For Collette, the Going Got Tough, but . . . : Jazz: While other musicians went East to establish their fame, Buddy Collette remained in Southern California to break ground and barriers.

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 L.A.’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.

But unlike his teen-age pals Mingus, Dexter Gordon, Britt Woodman and Chico Hamilton, Collette, who appears tonight in the “Legends of Jazz” program at the Japan America Theater, never moved East to establish his career. Born in Los Angeles in August of 1921, he preferred to stick it out in Southern California and make his name here. The going hasn’t been easy.

“I think L.A. is very difficult for jazz people,” said Collette recently from his home in the city. “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 accomplishments here are no small potatoes. In addition to gaining a reputation as a versatile saxophonist, clarinetist, flutist and composer, he was the first black to be accepted into the Hollywood studio scene (when he joined the Groucho Marx band in 1951) and was instrumental in forging a single musician’s union from the two segregated unions that existed in Los Angeles until the early ‘50s. But Collette is also famed for encouraging the careers of several of his peers, including the Mingus. It was Collette who got the late bandleader to pick up the bass.

“We were both about 13 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 in a little classical trio with his sisters. 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 later, I took him out on a job.”

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

“In Eric’s case,” Collette said, “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 a 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.

Collette himself only came close to making the move East once. “I went to New York in 1963 to conduct for Ella Fitzgerald,” he recalled. “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 from New York.

Staying busy hasn’t been a problem for Collette. He traveled to Japan earlier this summer as lead alto in the 45-piece Percy Faith reunion band, and has appeared in festivals under his own name in New York and Montana. His most recent release, “Flute Talk” (Soul Note) with San Pedro-based flutist James Newton, recorded and released in Italy in 1988, is just now making its way to this country.

When the Blue Line began running between downtown and Long Beach earlier this summer, Collette, appropriately enough, was asked to take part in the inaugural festivities. In an act that recalled those early days with Mingus, the saxophonist stuck his tenor out the window of one car and played (what else?) “Take the A Train.”