A Bright Light Shines Under a Bushelbasket : Jazz: Joanne Brackeen is being compared by critics to the great jazz pianists who came before her. But she has not received the recognition she deserves.

Jazz pianist Joanne Brackeen is not well known, so her unabashed confidence may seem brash or cocky to those unfamiliar with her music. But, at 53, Brackeen is in peak form, being compared favorably by critics to the great jazz pianists who came before her. In truth, she’s merely a realist in touch with her own substantial abilities.

In a phone interview from her home in Manhattan’s Chelsea district last week, Brackeen, who plays the Jazz Note in Pacific Beach tonight through Sunday, spoke about her career, and about how tough it has been to gain recognition.

Although she is confident about her talents, she doesn’t have the overblown ego that some jazz legends do. She is warm and engaging, disappointed that acclaim hasn’t come faster, but too busy to let that slow her down.

She recently returned from a tour of jazz festivals in Europe and Canada, including the Montreal Jazz Festival. After this weekend, she is headed for dates in Mt. Hood, Ore., and Honolulu. Before “Legends,” she released an album of Brazilian music last year, and is considering recording another.

Brackeen’s newest recording, “Where Legends Dwell,” released in February, has impressed critics. This reunion with bassist Eddie Gomez and drummer Jack DeJohnette, which features 12 of her original tunes, earned a respectable 4 1/2 of a possible five stars in Downbeat. The jazz magazine also heaped praise on the re-issued “Special Identity,” Brackeen’s initial 1981 recording with Gomez and DeJohnette.

Produced by Helen Keane, who also produced the late jazz pianist Bill Evans, “Where Legends Dwell” finds Brackeen running the gamut from McCoy Tyner-like percussive attacks to Cecil Taylor-ish free-form storms and more introspective, lyrical moments reminiscent of Evans.

Brackeen wrote five of the songs in a whirlwind four-day artistic maelstrom, working on a tight deadline with her much-in-demand sidemen. She is pleased with the results.

“Our energy level is in an amazing place, but it’s always been like that. If we never see each other for 10 years, when we get together it’s the same thing, very, very close, some kind of spiritual level,” said Brackeen, who looks younger than her age and attributes her vitality to a daily two-hour regimen of martial arts.

Brackeen was born in Ventura and broke into jazz with Teddy Edwards, Charles Lloyd and Dexter Gordon in 1950s Los Angeles. After 17 recordings as a leader and dozens more backing other players, she still finds it difficult to get the attention she needs to further her career.

“I’d really like to write a symphony,” she said. “I’ve applied for a Guggenheim (fellowship) five or six times, and everyone gets one but me. David Murray, Charlie Haden--all he had to do was send them a tape. All kinds of people just got one.

“These people look at my compositions and say, ‘I wish I could write like you.’ But I can’t get one because I didn’t go to school, I didn’t do things people do, I’m not the right race (she’s white) or sex.”

Brackeen clawed her way up the jazz career ladder the hard, old-fashioned way, with no college education and little formal musical training. She is mostly self-taught on piano, having discovered early that teachers couldn’t hold her interest.

“When I was 11, I started copying solos off the records of Frankie Carle,” she said. “If there had been any other jazz records in (Ventura), which had about 17,000 people then, I would have listened to them.”

Brackeen wasn’t exactly born into music. Her father “only liked two pieces: Ravel’s ‘Bolero’ and ‘The Third Man’ theme,” she said. “My mother played a little piano and taught kindergarten. We had a big grand piano, and I was interested when I was 6, but they told me I was too young for lessons.

“When I was 9, they gave me lessons, but that was a horror. Teachers are something else. I just wanted to play what I heard on the radio, and she was giving me all this other weird stuff--kids’ songbooks--it was just boring. I wouldn’t practice, wouldn’t touch the piano.

“I’m like 9 years old, and I can hear everything. I took six months to teach myself, then I started working, because I could play. People would call, I’d play dances, high school things, parties. I was tall and I could pass for 21 when I was 12.”

Brackeen recalls that she got her first substantial taste of jazz when she moved to Los Angeles at 14 or 15 and made new musical friends who listened to Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, Gerry Mulligan and other hip, emerging players of the 1950s.

“The neighborhood we lived in, they had segregated white and black,” Brackeen said. “My parents said, ‘We like black people, but if we let them come in, the neighbors will make us get out.’ So we had to rehearse in a church.”

By the time she was 18, Brackeen was friends with eventual top jazz players such as drummer Billy Higgins, who introduced her to saxophonist Ornette Coleman.

“Ornette’s music is my favorite, the most fulfilling. It has more elements in it,” Brackeen said of the saxophonist whose urgent, complex brand of jazz first shocked listeners when he came on the scene during the late 1950s and early 1960s. “His music is large, larger than anyone’s I’ve heard. He’s never gotten near the recognition he deserves.”

Brackeen was offered a recording contract while still in her teens, but didn’t feel ready. Instead, she spent most of the 1960s raising a family in New York and re-immersed herself in jazz through stints in the bands of Art Blakey, Joe Henderson and others during the early 1970s.

She recorded her first solo album, “Snooze,” in 1975.

“You can still get it,” she said. “It’s a good one. It was the first time (bassist) Cecil McBee and (drummer) Billy Hart played together.”

Brackeen’s approach is eclectic, and she has always admired innovators such as Monk, who died in 1982. His sound seemed offbeat and quirky to some people, but not Brackeen, who has developed her own, equally idiosyncratic approach.

“I saw him perform once or twice, and I really liked him,” she said. “People were saying, ‘Look how weird he is, look what he does.’ To me, he was the most normal looking and sounding person I could imagine. I looked at the way he danced while he played, that’s what I feel like when I hear music.”

Brackeen’s shows at the Jazz Note (860 Garnet Ave., Pacific Beach, above Diego’s restaurant) start at 8 and 10 tonight and Saturday night, 7 and 9 Sunday night. Admission is $10, or $7.50 for students with I.D. Shows are open to all ages. Brackeen will be joined by bassist Bob Magnusson and drummer Sherman Ferguson.