Five Pianists to Perform at Evans Tribute; Page Eight Concert to Benefit Library Fund

Alan Broadbent, Pete Jolly, Mike Lang, Mike Melvoin and Ross Tompkins--five of the Southland’s most celebrated pianists--will gather to pay tribute to a departed fellow master of the keyboard, Bill Evans.

The concert--Saturday at the Musicians’ Union Auditorium, 817 N. Vine St., Hollywood, 8 p.m.--is a benefit for Jazz Central, a nonprofit organization that allocates funds for jazz scholarships (it recently contributed to the Shelly Manne Memorial Scholarship Fund) and for performances in local schools.

“We scheduled a couple of the pianists, and then some others called up and asked if they could play a tune or two, but we didn’t want to get too many,” says Dan McKenna, Jazz Central’s executive director, of the Evans tribute. “We’ve had concerts before where all the players who wanted to didn’t get to play.”

The tribute will also feature vocals by Ruth Price and a guitar chorus or two from Mundell Lowe, one of the musicians credited with discovering Evans in the early ‘50s in New York City. Evans, who was one of the most harmonically innovative of pianists, died in 1980. Information: (213) 257-2843.

BUCKS FOR BOOKS: Saxophonist Lynn Johnston and the improvisational group Page Eight--with drummer Charles Pagano and bassist Carey Fosse--will perform at the Eastlake Victorian Inn in Angelino Heights on Sunday, 3:30 p.m. The event is part of a four-concert series to raise money for the Los Angeles Public Library’s Central Library Fund.

“I was raised in Los Angeles, and I used to go to (Central) library all the time,” says the inn’s manager, Michael Whitmore, who also plays guitar in Page Eight. “When it burned down (in April, 1986), it was a real disaster, and as longtime L.A. residents, we wanted to do something for the area.”

Of the musicians performing, Whitmore describes Johnston--who has played with reedman Vinny Golia and the Universal Congress Of--as “really aggressive. He’s kind of like a screaming-type sax player who has a warm sound when he wants to. He plays in the extremes.” Of Page Eight, Whitmore notes: “We like taking standard songs, blues and bossa novas and shifting them. We try to maintain a sense of order, so that it doesn’t just wander, but it’s still pretty free-form.”

The inn is located at 1442 Kellam Ave. Information: (213) 250-1620.

SIMPATICO TRIO: Tommy Flanagan, the gifted pianist who renders the bebop repertoire with consummate musicality, brings his trio, spotlighting his longtime musical partner, bassist George Mraz, to the Loa in Santa Monica this Friday-Sunday. Flanagan, who rarely plays Los Angeles, squeezes his local engagement in between a two-week stint at Manhattan’s Sweet Basil nightclub (with a tribute concert to Bud Powell at Alice Tully Hall thrown in for good measure) and a trip to Japan.

Flanagan--who between the late ‘50s and the late ‘70s was regularly employed as an accompanist, primarily for singer Ella Fitzgerald--finds Mraz the ideal compatriot. “He’s so musically correct in so many areas,” says the pianist, whose latest LP is “Jazz Poet” (Timeless). “He has good feeling, his intonation is about perfect, he’s very sympathetic to what’s around him and he doesn’t overplay. By that I don’t mean that he doesn’t dazzle you, but he’s always in balance with the whole group.

“(Drummer) Kenny (Washington, who has played with Flanagan for two years) is the same. He has a lot of knowledge for a young cat and that youth gives you a spark,” adds the 58-year-old keyboardist, chuckling.

Flanagan continues to play jazz classics like Powell’s “Bouncin’ With Bud,” Thelonious Monk’s “I Mean You” and Billy Strayhorn’s “Raincheck,” though he says, “We’re always adding something new.” He admits he does re-orchestrate his versions occasionally. “I change the tunes around, don’t change the melodies, I mean, but change inner structures,” he says. “That way you keep it fresh so people won’t hear it the same way. Duke (Ellington) did that--played the same tunes but rearranged them to keep them sounding new.”

MODERN CHAMBER JAZZ: Aurora, a spirited, invigorating trio that calls itself “a chamber ensemble of the ‘90s,” appears Sunday at McCabe’s in Santa Monica. “We’re a ‘chamber group’ because we’re all listening hard to each other while we play, like chamber musicians,” says tenor saxophonist Marty Krystall, who is joined in the group by bassist Buell Neidlinger and drummer Peter Erskine. (For this Sunday, keyboardist Don Preston will make the trio a quartet.)

Another chamber aspect, says Krystall, is that “we like to play a lot of different dynamic levels, from very, very soft to very loud to everything in between.”

The trio, which has been together (under various names) off-and-on since 1980 and has just released “Aurora” (Denon), plays “pretty much all original music that’s from basically a jazz standpoint and reveals such influences as Ellington, Coltrane, Ravel, Stravinsky and Rollins,” says Krystall. “It’s a music that takes from the past but that has something else, an edge, that people hopefully haven’t heard before.”