Keyboardist Peet Plans Daring ‘Day of Music’

Wayne Peet has been a fixture on the local jazz scene for years, supplied the ballpark organ music for the hit movie “Bull Durham” and toured Japan last year. The Mar Vista keyboard player has three albums out on the local Nine Winds label, two tapes on his own Killzone label, played piano jazz standards in a Beverly Hills hotel and recorded demos with aspiring singers in his home studio.

But chances for Peet, 34, to perform his own compositions in Los Angeles are rare--except at events like the California Outside Music Assn.’s Day of Music in Long Beach today, when 32 artists will present non-mainstream music from noon to midnight at four small venues in downtown Long Beach.

Said Peet, whose quartet is scheduled to perform a set of his electric keyboard material at Mum’s Ristorante at 6 p.m., of the local scene: “It’s like a roller coaster. You carve out your own niche and it’s there for awhile and disappears and you start from ground zero again. The weird thing is that any time we’ve played music that’s a little more adventurous, we’ve always gotten a very good response from audiences.”

The Day of Music program will include musicians working in the electronic-contemporary classical, world-ethnic, jazz and avant-rock improvisational fields. The venues--the Systems M Club, Mum’s, the Williams/Lamb Gallery and the Works Gallery--are clustered around the corner of West 3rd Street and Pine Avenue. Admission is free until 5 p.m.--after that, one $4 admission will gain admittance to all performances at any venue.

“It’s an attempt to do something very non-L.A.--to concentrate rather than diverge,” said Titus Levi, association president and founder. “Part of the reason was to show the diversity of (music) programming available in Los Angeles by concentrating it in one place.

“When you’re doing little concerts in L.A. as the ICA (Independent Composers Assn.) or COMA, it’s only going to attract so much attention. If you get all the little people together and they yell at once, you can hear something.”

The California association was formed in 1983 by Levi, 26, and several friends who shared an interest in non-mainstream music. The nonprofit organization quickly became a network for musicians working in assorted noncommercial veins and presented concerts in various clubs around Los Angeles and Long Beach. The assistance was invaluable to musicians such as Tom Dougherty, who played in various bands in Oregon before selling his drums for a computer and starting his postgraduate studies in cognitive psychology and music perception at Claremont College in 1985. Saturday, Dougherty will perform his “remote control” style compositions on a Macintosh SE computer hooked up to a synthesizer.

“When my father hears new music, he say he doesn’t understand it and wants to know what to listen for,” Dougherty said. “I don’t have any good suggestions--I try to create fresh, original music and avoid every possible cliche to come up with new ways of thinking about sound and music.

“People give me interesting feedback--some say that my music has more soul than any computer music they’ve heard. The term ‘computer music’ scares a lot of people because they think someone’s just gonna be onstage, hit a button and walk off.”

Levi now divides his time between managing the association’s $5,000-$10,000 annual budget, working as the curatorial associate for music on the forthcoming Los Angeles Festival and postgraduate studies in economics at UC Irvine. The schedule won’t deter Levi from his quest to expose Los Angeles audiences to non-commercial music.

“It’s like Stravinsky said, ‘People don’t know what they like--they like what they know,’ ” he said. “The problem is that people won’t try anything different and the press and radio stations, with the possible exception of KPFK, have really ignored the creative music scene in L.A.”

“People have to get through their heads that innovation invigorates everybody. The music is good so I know I’ve got the right ace in the hole...if I can just get people to the hole.”