Variety Adds Spice to Jazz Repertoire of Toshiko Akiyoshi

When she started her jazz career in the late 1940s, Toshiko Akiyoshi tried to eliminate all traces of her native Japanese musical heritage from her playing. And it worked.

“In Japan, they used to say my playing smelled of butter, which meant it didn’t sound like a Japanese playing jazz,” the 58-year-old pianist/composer/arranger/band leader recalled from her Manhattan home recently.

In the early 1970s, Akiyoshi--who came to the United States in 1956 and is married to saxophonist/flutist Lew Tabackin--took some time away from music to think about what her role as a jazz musician should be. She decided to reaffirm that same Japanese element she previously had eradicated.

“It was probably my most important discovery,” she said in English that still bears a strong Japanese accent. “Since then, I’ve been trying to utilize my heritage and my rich jazz experience to make my music a little bit different from American jazz players.”

Now when Akiyoshi appears--as she will tonight with her 16-piece Jazz Orchestra, featuring Tabackin, at the Robert O. Moore Theatre at Orange Coast College--she delivers a wealth of invigorating material, ranging from brisk, straight-ahead items such as “Studio J” and “March of the Tadpoles” to serious, often poignant pieces such as “Autumn Sea,” “Kogun” and “Tales of a Courtesan,” which have a distinctly Japanese flavor.

The repertoire represents her as a person, she said. “We are not one-dimensional people. Sometimes you are conventional, sometimes you are liberal. Whatever comes from me has a wide variety that reflects my musical attitude, my thinking translated to jazz language.”

Akiyoshi, whose latest LP is “Wishing Peace” (Ascent), distinguishes between the types of tunes she writes. “To write a vehicle for the band that is basically for soloing, with some orchestration, it’s not easy, but it’s not hard,” she said. “But to write something that reflects you, that’s very difficult. There’s nothing to go by. . . . It’s a long process.”

But a rewarding one. “For me, the work that has a philosophical point of view on some subject, that’s my important work,” she said. “But I don’t think about doing it all the time, or I’d suffocate,’ she added.

Akiyoshi said one of her dreams is to get corporate funding for her concerts so she can present some of her longer works, such as the 22-minute “Minamata,” a musical depiction of the demise of a Japanese fishing village whose waters become chemically polluted. “I can’t play that during a usual concert,” she said. “It’s too heavy.”

Akiyoshi--who was raised in Beppu, a small town on Kyushu, Japan’s southernmost island--was classically trained. At 16, she discovered jazz and was influenced by Teddy Wilson, Bud Powell and others. After coming to the United States, she studied at the Berklee School in Boston. She soon began playing with her own trio and bands led by Charles Mingus and Oscar Pettiford, and sat in with such greats as Clifford Brown and Max Roach. “With players like those,” she recalled, “I learned to feel what I was supposed to feel when I play jazz.”

Since she started her Jazz Orchestra in 1972, she has received critical acclaim and numerous awards, including 12 Grammy nominations, several jazz poll victories for best big band and best composer, New York City Mayor Edward Koch’s 1986 Liberty Award and, most recently, the Nigerian jazz magazine Roots’ award as “best jazz band leader in the world.” Akiyoshi, who has often played in Europe and Japan, will make her first trip to Africa when she travels to Lagos, Nigeria, to accept her prize.

Although she’s “been a student of jazz music for over 40 years,” Akiyoshi says she has lots to learn. “To maximize my knowledge is always a challenge,” she said. “Jazz is like writing literature. You know the language, you have a vocabulary, but you may not be able to express well enough, or there are so many expressions you’d like to be good at. I could never say, ‘I’ve done it.’ There’s always something else there, and that’s fortunate.”

TOSHIKO AKIYOSHI

Tonight, 8 p.m.

Orange Coast College’s Robert B. Moore Theatre,

2701 Fairview Road, Costa Mesa.

$12 to $14.

Information: (714) 432-5880.