JAZZ PIANISTS ARE TWO OF MUCH THE SAME KIND

There is a fascinating touch of synchronicity in tonight’s appearance by pianists Horace Tapscott and Andrew Hill at the Forum Theater in Yorba Linda. Born within a few years of each other in the mid-1930s, widely experienced in mainstream and vanguard jazz, they both have chosen to follow musical paths that have been determinedly uninfluenced by the demands of the marketplace.

Each is an articulate advocate of the music they view as America’s most valuable cultural commodity.

The 8 p.m. concert, co-sponsored by the North Orange County Community College District and the California Arts Council, will feature compositions by both pianists. Included will be “Strike Up,” “Seven,” and “I’ll Let Nothin”’by Hill, and “Mary on Sunday,” and “Raisha’s new Hip Dance,”written by Tapscott.

Tapscott, at 51 the elder of the two, was born in Houston but has spent most of his adult life in Los Angeles. In the late ‘40s and early ‘50s, he was one of the many jazz musicians who matriculated at Jefferson High when the school was a seedbed for young beboppers. (One of the pieces he will play tonight is a musical portrait of an influential Jefferson music teacher.)

Tapscott’s working experience has run the gamut from Lionel Hampton to jazz and poetry, but he clearly has felt most comfortable working with his own groups. “It’s a little easier way for me to get my ideas expressed,” he said in a conversation earlier this week.

Those ideas are no-holds-barred contemporary, but surprisingly accessible for the open-eared listener. Tapscott’s music has an astringently percussive quality that reminds one, at times, of an eyeball-to-eyeball detente between Cecil Taylor’s two-handed clusters and Thelonious Monk’s off-beat rhythmic accents. Whatever the analogy, his music is a rare island of originality in a sea of familiar jazz licks.

But is it jazz? Like many musicians of his generation, Tapscott has difficulties with the word. “I know jazz is a convenient label, and I understand why people use it,” he explained. “The problem is that it means too many other things that have nothing to do with music.

“I used to like the term ‘black music,’ then ‘Afro-American,’ but now I think I like ‘American Classical Music’ best, because that’s what it really is. The funny thing is that Europeans already think of it that way. Maybe by the year 2010, the people in the U.S. will come around to the same feeling.”

Haitian-born Andrew Hill’s far-ranging career has included work with Gene Ammons, Rahsaan Roland and Kirk and Dinah Washington (among many others), a string of his own recordings on Blue Note and Arista, and a Ph.D. from Colgate University.

A precise, soft-spoken but intense man, Hill, 48, always has chosen to do things in his own way and at his own pace. He has not, for example, elected to make a recording for seven years, because, as he explained earlier this week, “there just hasn’t been time. But now I’m becoming interested in getting back into the studio.”

Hill’s recordings from the ‘60s are extraordinary blendings of contemporary techniques with warmly communicative subject matter. In the ‘70s, his focus shifted to education and more extended composition for voice, strings and large ensembles. More recently, he has expressed interest in small ensemble work and film scoring.

“I enjoy it all: solo, trio, quartet, you name it,” he said. “Each situation creates a different feeling, a different interaction with the audience.”

Hill’s multiform activities are the visible evidence of a work-oriented personal philosophy that holds little patience with the familiar picture of the artist as a down-and-out Bohemian.

“A lot of writers like to picture us as scuffling individuals, striving against all odds to play our music,” he said. “But there’s no room for that kind of image of artists anymore. I’m not scuffling, and anyone who sees me that way doesn’t understand that all I’m doing is living the life I have and making the music I hear.

“I don’t think artists should be colored any differently from anyone else. Because God has given them something different, something extra, doesn’t mean they should be demeaned as struggling human beings. They’re not--they’re artists.”

Tapscott, in his own way, agrees: “I’d like for people to come to our concert with open minds. What I’m offering, hopefully, is an artistic experience that should be complete on its own terms. The music itself will explain who I am, and where I’m coming from.”