Doing the Write Thing : Guitarist Mundell Lowe Says It’s Composition That Counts With Him

If Mundell Lowe is pressed to put his finger on what really knocks him out about music, the answer he’ll give is composition .

“That’s my thing , baby,” he’ll tell you. “Whether you create it out of your head, in the moment, or whether you take a pencil and put it down on paper, that’s what I’m interested in.”

The 70-year-old mainstream jazz guitarist--whose melodic improvisations will be on display tonight and Saturday at Maxwell’s in Huntington Beach where he’ll play with Jim De Julio’s trio--remembers wanting to know “what is this thing called composition? I come from the South, where a lot of music is ear music, played by ear. So I wanted to know how to go about organizing tonality when writing for a band. To do that, you have to talk to someone who knows how to do it.”

He did just that. In the late ‘40s, the native of Laurel, Miss., moved from New Orleans, where he’d spent his formative musical years, to New York where he studied with such modern masters as Walter Piston, whose book “Harmony” has been an essential text for decades; Hall Overton, who arranged several Thelonious Monk pieces for a classic recording by the pianist in 1959; and Marion Evans, one of popular music’s most renowned orchestrators.

“Hall wrote some sensational stuff,” recalls Lowe, “My lessons with him would last about 2 hours. We’d sit talking, or I’d take down examples...”

In ‘65, he moved again, this time to Los Angeles where he began applying the lessons he’d learned, composing for movies (he has written the soundtracks for Woody Allen’s “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask” and Tom Laughlin’s cult favorite “Billy Jack,” among others) and TV (his scores include “Hawaii Five-O” and “I Dream of Jeannie”).

Currently living in San Diego with his wife, singer Betty Bennett, he’s finishing up his first symphony (“I’m down to the last three or four minutes and I can’t decide which way to go with the ending”). His latest album is “Souvenirs,” on Jazz Alliance Records.

Lowe, whose resume lists stints with Benny Goodman and Charlie Parker, picks and chooses his performing engagements these days.

“I try not to get overly ambitious. I’ve been on the road since I was a kid and unless something is awfully interesting, I might turn it down. I don’t feel that urge to die in the front seat of a bus, as so many musicians have.”

One current association he cherishes is his trio with Andre Previn on piano and Ray Brown on bass. They’ve made a pair of albums together for the TelArc label--”Uptown” and “Old Friends”--and will be hitting the performance trail toward the end of the year.

“The gig pays oodles of money, and you get to play jazz, too,” he says with a laugh, before continuing on a more serious note: “Jazz gives me something every time I play it. (It’s) my roots; that’s how I started playing in New Orleans. There’s also a certain satisfaction in listening to other players, good players who feed your mind as far as musical ideas are concerned.”

His own approach to improvisation is to be “as original as possible. I’m a hound for originality. I don’t have too much repsect for copiers. Originality is what makes the musical world go around.”

Asked to recall a high point of his long career, he chooses his time with Parker, the founder of the be-bop style. “Almost every time I played with him, there was something ethereal, and frightening, about the way he could play. He played faster than you ever thought you could, so that was a way of leveling my mentality as far as music was concerned, making me think I had plenty to work on.

“The first time we worked together was in 1952 at a dance/benefit in Harlem, put on to help people who were blacklisted. We were playing and at about 12 midnight, the police stormed the joint and we had to escape out the back door without our music cases, or my amp. Years later, I ran into Chan (Parker, the alto player’s widow) and we laughed about that night.”

Mundell Lowe plays tonight and Saturday at Maxwell’s By the Sea, 317 Pacific Coast Highway, Huntington Beach. Sets begin at 8 and 10 p.m. $5 cover, two drink minimum. (714) 536-2555.