MUSIC: Label Teams New Talent With Jazz Masters : New Jazz Talent Goes Out for a Spin With the Greats : Music: A San Diegan is doubling his chances for success by releasing works of jazz masters along with that of promising newcomers.

Longtime jazz buff Otto Gust has genuine respect for the music of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, the seminal years for jazz when Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, John Coltrane and other jazz gods were in their prime. But those years are long gone, and Gust believes now is time for a new generation of mainstream jazz innovators to take the stage.

Two years ago, he founded Time Is Records, San Diego’s only jazz label. Since releasing its first two CDs last October and two more earlier this year, the label is poised to please many hard-cord jazz fans. Partly in reverence for the past legends of jazz, but also with marketing in mind, Gust’s approach pairs each CD of rare material by an established jazz legend with a release by a rising talent.

“My plan of attack is, for every reissue, I also come out with a new recording,” said Gust, a 40-year-old whose thick muscles show his devotion to bodybuilding and Oriental martial arts. “The new stuff has to be heard.”

Gust runs Time Is Records from a small office on 1st Avenue near downtown San Diego, a tidy old room with hardwood floors where the label’s CDs hang on the walls, and where shelves--even in the small restroom--are packed with boxes of CDs waiting for distribution.

Acting as the label’s CEO and president, Gust has one partner in this cottage business--old buddy Bob Norsworthy, another hard-core jazz fan who has followed the music since the 1950s and knows where many of its gems are buried.

It was Norsworthy who turned Gust on to the tapes that became the label’s first two CDs of material by legends. Norsworthy is a friend of Bob Andrews, another dedicated jazz buff. During the 1950s, Andrews carted his tape recorder from club to club to document his favorite players.

In 1952, he recorded a rare date featuring saxophonist Charlie Parker, the founding father of be-bop, alongside a baby-faced Chet Baker, the trumpeter, at the Trade Winds Restaurant in Inglewood.

The next year, Andrews set up his tape machine to document a hot session at The Lighthouse jazz club in Hermosa Beach featuring the late alto saxman Art Pepper.

“Bird & Chet--Inglewood Jam” was one of Gust’s first two releases last October. “Art Pepper Quartet--Vol. 1” came out earlier this year as part of Gust’s second pair of CDs.

To go with these rare recordings of legends--previously released on vinyl by Andrews in the 1970s and digitally remastered and re-released by Gust on CD--Gust hunted down two extremely talented younger players he believes are destined to make their own mark in mainstream jazz: Irvine guitarist Robert Conti and Kansas-born, New York-bassist Nathan Berg.

Conti, whose “Comin’ On Strong!” CD came out alongside the Parker-Baker release is an aspiring successor to Joe Pass, Barney Kessel and Kenny Burrell. Conti combines technical prowess and awesome speed with an ear for improvising fluid melodic lines.

Berg swings hard on both acoustic and electric basses in his debut, “Fish With No Fins,” which Gust released at the same time as the Art Pepper CD. Gust calls Berg “the epitome of the new mainstream jazz player.”

Gust has always been interested in music. He grew up in Jersey City, in a German-Italian family, and still recalls the smell of macaroni on Sunday afternoons and the sounds of Vic Damone and Frank Sinatra on the radio.

A bassist himself, Gust was a folkie in the late 1960s in Greenwich Village and earned a music degree at Jersey City State College in the mid-1970s. Classically trained, he developed an interest in experimental music, combining musical instruments with the taped sounds of slamming doors, banging pots and pans, and people in Central Park.

Also during the ‘70s, Gust was devoted to jazz and even produced recordings by saxophonists Pepper Adams and Zoot Sims, and pianist Walter Bishop.

He lived in San Diego for a time in the late 1970s before moving to Costa Mesa and later to Edgewater, N.J., to pursue other business interests. He returned to San Diego in 1988.

With his record label, he seems to have found his niche. The historical value of Gust’s first two CDs from jazz legends, combined with the promising talents of Conti and Berg, give Time Is an auspicious debut package.

The weakest of the first four CDs is the Parker-Baker session. Although digital re-mastering cleaned up the scratchy sound of the original, the remixing process couldn’t quite pump up the volume of Baker’s horn, which is more of a background murmur than an emerging, original voice.

Even with talented young artists like the ones Gust has landed so far, it is difficult to get them noticed. He hopes his concept of “piggybacking” CDs by finds such as Conti and Berg alongside gems by established legends will strengthen his label’s image and help gain some radio time for the younger talents.

“It’s a psychological thing,” Gust said. “It entices my distributors to buy the unknowns. If I didn’t have the clout of an Art Pepper or a Charlie Parker, it would be a lot more laborious to get distribution on the new artists. This way, I’m cutting the time in half, getting distribution right away instead of waiting for airplay to establish these guys.

“Nathan wasn’t all that well-known, except to jazz lovers because he had been written up for his work with Maynard Ferguson. I put him out with Art Pepper, and distributors will take a chance on him, and their promotional people will go out and sell his CD to the music stores.”

There’s more to Gust’s marketing than pairing releases by established and new players.

For Gust, a restless soul whose previous careers ranged from making high-yield real-estate loans to inventing Selectrocution, a popular, computer-assisted audience participation game that got singles mingling in night clubs during the early 1980s, Time Is presents a perfect opportunity for him to exercise both his love of music and his hard-driving business sense.

In what he feels is his main advantage over other small labels, Gust is as painstaking about the business side of things as he is about searching out players and material.

He constantly updates a computerized list of about 200 jazz radio stations across the country, and, with the help of several assistants, phones them regularly to keep tabs on his company’s music.

“I’ll call every station once a week and say, ‘Where does it stand? Do you need promo copies for giveaways? Interviews? They tell me where it stands, and I try to beef that up a little. By making contact, letting them know I’m here working with them, I get more play. If they don’t hear from you, they play a new album for a week or two, then it gets put on the back burner.”

Gust has deals with distributors to get his product into Tower Records stores across the country, and he is also working to get his CDs into smaller specialty stores. Alongside this retailing effort, he is trying to develop a base of faithful mail-order customers through ads in Jazz Times, which reaches an international audience of about 250,000, and other publications.

So far, he has built a list of about 300 mail customers who receive his catalogues.

Gust’s five-year business plan calls for 40 releases by the end of next year, and a catalogue of 95 titles by the end of 1994. His third pair of CDs is due in June: a reissue of a 1953 session featuring saxman Shorty Rogers and a new recording from guitarist Dave Mundy, another young hopeful.

If Gust’s mailbox is any indication, he already has the respect of musicians. He receives 30 to 50 tapes a month from players hoping to become the next Conti or Berg. Amazingly, he hasn’t received a single tape from a San Diegan.

Even with a small label, there was a substantial upfront investment. Gust estimates he has about $70,000 tied up in the first four CDs, including recording and production expenses and promotional costs. He figures it will take another year to break even.

But Gust isn’t that concerned with the immediate future. It’s the long haul that counts.

“We’re going for broke here,” he said. “I’m doing everything I can to make this happen.”