Success Has Elusive Sound for Sax Player : Jazz: After a disappointing letdown last year, Richard Elliot has a new label and is primed for success. He plays Concerts by the Bay on Sunday.

Big commercial success has proved elusive for pop jazz saxophonist Richard Elliot, who shares a bill with Keiko Matsui on Sunday night as part of Humphrey’s Concerts by the Bay.

Elliot, 31, makes no bones about his calculated attempts to reach the largest possible audience, and his career was once ascending handsomely. The 1988 release “Take to the Skies” topped 80,000 in sales--not phenomenal compared with the millions sold by Kenny G, for example, but respectable. Elliot’s follow-up, last year’s “What’s Inside,” received even better reviews, and seemed destined for bigger sales.

But as Elliot’s career teetered on the brink of the big time last year, his label, Enigma, took a fall when its substantial investment in acts such as former teen idol David Cassidy and hard rock band Stryper didn’t pay off as expected. By August, Enigma had laid off most of its employees.

Elliot says that as “What’s Inside” was released in July, only a month before the shake-up, it hit the market with almost no promotional support and spotty distribution.

“We were touring in a lot of places, and people were saying they couldn’t find our record in stores,” he said. “We equaled the sales of ‘Take to the Skies’ and went a little beyond. But then it kind of stopped dead in its tracks.”

But there may yet be a happy ending in store for Elliot. After “What’s Inside,” he had one recording left on his contract with Enigma, a subsidiary of Capitol.

“I got a call from Bruce Lundvall, general manager of Capitol on the East Coast, and he said, ‘We picked up your contract for the last record, but rather than making it your last for Enigma, why not make it the first for us? So the new album will be the first on my new contract, and it’s special for that reason.”

Lundvall, the Capitol executive who heads Blue Note, the company’s respected straight-ahead jazz division, plans to reactivate Manhattan, a dormant Capitol label. Elliot’s sixth recording, due in August, will be one of the first on the revived Manhattan.

“I’ve always been free to do what I do creatively, but the real difference here is I’m getting input from Lundvall and his team,” said Elliot, who has already recorded 10 potential cuts for the new album in his home studio. “The thing that excites me is I want that kind of input. I send them rough mixes, and they give me feedback.

“The main thing we’ve been dealing with has been picking vocal tunes. We’re looking to outside writers, and Capitol has been instrumental in getting hold of songs. Doing vocal tunes allows an artist to get airplay, like on adult contemporary stations where it’s otherwise hard to get a foot in the door.”

The strategy has worked well in the past. “Movers and Shakers,” sung by Michael and Danny Sembello, was the commercial radio hit of “What’s Inside.” Elliot has been talking to singers, including Janice Siegal of Manhattan Transfer, about singing one of the two or three vocal tunes he plans to include on his new recording.

Elliot, who acquired a substantial funkability during the five years he spent with Tower of Power during the mid-1980s, is at his best on moving, grooving tunes where his throaty tenor sax takes the spotlight, such as “Cantiba” on “What’s Inside.”

On vocal tunes, where Elliot--who doesn’t sing (except in the privacy of his own home--takes a back seat, and on numbers where he puts down his tenor in favor of Lyricon, an electronic woodwind instrument, the music drops several notches in intensity and inspiration.

Elliot’s calculated blend of material sounds watered-down for the masses, which raises the question: At what point can an artist be accused of selling out? But this kind of talk doesn’t seem to bother him.

“I don’t think what I’m doing is bad at all. It’s a developmental thing. As long as you’re not doing something that isn’t in your heart--my music tends to be a little more on the commercial side, but I genuinely enjoy doing it.”

Along with the optimism that accompanies his new recording deal, Elliot’s artistic side has enjoyed a fertile period in recent months, boosted by his move, with wife Michelle, from Los Angeles to Florida last year.

“Living in L.A., toward the end, it was getting hard to write,” Elliott said. “I was sick of the environment, the smog, the traffic. It would take me weeks and weeks to write one song. After I moved to Florida, inside of three months I wrote 17 new songs.”

Elliot, a dedicated road warrior who plays more than 100 live dates a year, penned several more tunes while touring last year--”in the back of a little bus with headphones and a Casio keyboard. I had tons of time as we were driving from place to place. A lot of it feels like traveling music.”

Much of this as-yet-unrecorded music will be featured in Elliot’s show this Sunday.

Elliot was born in Scotland and moved to Los Angeles at 3, where he took up the sax at 12. In high school, he studied with vibraphonist Charlie Shoemake, who turned him on to Dexter Gordon and other straight-ahead jazz masters, while also listening to rock and fusion. At 16, after a high school music instructor arranged an audition, Elliot won a job touring Japan backing the Pointer Sisters, Natalie Cole and others.

Besides his work with Tower of Power, Elliot has played on albums by Huey Lewis and the News (“Fore”) and the Yellowjackets (“Mirage a Trois”). He also wrote the music for the movie “Teen Witch,” not highly visible in theaters but now a sort of cult hit on late-night cable.

“I’d like to get into more movie scoring, but I don’t have much time right now,” he said.

Elliot’s band includes Craig Yamek on drums, Naoki Yanai on bass, Richard Smith on guitar and Sam Mims on keyboards. Music Sunday night starts at 7:30 at Humphrey’s Concerts by the Bay. Tickets are $20.