Mixing Pop and the Soul : Music: Gino Vannelli hasn’t always found it easy to reconcile his Top 40 success with his classical bent. But he’s getting there.

Backed by a four-piece band, Gino Vannelli will open his first tour in 12 years at the Bacchanal tonight. He’s taking to the road in support of “Inconsolable Man,” an album of sensual pop-funk that is his first release since 1987, and perhaps the best work he’s done since 1981’s “Nightwalker.”

The title of the new album and its namesake ballad refer to a man’s tormented pining for a lost love. In a telephone interview earlier this week, however, the Canadian-Italian singer revealed that “Inconsolable Man” might just as accurately describe a chronic malaise that has dogged him through much of his career and which was only exacerbated by the pop success he achieved in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s.

Although he had been making records since 1973, Vannelli didn’t strike a large public nerve until 1978’s “Brother to Brother,” the million-selling collaboration among Vannelli and his brothers Ross and Joe. The album yielded the smash hit “I Just Want to Stop,” which earned Vannelli a Grammy nomination in the Best Pop Male Vocal Performer category.

Vannelli didn’t release a follow-up for three years, and, although “Nightwalker” produced another Grammy-nominated performance in the hit “Living Inside Myself,” crucial career momentum seemed to have been lost in the interim. By then, however, Vannelli was wrestling with personal issues that dwarfed considerations of chart positions and sales figures.

“With ‘Brother to Brother,’ I finally got the platinum album that I believed was my goal for so long,” said the soft-spoken Vannelli from his current base of operations in Thousand Oaks. “The ‘Nightwalker’ album did very well for me, too. But around that time I became deeply, deeply unhappy with the whole process of life. I wondered how I could sell a million albums and still be so dissatisfied. I was going through a very early midlife crisis.”

To understand how Vannelli dealt with his Angst , it is helpful to retrace the steps that led to it. Vannelli was born 38 years ago into a musical family in Montreal. His father, a singer, exposed young Gino to classical music and the best pop of the ‘40s and ‘50s.

“I learned to appreciate Frank Sinatra and the truly great arrangers of that era--Axel Stordahl, Nelson Riddle and the others,” Vannelli said.

At age 11, Vannelli began singing professionally in Montreal clubs, and was on the road before he reached his teens.

“Then, one day I realized that what I truly loved was classical music,” he recalled. “Throughout elementary and high school I went to a lot of classical concerts. At first I was into 18th-Century artists, then I switched to mid- to latter-19th-Century and early-20th-Century composers--Ravel, Tchaikovsky, Debussy, Stravinsky, Gershwin. These composers really piqued my interest, and, jerk that I was,” he added, laughing, “I was determined to challenge them.”

On the strength of his songwriting and his extraordinary voice, which is at once street-soulful, jazz-expressive and near-operatic in power and control, the 20-year-old Vannelli landed a recording contract with Herb Alpert’s A & M Records. Alpert himself produced 1973’s pop-jazzy “Crazy Life.” A year later, Vannelli recorded its follow-up, “Powerful People,” which surrendered the hit “People Gotta Move.”

Due in large part to the Beatles, however, the rock revolution of the ‘60s had opened the door to more sophisticated modes of expression than pop had ever known, and this development was not lost on Vannelli.

“I wanted to stake my claim to the sort of music the great composers had written,” he said, “and the musical changes that occurred in the ‘60s and ‘70s fueled that ambition. Suddenly, I could conceive of doing rock in the middle of an orchestral piece, or vice versa. I loved the intricacy of unworded music and rhythms, with carefully placed lyrics here and there. So I started writing pieces like “Storm at Sunup” and the ‘War Suite.’ ”

The former, a brooding, string-backed reverie sandwiched around a Latin-esque jazz jam, was the six-minute title track of Vannelli’s third album, released in 1975. “War Suite,” a dramatic pop-fusion tone poem in several movements, took up the entire second side of 1976’s “Gist of the Gemini.” These projects primed Vannelli for what he called “the real thing.”

“For my fifth album, I hired the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Don Sebesky to orchestrate and conduct this four-movement piece I had written, called “A Pauper in Paradise,’ ” Vannelli said. “At first, the musicians in the orchestra were a little bit arrogant; they figured, here’s a real greenhorn. But as they learned the piece, they realized it was actual music, and they ended up giving it their all.”

While the impressive orchestral-vocal piece was the core of the album, the other songs on “A Pauper in Paradise” also showed advancements over Vannelli’s previous efforts. Driven by the bold synthesizer textures of keyboardist-brother Joe--who is in the current touring quartet--Vannelli’s rich, angular chord changes, careening melodies and passionate vocals made the album a classic, if under-appreciated, example of late ‘70s progressive rock.

“ ‘Pauper’ was an attempt to go deep into the underworld, so to speak, to find chord changes and melodies that have a more profound effect on the listener,” Vannelli said. “To the extent that it succeeded, I guess it was a timeless sort of artistic endeavor.”

The singer-composer would soon find himself curbing such esoteric inclinations, however.

“After ‘Pauper,’ people at the record company were warning me, ‘Look, you’re selling 300,000 or so records per release and you have a certain cult following, but if you don’t broaden your appeal your sales are going to go down,’ and so on. You know, ‘Make a hit, make a hit.’ I felt all this pressure, from them, from my family, from everyone around me.

“So I did ‘Brother to Brother,’ ” Vannelli said. “And something good, in a pop sense, came from that album. But so did great misery. I had been making music and pouring my heart out for many years, but when the success of the ‘Brother’ album failed to please me, I realized for the first time that I was never really drawn to making strictly pop music. I had convinced myself that I was, but suddenly I had no notion of what I was doing.”

After the 1981 release of “Nightwalker,” Vannelli reached what he called “a point of total personal chaos.” For four years, he gnawed on some nagging psychological questions that were threatening his very creativity.

“In 1985, I became an avid truth-seeker,” he said. “I wanted to know if my art was just a product of my misery, and if so, did that mean that misery is beneath all art? Why are artists so despondent, so maniacal, so manic-depressive?”

Although he released two more albums (1985’s “Black Cars” and 1987’s “Wild Horses”), and has won five consecutive Juno Awards as Canada’s premier male vocalist, Vannelli spent most of the last half of the ‘80s immersed in studies of the humanities, comparative religion and philosophy. Eschewing what he dismisses as “peripheral, mental” self-realization disciplines such as gestalt therapy, est and Scientology, Vannelli instead delved into mystic Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism and other faiths.

“I also studied people’s lives: James Joyce, Robert Frost, Abe Lincoln. Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson became my inspirations because they took art out of the humanistic level and raised it to the soul level, which is the only effective means of breaking through human constraints. There’s still a lot of stuff churning inside me, but I think now I’m in the process of creating from that soul level.”

“Inconsolable Man” and its first single, “If I Should Lose This Love,” were released Tuesday. Vannelli expressed confidence in his band, which, in addition to his brother includes Mike Miller on guitars and bass, Enzo Todesco on drums and vocalist Maxayne Lewis. He also was cautiously optimistic about their use of music technology developed since the last time he toured.

“We’re trying to utilize sampling and computer technology in a way that enables us to reproduce the sounds on the album,” he said. “It is a real challenge to sync things together so that the combination of man and machine is natural and workable. But I like questions and challenges. Without them, you’re just asleep.”

Gino Vannelli appears tonight at the Bacchanal, 8022 Clairemont Mesa Blvd., 560-8022. Opening the 9:30 p.m. show are the Kiersons.