Jazz Virtuoso Prepares for a Comeback : Music: Three years ago, pianist Harry Pickens walked away from national renown for a change of scenery. Now he’s back with new ideas and energy.

Harry Pickens settled his long, angular body onto a piano stool at the Horton Grand Hotel downtown, leaned over the keyboard and eased into the music. For the next hour, as San Diego bassist Bob Magnusson prodded him, Pickens dissected standards such as “I Loves You Porgy,” “Easy to Love” and “Alone Together,” reassembling them as his own. In short order, he

incorporated a good portion of the history of jazz piano, from stride to swing, be-bop to plain old sweet and simple.

After a three-year layoff from pursuing jazz full time, the nationally reknowned Pickens plans to launch his music career anew in 1991. Now, in what is his equivalent of spring training, he is in remarkably good musical shape. He will undoubtedly get even stronger during weekly piano workouts at the Horton Grand this month in preparation for what he hopes will be a busy year of performing.

During an interview, the 30-year-old San Diego resident played “Stella by Starlight” to demonstrate some new approaches he is trying. First came a version in which the melody was easily discernible, followed by one in which the signature tune was far less recognizable.

“Instead of just playing the tune in a standard way, I might start out by beginning the tune completely free-form, sort of sneaking into it,” Pickens explained. “It’s traditional in jazz to create melodic variations on the existing harmonic structure. I want to create almost a new composition, with ‘Stella’ as the skeleton. Instead of just playing the tune, I take various thematic aspects and recompose them.”

Pickens is a man of many talents who doesn’t necessarily see jazz as the be-all and end-all in life. After three mid-1980s albums with the critically acclaimed New York group Out of the Blue, he began to feel boxed in by the grind of the music business and burned out on playing piano. So he simply turned to other skills.

“I’ve had about five or six careers, some of them simultaneous,” he said. “I’ve taught kindergarten to graduate school, public and private schools. Right now, I have a business which I’m moving out of, doing marketing consultation and seminars for small businesses. I’ve done seminars on teaching techniques for teachers and for students on how to learn better.”

Pickens recalled how stage fright prompted him to become an expert on curing various creative blocks faced by artists. He plans to offer seminars on peak performance for artists in the months ahead.

“I used to have so much difficulty performing that I could not sleep for a week beforehand. I threw up and had heart palpitations--my heart rate went up to 160 a minute. When I was like that, I realized that if was ever going to perform, I had to overcome them.

“I experimented with different disciplines--self-hypnosis, yoga, physical exercise. Now I can play in front of 20,000 people as effortlessly as in my own living room.”

Part of his system taps the potential of the human mind through meditation and other mental exercises.

“It’s purely a matter of conditioning--of how you condition the mind. You can literally program yourself to reach that transcendent state of mind on cue, so that inspiration is not an accident.”

In addition to his knowledge of human psychology, Pickens is well-seasoned in jazz, especially for a young player.

He was born in Brunswick, Ga., and raised in Davidson, N.C., and eventually entered Davidson County College as a premed major. The summer before starting college, though, he had an experience that changed his life.

“It was a Sunday night about 8. I was thumbing through TV stations looking for something to watch, and there was this incredible, stunning piano music being played by this huge man at the piano. Andre Previn had a series called ‘Previn and the Pittsburgh,’ with Oscar Peterson on piano. I will never forget that evening. The next day, I went to record stores, but I couldn’t find any of his albums, so I went to Goodwill. They had a stack of records, including Oscar in a trio with Ray Brown and Ed Thigpen. I listened to it at least 100 times in the next two or three days. That was really the turning point, where I knew jazz was going to have a big part in my life.”

At college, Pickens didn’t remain premed for long.

“After a semester, I was spending more time in the practice room than the biology lab, and I changed my major to music,” he said. “I transferred to Rutgers because it is close to New York and (pianist) Kenny Barron was on the faculty. I wanted to study with him. I went there a year and graduated, but the greatest thing about being there was the proximity to New York City. By 19, I was playing regularly in New York.”

Pickens’ precise, eclectic approach to jazz--he draws from a tremendous reservoir of both jazz and classical ideas--was soon in demand. He worked with top players, including Freddie Hubbard, Dizzy Gillespie, Milt Jackson, Johnny Griffin and Chico Freeman before joining Out of the Blue.

Led by several strong horn players, Out of the Blue offered limited opportunities for Pickens to express himself. He didn’t do any composing for the group, and his ingenious piano was often relegated to background rhythm.

When he decided to quit the band in 1987, he moved to San Diego, “because I had always wanted to live in California.” And, for the next three years, he left jazz alone while he did a variety of education and business consulting, going weeks at a time without touching a piano.

Even when he wasn’t playing, though, his subconscious was stewing musical ideas, he said. And now his new direction is taking shape.

“I want to return to the swinging virtuoso approach of people like Erroll Garner and Oscar Peterson, but I want to combine this with really modern lines,” Pickens said. He plans to work mostly with jazz standards, breaking down the songs and reinterpreting them.

“I won’t be working on original compositions as much as trying to deepen my own approach to various tunes. I have always admired people like Garner, who was able to spontaneously create compositions (while improvising) which, if studied, revealed a structural and logical complexity that equals a symphony.”