JAZZ DRUMMER REBUILDS HIS CAREER

After a two-year hiatus, during which he did little touring in the United States, jazz fusion drummer Billy Cobham is working hard to establish himself.

But even with two moderately successful albums out, one of which--”Powerplay”--is up for a Grammy award, and a reasonably busy work schedule, Cobham is still not in the clear.

“I’ve had to give up a lot,” Cobham, 42, said in a recent interview. “I have to watch where I go and what I play. My whole musical concept is affected by economics.”

As evidence of his point, Cobham said that guitarist Dean Brown, who played on both LPs, has been cut from his touring group--Gerry Etkins on keyboards, Sa Davis on percussion and Baron Browne on bass. Cobham and his band will play the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano tonight.

“I found it was just too expensive to travel with five guys, so I chose to do something radical, to take out the one element that I normally would hold onto,” he said. “Guitar is an institution in the U. S. and I wondered how I could function without one.”

The answer has been to further explore the creativity of the musicians at hand. “First, keyboards can give me a wider range of sounds than guitar, and I gravitate toward that orchestral approach anyway, playing some keyboards, both electronic and acoustic, myself,” he said. “And I play more drums to fill the gap. And I’ll get Sa to play where I wouldn’t have used him in the past.”

Cobham also uses state-of-the-art electronics, adding another distinctive aspect to his performances. “I have pickups on my drums that can trigger my synthesizers so I can get that synthesized sound and my drums, or just that sound alone of the synthesizers,” he said. “I have worked up chordal progressions so that each drum can play a chord or each drum can trigger a sequence, which I can then play off of.”

This electronic magic has resulted in consternation from audiences, he said with a laugh, “because no one wants to believe that the drummer is playing the piano. At first they think it’s Gerry, but when he leaves the stage, it’s obvious that it’s me. It used to be that the drummer just played time, but those days are gone.”

Now touring about 20 weeks a year, Cobham is slowly getting back on his feet. “I’ve been very happy so far with the way things have worked,” he said. “I’m giving myself a timetable, as I did in Europe, and I figure it won’t be too long before I’ll be back in a work environment that’s economically very healthy.”

For most of the 1980s, Cobham--who rose to fame 10 years earlier as a member of guitarist John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra--was doing just fine, living in Europe and touring steadily with either the rock-oriented Bobby & the Midnights or his own contemporary band.

Then, the bottom fell out. Cobham’s problems started when he made efforts to put together a 10-year reunion tour of Mahavishnu, the jazz-rock band that formerly included keyboardist Jan Hammer (composer-performer of the “Miami Vice” sound tracks), bassist Rick Laird and violinist Jerry Goodman.

“That band was great, certainly one of the milestones of my career,” Cobham said. “It was so much fun playing with those fellows, and I felt it was a shame to see the band break up.

“So I thought, ‘This 10-year anniversary is a great idea.’ I talked to John (McLaughlin), who said, ‘We should talk about it.’ Ultimately, John didn’t think it would work, for various reasons, and he decided to form another band--with saxman Bill Evans, bassist Jonas Hellborg and keyboardist Mitchell Forman--the band he’s leading now.”

That was fine with the Panamanian-born, Brooklyn-raised Cobham, since he was going to be the drummer in that band, too. “I wanted so much to play in that group,” he said, “and I committed myself 185,000%.”

But after making rehearsals and recording the band’s first LP (“Mahavishnu” on Warner Bros.), communications between Cobham and McLaughlin suddenly, and inexplicably, ceased. “I called him in Paris in May of 1984, asking when we were going to rehearse next. He said he’d get back to me, and I haven’t heard from him since.” (Eventually drummer Danny Gottlieb replaced Cobham in Mahavishnu).

Cobham was deeply hurt by McLaughlin’s change of plans. “I thought to myself, ‘Man, you really stuck your neck out there and you got your head chopped off,’ ” he said. “I ended up with no work for the year. It took me a long time to recover. I was really destitute for a while.”

That turned around in 1985 when a German promoter named Henning Toegle convinced Cobham to form a new contemporary group. The drummer agreed, the band toured in Europe and eventually it signed with GRP Records, “which was nice, since Larry Rosen (the ‘R’ in GRP) and I had gone to New York High School of the Performing Arts together.”

With the satisfaction of a Grammy nomination for the song “Zanzibar Breeze” as best R&B; instrumental performance, and generally enthusiastic audience response to his new band, Cobham believes that the rough road of the recent past, like a blessing in disguise, has reaped unforeseen rewards.

“My musical concept has expanded, giving me an element that sets me off from everybody else,” he said. “It’s made me much more of an individual.”

SAFARI SAM’S UPDATE: A federal court hearing has been continued until Feb. 23 in the lawsuit that owners of the defunct Safari Sam’s nightclub have brought against the City of Huntington Beach and the state Dept. of Alcoholic Beverage Control, the club’s attorney said this week.

The postponement of the hearing, which was to have taken place Monday in U.S. Central District Court in Los Angeles, is part of an effort to consolidate a variety of motions filed by the respective parties, attorney Gene E. Dorney said. Operators of the club, which abandoned live entertainment last September and closed in December, have charged that the city’s refusal to approve a new entertainment permit last fall violated First Amendment protections of freedom of speech.

HELP FOR THE HOMELESS: Half a dozen Orange County bands will play a Jan. 30 benefit concert to raise money for the homeless of Los Angeles.

The 8 p.m. show will be held at Fender’s Ballroom in Long Beach and will include performances by headliner El Grupo Sexo as well as Blue Trapeze, Penguin Slept, the Swamp Zombies, the Lexington Devils and Psychotic Fungus.

Tickets are $10, and $2 from each ticket will be donated to the group that established the “Tent City” for the homeless in downtown Los Angeles, concert organizer Emory Rogers said.