SOUNDS AROUND TOWN : Double Play : Jazz vocalist Oscar Brown Jr. will make a rare West Coast appearance that may show renewed interest in his music.

When seasoned songwriter and vocalist Oscar Brown Jr. comes to play at Ojai’s Wheeler Hot Springs this Sunday, it will be something of a double coming-out.

For one, it will be a rare professional trip to the West Coast for the Chicago-based musician. He’ll play here with a group including his son, Oscar Brown III on bass, pianist Theo Saunders and percussionist-drummer Sartuse.

His visit may also signal renewed music-industry interest in Brown, who first established himself as a jazz songsmith 30 years ago.

In the ‘60s, Brown was noted for his fiendish way with a lyric, whether in songs of his own or in collaboration with great jazz instrumentalists. Brown’s huge songbook (approaching the 500 mark) spills over with tender touches, bawdy humor, social commentary and witty linguistic high jinks.

His Columbia albums from the ‘60s sound fresh today--maybe even fresher, given the improved atmosphere for jazz. One burning question, then: Why has Brown, who at 63 is far from entertaining the idea of retirement, not been recorded by a major label lately? He’s younger than Miles Davis, with whom he wrote “All Blues” three decades back. It certainly is not for lack of creative energy on Brown’s part.

“Man, I’ve been on a roll recently,” Brown said last week. “Whoo. I don’t know what’s happening. I’ve been writing so many songs, I’m getting scared. Maybe it’s just the bright flash before the end. I’ve been writing ragtime. I’ve been writing lyrics to Duke Ellington and Illinois Jacquet. I’ve been writing stuff of my own.”

When Brown comes to town, there will be a special Ojai connection. Rickie Lee Jones, an Ojaian, has cut a version of Brown’s spunky “Dat Dere,” for her new album “Pop Pop.” It all began one night when Lannie Kaufer, who has headed up the concert series at his Wheeler Hot Springs, was talking to Jones about her upcoming project and suggested she look into the songs of Brown.

As Kaufer said: “I think the fact that Rickie Lee just recorded one of his songs may help him step back into the limelight a little. I certainly didn’t plan it all to happen that way, but it’s nice that it has.”

When Brown spoke last week, he hadn’t heard about Jones’ cover song. In fact, he’d never heard of Rickie Lee Jones. “But that don’t mean anything because what I don’t know would make a new world,” he said.

A 4-year-old Oscar Brown III was partly responsible for “Dat Dere,” written by dad in the mid-’50s, at the time he was writing lyrics for Nat Adderly’s “Work Song.” Brown would repeatedly listen to the song on the Cannonball Adderly record, which also included Bobby Timmons’ tune “Dat Dere.”

He recalls: “I’d be working on a phrase, a word, a line for ‘Work Song’ and the needle would just keep going. By the time I was through with ‘Work Song,’ I had heard a lot of ‘Dat Dere.’ And I had this 4-year-old running around asking ‘dat dere’ questions, and the two things came together.”

Brown talked by phone from Norfolk, Va., last week, where he was working on a reading of his play “Creici,” which will be performed in late August at the Confederacy Museum in Richmond. The injustice of slavery is the subject of the play, composed entirely in rhyming iambic pentameter. Opening the play is Brown’s haunting “Bid ‘Em Here,” recorded on “Sin and Soul,” his debut album of 1960. The song, about the human marketplace of a slave auction, takes its stark rhythms from the cadences of a slave auctioneer.

“Now,” Brown explained, “I’m experimenting with the possibility of putting beats behind the quatrains in order to create a real American recitative opera.”

Much as he is known for individual songs, Brown has long been involved in the larger arena of musical theater. “I created a form that I call a DOME--a dramatic organization of musical expressions--in which I take songs and, by the organization and dramatic sequence of them, I can make a theater piece.”

Actually, Brown was already thinking big as early as 1960, when he went to New York to cut his first album with the idea of finding funding for his musical “Kicks and Company.”

“I was in the process of trying to raise $400,000 even as we were appearing at the Village Vanguard,” he said.

Overall, the business of jazz hasn’t been especially good to him. “As I got into jazz, I found it was not the best label to put on yourself if you wanted to get drive-time airplay, because jazz meant FM at midnight and clubs that didn’t pay much. Although I entered it with great pride, I had second thoughts and wished that I had perhaps called myself a folk singer or a pop artist or anything.”

Brown found himself onstage--acting in “Peter Pan”--at the age of 8, and songwriting wasn’t far behind. “I started doing that when I was a teen-ager. Moliere says that writing is like prostitution. You do it first for love, then for a few friends and finally for money. That’s what it was for me,” he said, laughing. “I started doing it for love, singing for a few friends and then finally I made the whole transition.”

For Brown, songwriting “happens in many different ways. I might hear an expression, like when somebody said, ‘O man, I’m a dime away from a hot dog.’ There comes the inspiration for a song. I might work a club called Memory Lane and write a song about that, or another club called The Last Hurrah and that inspires a song.

“I remember one time someone said, ‘O man, I had a honeydew vacation. It was “honey, do this, honey, do that.” I wrote a song called that, and just had it published this year.”

“Brown Baby,” his well-known tune of 40 years ago, was a lullaby for Oscar III. He was seized with the idea for Davis’ “All Blues” while taking off from Los Angeles International Airport in a blue plane with blue-lined decor and a blue panorama of sea and sky. “I recall as I took off over the ocean, I experienced the refrain ‘the sea, the sky and you and I.’ That was the kick-off right there.

“The blues are more than a color. They’re a ‘a moan, a pain, a taste, a stripe, a sad refrain against which life is played.’ It is a color, but it’s more than a color. That was actually the kickoff. I looked all around where I was, and it was all blue.”

Brown doesn’t listen much to his contemporaries--”I’ve got too much going on in my head and don’t want to be distracted”--but certain sounds do penetrate. “I like Bobby McFerrin--particularly his rhythmic concept. I like Tracy Chapman. I don’t know if that’s jazz. It’s hard to define anyway. Eubie Blake never called any music jazz. He thought it was a bad word.”

* WHERE AND WHEN

Oscar Brown Jr. will appear at Wheeler Hot Springs, 16825 Maricopa Highway, Ojai, on Aug. 4 at 4:30 p.m. For more information, call 646-8131.