Saxophonist Karl Denson Evolves From Funk to Free Jazz

In a way, saxophonist Karl Denson came into his burgeoning career as a jazz artist through the back door: Funk was his first love.

“Sly Stone, the Ohio Players, James Brown, that was the first music I listened to,” he said. Denson, 35, who lives in El Toro, appears with his quintet Wednesday at Lunaria in Century City.

After his funk phase as a teen-ager, Denson became interested in jazz. “I don’t know why,” he said, “but I found myself asking everyone who the best saxophone player was, and everybody said, ‘Trane,’ ” referring to the innovative saxophonist John Coltrane.

Denson’s older brother was a Coltrane fan too, and soon the youngster was listening to such formidable albums as “Kule Su Mama” and “Interstellar Space”--explosive, expressive projects that Coltrane recorded near the end of his life in 1967.

“So for a while that was my concept, a mixture of funk together with ‘Interstellar Space,’ ” Denson said.

Then, about five years ago, Denson became enamored with the melodically rich music of be-bop and the blues and broadened his horizons considerably, often playing be-bop-type, harmonically rooted solos. This conceptual shift, he said, is an about-face of how Coltrane charted his meteoric career.

“John went from the inside out,” Denson said, alluding to Coltrane’s evolution. After starting as a melodic-based player who generally played the notes in a given chord, a style musicians call inside, Coltrane became a champion of free-form, no-holds-barred improvisations with no adherence to the notes in a chord--what’s known as playing outside.

“I went from the outside in,” said Denson, who appears at Lunaria with trumpeter Ron Stout, pianist Frank Strauss, bassist Jesse Murphy and drummer Trevor Lawrence.

This wasn’t a seamless transition, by any means. Denson recalls an embarrassing moment at a jam session a few years back, when he was struggling with the Jerome Kern popular standard, “All the Things You Are.”

“I was completely lost,” he said. “You have to know where you’re going with those tunes. So I have been working my way back into the tradition, and developing an understanding of the roots. There’s so much literature there that it kind of takes you over when you develop a taste for it.”

Denson said he excels at modal compositions, where one or two chords are employed for improvisations, as if a painter were using only two or three colors, instead of hundreds, for a huge canvas.

“With be-bop and blues, I’m still doing the rite of passage,” he said. “I listen to the way I play those types of tunes and the way Ron Stout does, and that’s why I refer to him as my tutor,” he added, laughing.

Stout, who performs with Bill Holman’s orchestra and occasionally subs for Conte Candoli in Supersax, says in no uncertain terms that Denson’s abilities as an improviser are shining through. “This guy can really play,” he said in a separate conversation.

If Denson remains a multifarious soloist, he displays a comparable approach to composition. During a performance at last month’s fifth annual John Coltrane Festival at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre in Los Angeles, the saxophonist’s quintet--which won the affair’s Young Musicians and Artists Competition--played some edgy and adventurous music. These selections had plenty of bite, resulting in solos that swayed between calm and a riotous, hellbent effusiveness.

“Yeah, I stretched out that night,” he said, indicating that the music had a high degree of looseness. “Free jazz is in certain ways more fun to play than be-bop. But I learned a while back that it’s difficult to get people to sit down and listen to it.”

On another night at the Studio Cafe in Balboa, where Denson has been appearing Tuesday nights for about five years, his tunes were more hard-bop based, recalling the intricate, flowing works of such writers as Horace Silver, with their amalgam of keen melody, varied harmonic platforms and bluesy swagger.

“I play different things in different places,” Denson said. “In a place like the Studio Cafe, where you don’t know what kind of audience you have--it’s not necessarily a jazz audience--I try to swing more. I notice people who aren’t jazz listeners, they’re bobbing their heads or patting their feet. I can tell by the looks on their faces that this music is not what they expected.”

Denson, born in Quantico, Va., moved to Orange County when he was 6. He graduated from Santa Ana Valley High School and attended Fullerton Junior College and Cal State Long Beach. Since the mid-’80s, he has made the lion’s share of his living touring with pop singers O’Bryan and Lenny Kravitz.

But it’s establishing a personal statement in the jazz vein that drives Denson, who can be heard on trombonist Fred Wesley’s “Comme Ci, Comme Ca” on Antilles Records and whose Antilles debut is due out in March.

“I’m trying to make my tunes come to life, make them something they weren’t before,” he said. “I want people to feel they’ve come to my world, not just the jazz world. I’m after something different.”