This Musician Cooks : Bassist Art Davis, Man of Many Parts, Plays Costa Mesa Tonight

Art Davis is not only a respected string bass player who’s worked with John Coltrane, Bob Dylan, Judy Garland and a number of symphonies. The man also has a doctorate in psychology and teaches at a couple of Orange County colleges.

Plus, 54-year-old Davis is a chef who has garnered accolades from New York gourmet Craig Claiborne.

That’s right, this is one musician who really cooks.

Davis, who has lived in Orange County since 1986, will be performing tonight at the Fine Arts Recital Hall on the Orange Coast College campus in Costa Mesa. With him will be Charles Owens on reeds, John Beasley on piano and Mike Baker on drums. It’s a rare chance to see the bassist in a concert situation; most of his playing these days is done on weekends at Oysters, a Corona del Mar restaurant that features a couple of his recipes.

So, how did he end up in Orange County?

“I had come out here (from New York) to do several clinics and master classes and I got an offer to teach at Orange Coast,” he said this week. “I liked the weather and I liked the people. My wife, who’s a psychiatric nurse, was offered a job in Long Beach. . . . “

Back East, he’d been “working as a psychologist and it limited my playing. In fact, I couldn’t find the time to play.” He’d tried to juggle two careers, psychologist and jazz musician, while living in a rural part of Westchester County where he and his wife, Gladys, raised two sons. The realization that it was all too much came in 1984, while he was playing with saxophonist David Murray.

“We’d finish at Sweet Basil (a club in New York’s Greenwich Village) around 4 a.m. and by the time I got home it was time to go back to the medical college where I worked,” he related. “I tried renting a hotel room and staying in town, but it was still too much and eventually I had to quit.”

He’d come a long way from his youth in Harrisburg, Pa. “You know that Red Foxx line, ‘We were poor, poor, poor’ and he just goes on and on? I can identify with that. My father had a fourth-grade education and my mother didn’t have any education at all.” Davis, who started out on piano at age 5 before switching to tuba and finally settling on the bass, saw his musical ability as a way out. At 16, he was playing with the Harrisburg Symphony.

During the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, he gained experience with Max Roach, Dizzy Gillespie and Lena Horne and recorded with Oliver Nelson and Quincy Jones. His most important association, though, was with the legendary saxophonist John Coltrane. “I was a confidant of John’s for about a 10-year period,” Davis said. “I was the first musician he asked to join him when he left Miles and was forming his own group. The two of us used to practice together and we got very close. Somehow, I didn’t have the foresight to record those things. I’ve always thought if I could bring that time back, that’s the one thing that I would do.”

Davis can be heard on Coltrane’s “Ole” and “Africa/Brass” recordings and is on some unreleased material from “A Love Supreme.” But his most important work with the saxophonist is “Ascension,” an album-long piece that pushed the limits of improvisational music when it was recorded in 1965. For the historic session, Coltrane put aside his usual quartet format and invited nearly a dozen of the day’s most forward-thinking musicians to Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in New Jersey.

“I got the call from John who said, ‘I want you to be on this date. I think it’s going to be a most important one.’ Now John, like my oldest son, was a champion of understatement, and for him to say something like that, well, I thought this is going to be mind-boggling. I went to the date and there were a lot of cars outside and I thought maybe a lot of people had come to watch us record. I had no idea. I walked inside and saw all these musicians and said, ‘What?’ ”

“I think it turned out to be the most important date that John did,” he continued, “because it was completely different. It had all the elements--and I can give lectures on this--of collectivism. It went back into the early traditional music where everybody was playing, there wasn’t one soloist out front. Even today it sounds modern.”

Coltrane’s death in 1967 marked a turning point in Davis’ life. He gave up on recording jazz and doing other studio work to chase another of his dreams. “I started thinking, now’s my opportunity to do what I really wanted to do. I had the gift of giving advice to musicians--Eric Dolphy, Jim Hall--people would just come to me. So I went back to pursue psychology and medicine. I was lucky enough to have the brains to do it. Being a musician is a one-way street. So many top musicians, that’s all they can do. I’ve been lucky.”

After gaining master’s degrees in music and psychology, Davis was awarded his doctorate in 1981 from New York University. His dissertation involved music and its effect on time estimation. Subjects for the study included trumpeter Lester Bowie and saxophonist Arthur Blythe. The work was dedicated to his parents.

And he was getting back into performing and recording. “I met Dizzy Reece in 1979 when I was with Dizzy Gillespie in Europe. He said if he ever got an album, he was going to call me. Turns out he did and that was the first jazz date that I had recorded since Coltrane’s death.”

Davis worked as a psychologist and taught in the early ‘80s while doing the occasional jazz date. He says that he’s played more since he’s been in Orange County, but his main gig has been teaching. He fronts classes in music at Orange Coast (where he also anchors the bass section of the symphony) as well as instructing a class in cultural diversity at Cal State Fullerton.

The bassist has been involved with almost every type of music imaginable. He can be heard on some early Bob Dylan recordings and for a while in the ‘60s he was the first-call bass for a number of folk singers, including Peter, Paul and Mary. He was a member of the New York Philharmonic in the early ‘70s and has recorded Greek music with Manos Hadjidakis, the composer who won an Emmy for his “Never On Sunday” score. Davis has even backed Minnie Pearl.

“I’m fortunate because I like all kinds of music, not just one or two particular types. It’s very stimulating to me. I think there should be a lot of diversity.”

The Art Davis Quartet plays tonight at 8 in the Fine Arts Recital Hall at Orange Coast College, 2701 Fairview Road, Costa Mesa. Tickets: $7.50 to $9. Information: (714) 432-5880.