Count Basie and Mary Lou Williams.

Because he is black, Williams was not allowed in the park. So, he hung on a fence and listened to every note. Then he ran home and told his parents he was going to play the fiddle like Venuti.

The next day, when he got home from school, his cello was gone and a fiddle was on his pillow.

“Maybe for a year or so I took lessons, from this man in town who played,” Williams said. “I figured I knew it all by then.”

The fiddler joined a band and traveled the state for gigs.

In the late 1920s, the band left Oklahoma and moved to Kansas City.

In his mid-20s, a bass player named Eddie Cole told Williams that his band might need a few players. The band, which played the Regal Theater in Chicago, included jazz great Nat Cole, or simply “King” as Williams now calls him.

“King sure could play that piano,” Williams said. “Best damn piano player in Chicago. He didn’t sing back then, though. Didn’t think he could.”

When the Regal gig ended, the band went to Louisville, Ky. But Williams left the group when promises for work fell through.

Williams headed back to Chicago, where a band leader named William Basie was interested in the way he played the guitar. Williams played with Count Basie and The Barons of Rhythm in Chicago, New York and Kansas City.

“He wasn’t just a hanger-on with the Basie band,” Haddix says. “He was a soloist. He was very well received.”

But the band’s manager, John Hammond, didn’t want a fiddle-playing guitar soloist in the rhythm section. Months before the Barons became a household name, Hammond told Basie to fire Williams.

Williams went to Kansas City, married and became a family man, even taking a day job at a local title company. Still, Williams kept playing.

In the 1950s, he hooked up with Roy Milton’s Solid Senders in Los Angeles. In the 1960s, he started playing with Jay McShann, a fellow jazz legend and Muskogee native.

In Toronto, in 1972, an executive with the Sackville Recording Studio approached McShann and asked to record him. McShann’s album, “Man From Muskogee,” relaunched Williams’ national and international career.

At 65, he was more famous than he’d been at 35, playing jazz festivals and recording albums. By the time he was 75, he’d surpassed himself at 65, taking his violin to Paris with Black and Blue, and touring Europe. At 85, he had moved onto Broadway, played Lincoln Center, played for President Clinton, and always to loud applause and rave reviews.

Now, at 95, Williams sits in the living room of his Kansas City home with his second wife, Blanche. She opens a fiddle case.

“Fiddler” leans forward, reaches, carefully, and Blanche lays the instrument in his cupped hands. She hands him the bow.

“He still plays, you know,” Blanche says, noting performances at the Blue Room on his birthday, the Gem Theater this spring. “He still plays beautifully.