Conrad Janis’ Dixieland With a Difference

Though Conrad Janis has had a long and flourishing career as a stage, screen and television actor, it’s when he blows his traditional-style jazz trombone that his artistic spirit truly soars.

“I like the freedom of expression of jazz, which is much freer than acting,” said the ever-enthusiastic Janis, 60, in a phone conversation from his office in New York’s Sidney Janis Gallery. In yet a third career, he’s a co-director there with his father, Sidney, 91, and his brother Carroll, 56.

“With jazz, you make up your own lines, though you’re held to a rough form of chords and style,” said Janis, who has been a professional musician for almost 40 years, and a professional actor for another 10. “And there’s a certain emotional freedom in jazz. It’s great fun to do it. When it works right, it feels like the whole band is coming out my horn and that’s terrific.”

These days, Janis the trombonist is best known as the leader of the Beverly Hills Unlisted Jazz Band, an ensemble made up of entertainment hyphenates like himself and full-time musicians, which delivers Dixieland jazz with a difference.

“Even though we play Dixieland, we play it with a harder drive and a funkier style than most Dixielanders,” said Janis, who will play with the band in a free show at L.A. Alive! at the Music Center Plaza, Saturday at noon. “We also have a very strong rhythm section. Our pianist is Arnold Ross, who played with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie on a Jazz at the Philharmonic tour, and who can really comp behind a soloist. Our drummer is Paul Humphrey, who can play anything from rock to be-bop. Between the two they form a driving, much more modern rhythm section in front of which we play Dixieland tunes. That free-blowing modern beat gives us a freedom I like.”

A BHUJB performance is nothing if not rambunctious. “My theory is that you’ve got to blow the roof off the room,” said Janis, who for four seasons played the role of Mindy’s father on the ABC series, “Mork and Mindy,” starring Robin Williams and Pam Dawber. “And if you’re going to play this music, which after all is an earlier moment, you’ve got to generate as much heat and excitement as you can because if it isn’t driving, you might as well just relax, play all the changes and blow modern.”

While in New York--where he and his wife, Maria, spent five months last year--Janis keeps his horn handy. “Whenever I get a quiet moment at the office, I run upstairs to our storeroom and practice,” said the man whose latest film is the soon-to-be-released “Sonny Boy,” starring David Carradine and Paul Smith. “And I have played a couple of jobs with (reedman) Kenny Davern, who was in some of the bands I led in New York in the ‘50s and ‘60s.”

Janis is much more active musically while residing in Southern California, which he considers his home. “We often play clubs, as we did five nights a week last year at (the now defunct) Dixie Manor in Beverly Hills,” he said. “And we play a lot of festivals. We just worked Dixieland Monterey in March, and we’ll be appearing at the Reno Jazz Festival in Sparks, Nev., on the Fourth of July, the Catalina Festival in Avalon, July 30, and the Los Angeles Classic Jazz Festival (held Labor Day weekend).”

Janis’ interest in jazz was first piqued in 1943, when, while touring the U.S. with writer/director Moss Hart’s “Junior Miss,” he heard musicologist Rudi Blesh deliver a lecture called “This Is Jazz” in San Francisco. Then in 1948, while under contract to 20th Century Fox and living in the Southland, Janis went “almost every night” to hear trombonist Kid Ory’s band play at such venues as the Jade Room on Hollywood Boulevard or the Beverly Cavern, at Beverly and La Cienega boulevards.

Ory indirectly taught Janis, who didn’t start playing trombone until 1949. “I memorized a lot of what he did, and from this, I was able to start almost immediately,” said Janis, whose stage highlights include working on Broadway with Robert Redford in 1961’s “Sunday in New York,” and a two-month stint at the Ahmanson in 1975 opposite Joyce Van Patten in “Same Time Next Year.” “I was fascinated by (Ory’s) driving, basic style, a pure New Orleans style. I just thought it was magical.”

Back in New York in the early ‘50s, Janis capitalized on his exposure on television--”I was doing three hourlong live dramas a month on shows like “Studio One” and “The Philco TV Playhouse”--to help launch his musical career. Soon he was leading “Conrad Janis and the Tailgaters” around Manhattan, playing with many of the greats of traditional and mainstream jazz, among them trumpeters Charlie Shavers and Roy Eldridge, drummers Baby Dodds and Jo Jones, reedman Gene Sedric and pianist Dick Wellstood.

Janis will quickly admit that it’s been a charmed life. “The thing that’s been so great is that I’ve been allowed to do just what I love doing almost all my life,” he said. “It’s just dumb luck that it worked out that way. I have to thank whatever it was that allowed it to happen and, knock wood, I hope I can keep doing it a bunch of years more.”