Keeping It Fresh and New : Jazz: Bob Magnusson has a classical background. He has become one of the best on one of the most neglected jazz instruments--the bass.

Bob Magnusson remembers the exact moment jazz took over his life.

He was 19, had played classical French horn for 12 years and thought he would end up being a career symphony musician like his father. It was 1966, and his peers were into the Fab Four, Paul Revere and the Raiders and other teen idols. Not Magnusson.

“I heard Miles Davis’ ‘Kind of Blue’ and that was the clincher,” said the San Diego jazz bassist who has since earned an international reputation.

But it was more than Paul Chambers’ bass on “Kind of Blue” that mesmerized him.

“It was the collective sound of the music,” Magnusson explained. “It had sophisticated harmony, which I was used to from classical music, and the rhythmic pulse I liked from blues and jazz.”

At the time of his jazz epiphany, Magnusson was working in a cabinetry shop, where he glued an old bass back together that his mother had stored in pieces.

On French horn, Magnusson had been good. On bass, he was a natural.

After a year holed up with the instrument, he made his jazz debut at the old Stage Door bar on Crystal Pier in Pacific Beach and took over the eighth of eight bass chairs with the San Diego Symphony. After two years, he was touring with drummer Buddy Rich’s big band.

Jump forward to 1992. Magnusson, 45, has now chalked up more than 100 album credits, playing behind a Who’s Who of jazz: Benny Golson, Shelley Manne, Sara Vaughan. He has made five albums of his own. He pulls out a date book that shows a recording session with Neil Diamond this week, live dates with Red Holloway and Laurindo Almeida this spring and a Japanese tour in May with Diane Schuur, along with his frequent appearances in San Diego.

“It’s not often that you find a guy that can play with such beautiful tone and such beautiful time,” said Del Mar guitarist Peter Sprague, a longtime musical associate of Magnusson’s. “He’s got a great sense of time, he solos up and down the chord changes, he’s one of the nicest guys you’d ever meet, and he surfs his tail off, too. He’s an old-style long-boarder, and he has loads of style. It’s all about beauty, similar to the way he plays bass. He’s not into flash, but more into playing the music.”

Listening to guitarist Almeida’s new album “Outra Vez,” recorded live at the Jazz Note in Pacific Beach last October, it’s quickly apparent why Magnusson is much in demand.

In his hands, the bass is a living, moaning, crying hunk of wood, rising above its basic role as timekeeper.

Magnusson’s classical training and years as a busy Los Angeles studio player allow him to finesse any piece of music on sight. He can drive an up-tempo, be-bop tune, deliver a delicate bowed solo on a ballad or slip easily into a samba.

On “Outra Vez” he steals the limelight during Almeida’s ingenious pairing of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” and the jazz standard “Round Midnight.” Almeida takes the Beethoven, while Magnusson parallels with a deep, moody version of the jazz tune that climaxes in a monster bass solo.

Born in New York City while his father, Daniel, attended Juilliard, Magnusson was practically weaned on music during his San Diego childhood. His dad was principal clarinetist with the San Diego Symphony for 28 years, and his mother taught piano.

“My Dad took me to see Segovia when I was 14 or 15,” Magnusson recalled. “I just loved the classical guitar. I was totally impressed.”

Magnusson took several months worth of guitar lessons as a diversion from his classical French horn studies. Meanwhile, his older brother played sax in a circa-1963 surf-rock band and recruited Magnusson on electric bass.

“Then I got into a really good R&B; band called ‘The Kingsmen’--not the ones who did ‘Louie Louie,’ ” Magnusson said. “It was miles over my head, what they were playing, but they liked me, and they taught me the style.”

Soon after, Magnusson heard “Kind of Blue,” and he spent a year playing hundreds of records, learning his way around the acoustic bass, listening intently to bassists such as Steve Swallow, Albert Stinson (from Chico Hamilton’s band) and Paul Chambers.

Magnusson says it was difficult to make the transition from the rigors of classical music to the looser, spontaneous realm of jazz, where improvisation is the essence and players often rely more upon instinct than sheet music.

“The most difficult thing was learning to trust my ears,” he said. “In classical music, you read music all the time.”

Magnusson became part of a vital late-1960s San Diego jazz scene that also included pianist Bill Mays, bassist Hank Dobbs and drummer Jim Plank, whom Magnusson had known for years through Plank’s work in the symphony with Magnusson’s dad.

Brothers Joe and Tony Marillo had also been mainstays on the local jazz scene, as they are today, but during the late 1960s they were living in Las Vegas and persuaded Magnusson to join a a happening music scene that ranged from casino show bands to all-night jazz dens. Magnusson shared an isolated desert bungalow with drummer Ron Ogden, and the pair serenaded the sands until the wee hours when they weren’t working.

Magnusson landed a lounge job right away, but within days moved up to a show band at the Thunderbird Hotel. He was only 20 when he joined Rich’s band a few months later. Magnusson settled in Vegas again after a year on the road with Rich and played with several other bands while soaking up the sounds of the legends who came to town: Count Basie, Carmen McRae, Duke Ellington. And, last but not least, jazz vocalist supreme Sarah Vaughan, who asked Magnusson to join her group in 1971 after he played a few shows with her.

Magnusson spent two years in Vaughan’s band and played on two albums. He brought his young family to San Diego for three years, but rejoined Vaughan in 1975 and moved to Los Angeles to be in the heart of the West Coast jazz scene.

In Los Angeles, Magnusson met and played with more top musicians, and in 1981 made his first solo album, “Song for Janet Lee,” dedicated to his wife and Point Loma High School sweetheart and featuring sax and flute player Joe Farrell, drummer John Guerin, and old sidekicks Plank and Mays.

As a free-lance bass, Magnusson worked all kinds of dates. During the 1980s in Los Angeles, he played on two of pop singer Linda Ronstadt’s three albums with Nelson Riddle’s orchestra and on two of Bonnie Raitt’s. You can also hear him on the sound tracks for the movies “Sharky’s Machine” and “Dick Tracy” (with Madonna) and on television movies including “Evita,” starring Faye Dunaway.

But, while Magnusson’s jazz career was taking off, so was his family. Eventually, he burned out on Los Angeles and moved back to San Diego, where he and his wife, Janet Lee, and four children, ages 11 to 22, live in the Point Loma house his parents built in 1955.

“L.A. was very good to me, it presented all kinds of opportunities,” he said. “But, after a while, I was looking for quality of life for my family.”

San Diego may have a lower profile jazz scene, but it has world-class players, Magnusson emphasizes, mentioning Mike Wofford, Charles McPherson, Mundell Lowe and Gary LeFebvre.

Magnusson has made a transition from youthful ambitions to mature satisfaction with his career, and he is content to be a solid San Diego family man with a locally based career that still affords him many chances to play with jazz’s best.

He also enjoys his two days a week teaching bass at the Musicians Institute in Hollywood, where he has taught since 1978.

“It was never a drive for stardom or fame for me, but it was a drive when I was younger to test myself because you never really know what you can do,” Magnusson said.

Now that he has arrived as a mature artist, he can be just as happy playing standards on a Wednesday night at the Horton Grand as recording with big names like Almeida and Vaughan.

“The songs are different every time,” he said. “Your moods are different, different things happen. That’s the art of jazz. That freedom of expression is what keeps it fresh and new.”