Six-Figure Art and $50-a-Night Jazz

Artist Larry Rivers, whose paintings are in the collections of the Musueum of Modern Art in New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, has another life: He’s a jazz tenor saxophonist.

“I try to play as much as I can,” says Rivers, a native New Yorker. He’s appearing with his Climax Jazz Band on Friday at the Remba Gallery in Santa Monica, where an exhibition of his new 3-D relief paintings is opening. Another exhibition of Rivers’ prints opens at the Earl McGrath Gallery in Los Angeles on Thursday.

The 67-year-old Rivers has been married twice and has five children. He studied music at Juilliard before he became seriously interested in art.

Rivers says he’s stylistically a mainstream jazzman. He cites greats such as Sonny Stitt and Sonny Rollins as favorites, and admits that he also has a free-form side like Ornette Coleman.

Dollars- and cents-wise, there’s no comparison between Rivers’ two fields. His paintings have sold at auction in the mid-six figures. With Climax, he averages about $50 a night. “I figure I should get something. After all, I handle such chores as keeping the music in order so we don’t have to wait five minutes between tunes.”