Harmonizing 2 Musical Loves : Alan Broadbent combines affection for composing with a talent for performing and improvising, saying they are essential to his existence

“I have two worlds in my head,” says jazz pianist and composer Alan Broadbent. He stands in the middle of the studio in his Santa Monica flat, where shelves of scores and CDs and walls dotted with photographs of musicians such as Charlie Parker, Gustav Mahler and Bud Powell all vie for a visitor’s eye.

“One’s the improviser,” Broadbent says softly, in an accent that only slightly betrays his New Zealand heritage. With a sly smile, he switches to a French pronunciation, “And one’s the composeteur. “

Broadbent, 44, a prodigy who in 1966 left his native land at 18 to come to the United States to study and play jazz piano, discovered soon afterward that he also had a deep affection for composition. He also enjoyed orchestration, defined in the Harvard Concise Dictionary of Music as “the art of specifying the use of particular instruments in a composition.”

The musician, who was nominated for a Grammy in 1975 for “Children of Lima,” a recording melding the Woody Herman orchestra and the Houston Symphony, says his two worlds, his two musical loves, are essential to his existence.

“They are so life-affirming, so healthy, so giving,” he says. “They’re both ways for me to connect my feelings with music, and they both provide me with nourishment. They give me a reason for living.”

Broadbent, a wonderfully lyrical and fluid jazz soloist, works regularly with his longtime bassist, Putter Smith, and drummer Billy Mintz at such haunts as the Grand Avenue Bar of the downtown Los Angeles Biltmore Hotel and the Glendale Grill. He also makes out-of-town runs, such as a recent excursion to the Bay Area, where he backed singer Sheila Jordan, then concertized at Maybeck Hall in Berkeley, a performance that will be released on the Concord Jazz label.

The club work is stimulating, says Broadbent, whose most recent trio release is “Away From You” (Trend). “It’s a way of keeping the energy of my trio together and a way of communicating the music I love to people, especially younger people. In these rooms, they don’t have to pay a lot of money to get in, as they would at a major jazz room, and I can get the message passed on.”

His repertoire includes originals, jazz classics and pop standards. He finds a tune such as Jerome Kern’s “All the Things You Are” always interesting to improvise on. (It was written for Kern’s 1939 Broadway show, “Very Warm for May,” a flop which ran just 59 performances.)

“But I’m not improvising on the song, I’m improvising on its form, the chord changes, though after years of experience, I hear more than that,” he says. “I hear it the way Beethoven would hear a rondo form.”

The thing that excites Broadbent about improvisation is its mirroring of life, its contemporaneity. “Jazz musicians have the ability to take the popular songs of the past and bring them into contemporary culture by expressing their feelings on this form,” he says. “So a modern musician, say, pianist Mulgrew Miller, can play “All the Things” now and be contemporary, and Benny Goodman could have played it in the ‘40s, and it would have been contemporary then. It’s because of the construction of the thing and the way you interpret the music that makes it sound fresh, makes it always sound like jazz.”

Jazz for Broadbent probably wouldn’t be the same without bassist Smith, who’s been a cohort for more than 15 years. “ ‘Putt’ and I have been playing together for so long that there are times when our functions seem to come from the same source,” he says. “His bass notes are the ones I hear in my inner ear, and my solos are extensions of those notes. This requires vulnerability on the part of two improvisers--three even more so, which is why I use Billy Mintz on drums or Frank Gibson, when he’s here from New Zealand--and can lead to disappointments as well as great joy.”

Composition remains largely an avocation. “I don’t compose commercially, and I only arrange and orchestrate occasionally,” he says. The last activity is represented by occasional television work. Over the years he has orchestrated for such noted score composers as David Rose and Peter Myers--and has done frequent recording assignments, such as concocting background parts for singer Sue Raney’s 1989 Trend release, “Sue Raney Sings the Music of Henry Mancini.”

“I’m proud of the writing,” says Broadbent, who orchestrated such Mancini tunes as “Moon River” and “Days of Wine and Roses” for an octet of woodwinds. “And Sue sings her tail off.”

Of the several large-scale works he has completed, he’s most satisfied with “Suite for Orchestra,” commissioned by Jack Elliott of the New American Orchestra in 1980 and premiered in 1981, and his as-yet-unperformed “Concerto for Jazz Piano and Orchestra.”

“This one took me nine years to write and nine months to orchestrate,” says Broadbent, holding up a Manila folder containing his tome. “In the work, I’ve deliberately tried to wed the two together: the jazz and the symphony. The symphony doesn’t play jazz. When I play piano with the orchestra, we play in a classical vein. When I play with my trio, it’s jazz with orchestral accompaniment.”

Broadbent, who lives with his wife of five years, actress Alison Halifax, splits his day between preparing for performances and studying orchestration. His primary concern as a pianist is to “get beyond” himself.

“That means getting beyond the physical awareness of yourself, of your own mind, your ego,” he says. “In other words, anything that is not concentration on the music--such as nerves or if I’m worried about whether my fingers are in shape--is something that will interfere with the music. Just to get to that point of ‘being the music’ is what is frustrating because, with jazz, I won’t know until the moment I sit down whether I can have it, like magic, begin. If you’re serious about improvising, it changes from day to day, depending on how you feel. You never know how it’s going to turn out.

“Most of my life has been spent trying to obtain the technique to will the music to happen: Your musicality wills the phrase, and it comes out. If the will is interrupted--by the ego, let’s say--I’m back to the beginning again. I can be fazed by this, or I can be a professional and get past it.”

A native of Auckland, Broadbent studied piano at the Royal Trinity College of Music from ages 7 to 13, and encountered jazz soon thereafter. He was already an accomplished jazz musician when he came to the United States, and he studied for four years at the Berklee College of Music in Boston.

“I was like a sponge,” he recalls. “I was playing jazz every day with my peers.”

During his stay at Berklee, Broadbent was active. He worked as a jazz player six nights a week in Boston; traveled to New York once a week to study improvisation with the legendary pianist Lennie Tristano; wrote scores for the Berklee jazz ensembles and independently studied his primary orchestral heroes: Maurice Ravel, Claude Debussy and Gustav Mahler.

Mahler’s oeuvre was not easy for a 20-year-old initiate. “I found a score to his Ninth Symphony in a bookstore and bought a recording of it,” he remembers. “I could only get through about the first 20 bars, and then this other stuff that sounded so Germanic would happen, and I found I just couldn’t handle it. I was too young.”

Later, in 1980, at the end of a period when he had listened to a little orchestral music and as he began work on “Suite for Orchestra,” Broadbent tackled Mahler again and found he was now more open to the composer.

“I found that, like my favorite improvisers, Mahler’s orchestrations, the emphasis he has with certain instruments, the colors he uses in the orchestra, have direct connections to his feelings,” he says.

After Berklee, Broadbent toured with Woody Herman from 1969 to 1972 and then settled in Los Angeles. He’s worked with an array of talented Angelenos, including bassist Charlie Haden, saxophonist Gary Foster, guitarist Lee Ritenour and singers Raney and the late Irene Kral.

As time goes by, Broadbent says, it seems as if his path has chosen him, not vice versa.

“Everybody knows that the more knowledge you gain about something, the more mysterious it becomes, such as where it comes from and why, and how it’s made and why we resonate to it,” he says. “But music is something that’s internal in me and that has to be done. Lennie Tristano said that if you’re an artist and you don’t use that energy, it works against you. So we have to use it, or we’ll hate ourselves.”