Buddy Collette Still Loyal to West Coast : Jazz: The great saxophonist, who, unlike friends Dexter Gordon and Charles Mingus, never moved east to establish his career, leads a quintet tonight in Newport Beach.

They must have been a strange sight, the skinny kid with an alto saxophone and his husky friend with the bass, playing tunes on one of Southern California’s old Red Line trolley cars in the late 1930s. But the two teen-agers, Buddy Collette and Charles Mingus, playing for their own enjoyment and small change, were to become two of the most important figures on the West Coast music scene as well as in the jazz world at large.

No jazz musician is more connected to Southern California than William Marcell (Buddy) Collette, who leads a quintet at the Hyatt Newporter tonight as part of the hotel’s continuing series of outdoor summer concerts.

Unlike his teen-age pals Mingus, Dexter Gordon, Britt Woodman and Chico Hamilton, Collette never moved east to establish his career. Born in Los Angeles in August of 1921, he preferred to stick it out on the West Coast and make his name here. The going hasn’t been easy.

“I think L.A. is very difficult for jazz people,” Collette recently said from his home in the city. “Very few people have made it who were located here. Jimmy and Jeannie Cheatham, who stayed with me 11 weeks when they first moved out here from Madison (Wisconsin), they told me, ‘You’re probably the only guy who ever made it here in L.A.’

“Mingus left, Dexter Gordon left, Chico Hamilton left, Eric Dolphy left, Charles Lloyd left--they all left, and they made it big. Me, I’m still wondering.”

Collette’s West Coast accomplishments are no small potatoes. In addition to gaining a reputation as a versatile saxophonist, clarinetist and flutist and composer, he was the first black to be accepted into the Hollywood studio scene (when he joined the Groucho Marx Show band in 1951) and was instrumental in forging a single musicians union from the two segregated unions that existed in Los Angeles until the early 1950s. But Collette is also famed for encouraging the careers of several of his Los Angeles peers, including Mingus. It was Collette who got the late bandleader to pick up the bass.

“We were both about 13,” said Collette, “and living in the Watts area. Kids with a band. The tune ‘Slap That Bass’ had just come out, and I knew that if that was happening, I wanted a bass in my band. Mingus was always a different kind of kid--he shaved his head, he was bowlegged and heavy, just a funny kind of guy. He played cello. So I asked him, ‘Will your dad take the cello and trade it in for a bass?’ And it made a little light come on in his head. I saw him a couple of weeks later at school and he said he got the bass. About a week after, I took him out on a job.”

Collette also introduced his friend to bassist Red Callender, with whom Mingus studied for a number of years. “When Mingus and I were young,” he said, “we were talented, but we didn’t just stop there. He studied with Red, he studied symphonic music--he went all the way. He studied to get the technique and to learn to play well, but his goal was always to play jazz.”

A stint with the ground-breaking Chico Hamilton quartet in the mid-1950s (for which Collette played flute) led to the first big break for another of his Los Angeles pals, Eric Dolphy.

“In Eric’s case,” said Collette, “he was playing so good he was going crazy in this town. He was doing all this practicing, and nothing was happening. And Chico kept calling me to come out to New York and play with him, and I said, ‘I’ve got a man you won’t believe.’ So we put him on the plane. After a few months, Eric called and said, ‘Man, what are you doing there? You’ve got to come out here. This is where they need you, where they’ll understand what you’re doing.’

“It was the same thing with (saxophonist) Charles Lloyd. Charles was teaching school here but wasn’t doing a thing musically--he was a musician only on Saturday night.” Collette found him a job, again with Hamilton, and Lloyd was on his way.

Has Collette ever considered making the move east himself? “I went to New York in 1963 to conduct for Ella Fitzgerald,” he replied. “I could have stayed; I was getting all these offers, and I could feel the difference.” But a pending divorce and the responsibilities of two young daughters brought him back to Los Angeles.

Collette isn’t bitter about his relative obscurity on the West Coast. “I’ve been here as long as anybody, and I’m still active,” he said. “Maybe living here doesn’t mean as much to some people as it would if I had come here from somewhere else. But it doesn’t bother me. I know that if I’d been in New York, there would have at least been a lot more record dates.”

His most recent release, “Flute Talk,” with San Pedro-based flutist James Newton, was recorded and released in Italy in 1988. Only now is the album making its way to this country. A recent reissue from 1962 on the Studio West label features the Collette quintet with vocalist Irene Kral. The guitarist on that date, Al Viola, will be in the group tonight at the Newporter.

Collette continues to stay busy, even if he doesn’t work in his hometown as much as he would like. He has just returned from Japan, where he played lead alto in the 45-piece Percy Faith Reunion Band, and will travel to Montana in July for the four-day Flathead River Jazz Festival. A concert with a 20-piece orchestra he led at El Camino College in Torrance this past May yielded enough recorded material for two albums, according to Collette. And, in a ceremony at the Biltmore Hotel, Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley proclaimed Jan. 23, 1990, “Buddy Collette Day” in honor of Collette’s contributions to the local music scene during the last half century.

The multi-reedist will have his flute, clarinet and tenor sax along with him tonight (“I don’t like to carry both the alto and the tenor,” he explained) and promises a variety of tunes written over the duration of his career. No doubt Charles Mingus, Eric Dolphy and Dexter Gordon will be there too, if only in spirit.

The Buddy Collette Quintet will appear tonight at 7:30 at the Hyatt Newporter, 1107 Jamboree Road, Newport Beach. Tickets: $5. Information: (714) 729-1234.