The last time Rosemary Clooney played the New York area, she came to Westbury Music Fair a few weeks after the attacks of September 11, 2001. After closing her show with “God Bless America,” she told me she was moved by the way everybody in the house spontaneously stood up and started singing with her even before she had invited them to. I was touched too, but even more so by “Do You Miss New York,” the song that, to me, best expressed what it means to be a New Yorker.

The composer, Dave Frishberg, who performs the song himself almost as movingly as Clooney, will be playing his first extended New York City gig in about four years when he splits a bill with the talented cabaret and theater singer Jessica Molaskey for the next two weeks at Feinstein’s.

Like Clooney did before her death in 2002, Mr. Frishberg connects to the song so well because it comes directly from autobiographical experience, as it has for several generations of creative musicians and other performers. They come to New York to practice their craft and participate in the most actively artistic culture in the world, spending their salad days here before moving on to someplace else — usually Los Angeles, if not to become rich and famous then at least to enjoy a more economically stable lifestyle. “Do You Miss New York” is a song about lost youth: New York is a town where nobody grows up; Los Angeles is where you go to become a responsible adult.

Mr. Frishberg was born and raised in Milwaukee, spent a hitch in the Air Force at a base in Salt Lake City (where he moonlighted as a writer of advertising jingles), and came to New York at age 24 in 1957. He spent 15 years here as an active, if not especially well-paid, writer and pianist in what could be called the final years of the Golden Age of Jazz. Even early on, his songs revealed a knowledge of modern harmonies, yet Mr. Frishberg primarily worked with the veterans of the swing era; he was one of the few players of his generation who was more at home with Ben Webster and Buck Clayton than with Art Blakey and Horace Silver.

After cutting his teeth in New York, he spent 15 years in Hollywood, working in the last phase of the Golden Age of studio work, playing for soundtracks and other “commercial” sessions.

In those early years, Mr. Frishberg spent most of his time in New York’s cramped jazz clubs. “When I got to New York, I found myself working with a lot of the older generation of musicians, many of whom were black,” he said last week in a phone interview from his home in Portland, Ore. “That was not by design, it just kind of fell that way. It was the place to be — I sure knew that! I kept pinching myself a lot. Wow! Am I really playing with these people? I got to play with all the musicians I had never even dreamed of meeting: Roy Eldridge, Charlie Shavers, Buck Clayton, Bobby Hackett, and I played with Gene Krupa’s Quartet for about four years.”

It wasn’t until 1962, when Mr. Frishberg was playing a regular gig in Ben Webster’s band at a place called the Shalimar, that he began to think seriously about writing songs.

“I met a couple of guys through my wife who were composers,” he said. “I heard them play and sing their songs and I wanted to do that.” He played a few things for them and they encouraged him to take his songs to the publishing company owned by Broadway great Frank Loesser.

“I met Loesser after I had brought about a half dozen songs to his company. He had his people call and arranged a meeting because he liked the way I wrote. He also liked that I wrote both words and music, and he wanted to have a conversation with me. It was a big moment for me because he was and is my hero as a songwriter.”

The first song he brought to the publishing house was “Peel Me a Grape,” a remarkable composition, especially for a freshman effort — a perfect marriage of an irresistible melody with words that are satirical without ever being cynical.

“They put it out and to my astonishment I got a record on it almost immediately,” Mr. Frishberg said. “The first one was by a singer named Nikki Price, whom John Hammond was producing, and I played on that date. Then Anita O’Day did it with Cal Tjader. I thought, ‘Hey, this is gonna be easy, establishing myself as a songwriter.’ But then I didn’t get another recording for about 10 years after that. I kept trying to write for the commercial market, to write something that Connie Francis or somebody would sing, but I didn’t have any luck.”

Finally, “out of self-defense, I figured I should just write songs for myself to sing because no one else was going to.”

Meanwhile, by the early 1970s Mr. Frishberg was reaching the climax of his career as a New York jazz pianist. His most famous gig, which he played on and off for about eight years, was with the remarkable two-tenor band led by Al Cohn and Zoot Sims, in semi-permanent residence at the old Half Note.

In 1971, Mr. Frishberg’s reputation as a budding (if under-recorded) writer of words and music had reached Hollywood, and he was offered a job writing production numbers for an NBC variety show. Before he moved, he capped his New York career with a classic album, “The You and Me That Used To Be” — the final album by the great vocalist Jimmy Rushing and the only one to document the essence of the Half Note band.

“You and Me” was completed over two dates with slightly different bands, and, he remembers, “After the second date was finished, I went home to my apartment, packed up, and the very next morning I took a plane to Los Angeles and left New York forever. So that record has that special feeling for me when I listen to it.”

Mr. Frishberg worked in the Hollywood music industry for 15 years, by the end of which the idea of acoustic musicians doing studio work was just about finished.

“In my last year or so there, I had to get to all my gigs 90 minutes early, just so somebody could show me how to turn the synthesizer on.”

Fortunately, he had at last established himself as a star performer playing and singing his own songs, and he has supported himself that way ever since he moved to Portland 20 years ago. “I didn’t have to be where the music industry was anymore,” he said. “I’ve never looked back.”

Even so, there’s little doubt that his years on the New York jazz scene were the most special of his career. At the end of our interview, I didn’t even bother to ask him if he misses the Big Apple — his song “Do You Miss New York?” already told me everything I needed to know.