Akagi Trades Top Job for a New Sound

Not that he was falling asleep on the bandstand, but last year, pianist-composer Kei Akagi quit perhaps the most prestigious job in contemporary jazz--working with the late trumpet legend Miles Davis--because he was just plain bored.

“It was exciting at first,” said Akagi, who played with Davis for almost two years. But after a while, he said, he became tired of Davis’ style of contemporary urban music.

“It wasn’t what I was hearing, which was acoustic jazz,” said Akagi, a slim, intense man of 39, dressed today in a gray sweat shirt, black sweat pants and black and white high-tops.

So Akagi took a job with tenor saxophone master Stanley Turrentine, which proved much more to the pianist’s liking. “I love it. I get a chance to play chord changes, play the acoustic piano, solo”--all of which weren’t often part of Akagi’s tenure with Davis. “All of my own recent bands have been acoustic jazz bands.”

And if he didn’t share an affection for Davis’ style, Akagi--who leads his trio for three consecutive Friday evenings, beginning this week at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art--certainly embraced the late trumpeter’s attitude of always seeking fresh avenues of musical expression.

Akagi says that at the core of playing music is the art of doing the unexpected. “But when you do the unexpected, it can’t be from nowhere. You have to relate it to what you’ve done before and where you’re going next,” he said.

From Akagi’s point of view, musical rules exist to be broken, albeit judiciously. “For every do, there’s a don’t. And when you break some of these maxims, you make stuff interesting,” said Akagi enthusiastically, pulling on his lengthy pony tail. “Miles was a master of this. He’d start his solos in unexpected ways, and then when a solo should logically go a particular way, he’d stop, as if to say that the logicality would make a continuance of the idea unnecessary.”

When playing either with his trio or a newly formed quartet, Akagi employs a sense of spontaneity similar to Davis’ in his explorations of tunes, be they originals, jazz classics or classic pop standards.

A composition might begin, he said, with a long, freely conceived introduction, then once the song itself began, “we might start taking more and more liberties with the harmonies, and see what happens.” He added, “But in order to play this way, you have to have a thorough grounding in traditional jazz, because you’re still playing the composition, instead of playing free.”

Akagi finds himself enthralled by “playing free,” or, as musicians often say, “playing outside,” both of which might be described as loosely interpreting the underlying chord structure of a tune and utilizing many other possibilities in choosing the notes.

“It feels like flying, like soaring, though you have to keep an eye on the ground so you know where you’re going to land,” he said.

How do you develop the ability for this kind of playing? Akagi looked off to one side, thinking, then responded: “At first it’s going to be uncomfortable, because you’re playing something your ear is not used to. But like anything else, you develop a taste for it, and it becomes part of your hearing.

“When I first played jazz, a chord might have only so much musical meaning, but as time went by, I started hearing all the possibilities that are in that chord, and as my ear became used to those, they became second nature. And that openness becomes a device for my emotional expression as an artist.”

Some of Akagi’s music leans toward this level of difficulty; some of it definitely does not. Listen to his recent “Playroom” release on Moo Records and you’ll hear several compositions with a pleasing, melodic ring, and others that are more demanding, that reach out and grab you. All in all, these selections exhibit substantial appeal.

“Kei’s deep. He’s an artist who takes his craft seriously, who has very interesting well-written originals. He does his own thing,” said guitarist Sid Jacobs, who booked Akagi’s quartet earlier this month at the Club Brasserie in the Bel Age Hotel.

Akagi returns Wednesday to the room with Jacobs, bassist Dave Carpenter and drummer Joe LaBarbera. He also leads his quartet at Le Cafe in Sherman Oaks on Dec. 8.

Akagi was born in Sendai, Japan, and was raised in Cleveland, Ohio, where his father was in a Ph.D. program at Case Western Reserve University. Akagi started classical piano studies at 5, and after his family returned to Japan in 1965, discovered jazz.

“One of my teachers told me I should investigate jazz, so I went to a local record shop, stood in front of the jazz bin, closed my eyes and pulled out a record. It was by Bud Powell,” he recalled. “It was unbelievable. I was sure it was all written out, rather than improvised.”

Returning to the United States in 1975, Akagi studied for two years in a Ph.D. program in philosophy at U.C. Santa Barbara before deciding to become a professional musician. In his career he has played with many jazz greats besides Davis, from Freddie Hubbard and Tom Harrell to Al DiMeola and Flora Purim.

Despite their differences on music, Akagi treasures his memories of Davis, who died last year.

“He didn’t talk to me a lot over the two years, but what he said was incisive,” he said. “Like one time he told me,” and here Akagi mimics Davis’s renowned rasp, “ ‘Just because you go up the instrument doesn’t mean you gotta come down.’ Or he might call me to come to his hotel room, and he’d pick up his trumpet and do a phrase that Dizzy Gillespie taught him when he was 19, saying, ‘See, I can still play it.’ I lived for those moments.”