Irvine Music Festival Cultivates a Hybrid Beat : Concert: Vietnamese pop and contemporary Western jazz are fused in what is being billed as the first such live offering.

When Sean and Giana Pham left Vietnam for the United States in 1975, one thing they didn’t leave behind was their deep appreciation for the popular music of their homeland.

Once in this country, they developed another love: contemporary Western jazz. Combining these two passions has resulted in one of the most unusual musical hybrids in the world of jazz fusion. The Phams now head a Berkeley-based company, Giana Records, dedicated to preserving the pop melodies of Vietnam by adapting them to jazz formats and having them performed mostly by American musicians.

The label’s slogan is “Music That Brings Us Together,” but the Phams’ attitude seems to reach beyond platitudes. “We want to introduce Vietnamese audiences to the beauty of jazz as well as introduce American audiences to the composers and melodies of Vietnam,” Giana Pham said recently by phone from the company’s offices in Berkeley. To that end, the company is sponsoring what is being billed as the first Vietnamese-American Jazz Festival at the Radisson Plaza Hotel in Irvine on Saturday.

“The reason for the festival,” Pham said, “is to put what we’re (saying) into action; to show the Vietnamese community the magic of this jazz fusion when they hear it in a live concert, and to have American audiences witness and enjoy what we are doing.”

The Phams, both from musical families, were part of the recording business in their native land before coming to the United States. Here, they began to produce pop records, starting with Sean’s singer-sister Khanh Ly, before hitting on the idea of fusing jazz with Vietnamese music.

Guitarist Trung Nghia, the only Vietnamese artist among 12 musicians scheduled to appear Saturday, started recording with the Phams in the late ‘70s when they were still doing pop tunes. He says combining jazz and Vietnamese music has been a dream come true. “Our music is very romantic. We put it in the form of sambas, bossa nova, rumba, swing. . . . If you put your mind and heart into it you can learn a lot.”

The company has released seven albums since its founding in 1986, some with titles suggestive of the music’s cross-over nature, such as saxophonist Dave Tidball’s “Saigon San Francisco Samba.” According to Pham, the recordings contain mostly Vietnamese pop tunes, with a few Vietnamese folk songs as well as American jazz tunes thrown in. “We use both,” she said, “whatever is especially popular. The Vietnamese tunes are all well-loved, cherished and remembered by the Vietnamese in this country who are old enough to recognize them.”

Peter Zak, a Los Angeles-born keyboardist now located in New York who has a pair of releases on Giana, confirms the music’s familiarity in the Vietnamese community. “I just did an interview in New York for a Vietnamese radio station and (the interviewer) knew almost all of the tunes on my album.”

Zak, a classically trained keyboardist who got into jazz during high school and was a member of the UC Berkeley Jazz Ensemble in the mid-’80s, said he was introduced to the Phams by a friend just before he left college in 1987. “I started arranging Vietnamese pop tunes for them when they were getting ready to do their first album for (keyboardist) Harold Mann,” he said.

The keyboardist, who will work solo at the festival as well as in combo settings, said he had no knowledge of Vietnamese music before meeting the Phams. “I started listening to it through them. . . . They were trying to cross over from a purely Vietnamese market to the American market using Vietnamese songs as base. I didn’t want to do pop music they way they had been doing it and they wanted to get out of it, too. At the time, I was the only jazz musician involved.”

Adapting the tunes has its challenges, he said. “I’ve tried to approach them as I would a jazz standard, though I took more liberties than I would with, say, a Gershwin tune. I’ve basically reharmonized them, though I stick with the original melodies. Some of the songs have a mysterious quality, a lot of them are in minor keys. I’ve changed some in minor keys to major keys, changed the time signature on some. On my second album, I gave some an upbeat feel, made some with a kind of gospel or R & B approach, gave a couple a Latin or a bossa beat.”

The Phams established one guideline for the new arrangements, Zak said: “They want melody to be as recognizable as possible.”

His association with the Phams has been rewarding, according to Zak. “It’s given me a chance to put out my own records commercially,” he said. “Arranging around these melodies and themes has helped me with form and structure. And it’s helped my improvisational playing in different ways. I’ve been playing be-bop for several years and this is a different thing. Playing something other than American songs gives one a fresh outlook.”

In addition to continuing their recording business, the Phams hope to hold concerts promoting their blend of music at various college campuses around the country as well as establishing a continuing series in Orange County. And they’re looking forward to the time their recordings will be sold in their native land.

“It is impossible now,” Giana said. “There are too many things to fight, with the embargo still on and the currency problems. But someday.”

Guitarists Trung Nghia and Jeff Feldstein, keyboardists Peter Zak and Charlie Otwell, saxophonist Dave Tidball, flutist Arthur Maxwell, drummers Edward McClary and Peter Pfeifer, bassists John Wiitala and Charlie Irwin, and vocalists Brenda Boykin and Cecilee Gardener will perform at the First Vietnamese-American Jazz Festival at 8:30 p.m. Saturday in the Crystal Ballroom of the Radisson Plaza Hotel, 18800 MacArthur Blvd., Irvine. Tickets: $30, including one Giana CD or cassette of the buyer’s choice. Information: (714) 833-3331.