The Sounds of Simon : Singer Returns To Central Park (Without Garfunkel) For HBO Concert

He isn’t a big guy and hasn’t a big voice, just a light, floating tenor. In an age of punk, heavy metal and robo-rock, he still writes and sings harmonically rich melodies.

But then, it would look silly if Paul Simon, author of “The Sounds of Silence,” started screaming music at this stage of the game. He’s not crazy after all these years.

On Thursday, Simon and a 17-piece band drawn from five nations will step on stage in Central Park for a free concert of almost three hours. HBO will televise it live (tape-delayed on the West Coast).

“It just seemed like a good idea,” Simon said, deadpan.

It isn’t a small one. He and Time-Warner (HBO’s parent company) will cough up what a Simon spokesman says will be $400,000--at least $150,000 contributed to New York’s parks system, the rest for city services at the concert, including police.

That is quite a coughing-up, and a very long way from the innocent, low-budget doo-wop days of the ‘50s in Queens, New York, when he considered himself lucky to get booked at a teen dance in a church basement.

That was when he hung out with Art Garfunkel, with whom he became the Jerry of a duo called Tom & Jerry, later to become the somewhat better-known team of Simon & Garfunkel.

Thursday’s extravaganza is a moment of musical good cheer in New York, a once-vibrant hamlet battered by crime, red ink, rising taxes and constantly lowering expectations. Some still remember the good old days, though.

For Simon, they were when Alan Freed ruled the New York radio roost, and he was learning his trade, a small, skinny kid making the rounds of record companies in Manhattan, doing demonstration records of songs by others.

His stops then were along Broadway, at mid-town addresses he still remembers, the tall, ornate old buildings marked 1650 and 1697.

Thursday’s show is part of a longer trip, a pause in his marathon “Born at the Right Time” tour of almost 14 months, which includes stops this fall at the Hollywood Bowl and Pacific Amphitheatre in Costa Mesa. Simon says the tour will end early next year in Africa after stops in Japan, China, Australia and South America.

The concert is a retrospective of his career, from the simple beginnings to the pulsing South African sounds and rhythms of his 1986 “Graceland” album and the Afro-Brazilian drumming and Antonio Carlos Jobim chord chemistry of his latest, “The Rhythm of the Saints.”

Much of his work is complex, a mix of music from the United States and other lands--Jamaican sca and reggae, Louisiana zydeco, gospel, jazz, rock, English pastoral, the blues, African chants. It represents a lot of listening.

That started when he was in his teens, checking out Top 40 radio and the early folkies in Greenwich Village or, paying attention when his father Lou, a bass player, fronted a big band that alternated with a Latin band at Roseland, New York’s venerable dance hall.

“I felt comfortable in listening to some piece of music that was not from my neighborhood. And I didn’t feel that it was weird. I could still hear that it was pretty, or arresting, or whatever.”

In 1970, at about the time he and Garfunkel called it quits, he began evolving from the category called folk-rock, a bag that included their sweetly olde English hit “Scarborough Fair.”

He began investigating the formal side of music, learning how it works. “I seriously studied harmony, theory, learned about chord substitution, modulation, changing time signatures, how the bass line affected the sound of the chord.

“A lot of that came from the fact I’d injured my hand”--specifically, the first finger of his left hand, the hand he forms chords with on his guitar.

“I couldn’t bend it, I couldn’t play. I had to learn different ways of holding the guitar. It took more than a year waiting for the finger to heal.”

The wait made him a student again, not only of theory and harmony, but of voice, classical guitar and Brazilian music, particularly “a lot of Jobim music.” He also studied with Chuck Israels, a jazz bass player.

“I started to apply a lot of that to my own writing,” he said. “And that’s why, in songs like ‘Still Crazy After All These Years’ or ‘Something So Right,’ I used chord changes that, uh, were not in the lexicon of rock ‘n’ roll ballads.”

His work became more sophisticated, then more international, drawing from a wide variety of melodic and rhythmic influences.

Thursday’s Central Park gig, though, will include the plain, simple music of his early days with Garfunkel, with whom he teamed in 1981 for a Central Park reunion concert taped and shown later by HBO.

Garfunkel won’t join him this time. Simon said he didn’t invite him, but insists it’s not because of troubled waters over which there is no bridge. They still keep in touch, he said. “I just saw him yesterday with his baby.”

But another reprise of Simon & Garfunkel “is not what this show is about,” he said.

“Paul Simon Live: Born at the Right Time Tour” airs Thursday from 7 to 10 p.m. on HBO.