Guitarist Khan’s Circuitous Route Led to Jazz

“Space Age Wes Montgomery.”

That’s what a music writer called guitarist Steve Khan about a decade ago. Although he initially disagreed with the comment, today Khan says he affirms that stylistic link with the great melodic guitarist.

And with good reason. Khan’s latest album, “Headline” on Bluemoon Records, definitely qualifies as straight-ahead jazz. The selections are mostly jazz classics, including Thelonious Monk’s “Hackensack” and Joe Henderson’s “Caribbean Fire Dance,” played with a zesty, swinging flavor by Khan and his associates. There are even some passages that bear a bit of a resemblance to Montgomery, though Khan’s tone and rhythmic emphasis are decidedly his own.

As a teen, Khan idolized Montgomery. He recalled the times he heard the guitarist in Hermosa Beach, at the Lighthouse Cafe: “I was like a groupie. I’d wait outside for his Cadillac to drive up, then I’d help him, carry his amp inside. I’d sit in the front row. I’ve never seen a smile like his. No one was more genuinely happy to play music than he.”

It’s almost by accident, Khan said, that he’s now sounding more like Montgomery than he ever imagined.

“By taking a circuitous route, I have ended up with a sort of basic jazz guitar sound with a few contemporary touches,” said Khan, 45, in a telephone interview from a motel room in Santa Cruz, where he was performing as part of his first California tour in more than five years.

Khan, along with bassist Drew Gress and drummer Ben Perowsky, plays tonight through Sunday at Maxwell’s by the Sea in Huntington Beach and Monday at Catalina Bar & Grill in Hollywood.

At first, Los Angeles native Khan, son of the late songwriter Sammy Cahn, wanted to be the next Montgomery. But “I realized that nobody would ever play that style any better than George Benson and Pat Martino,” he said.

Moving to New York in 1970, Khan instead established himself as an eclectic contemporary artist. His energetic approach--a blend of rock, jazz and R & B--was characterized by a gritty, wiry tone and highly rhythmic yet dissonant-leaning statements.

For a good 10 years, that slant kept Khan not only interested, but in vogue. He was an active session musician in New York, making albums with Steely Dan, Kenny Loggins and Billy Joel, among others, and was a member of the Breckers Brothers band. He also made three albums for Columbia Records, which many fans may remember as much for their colorful covers by French artist Jean-Michel Folon as for their invigorating music.

Then in 1980, Khan shifted gears.

“I just bottomed out,” said Khan. “I got so depressed at how I was playing and sounding.” So depressed that he put his favored Fender Telecaster guitar in the closet. “I haven’t touched it since,” he said.

In the aftermath of this experience, Khan switch to a Gibson 335 hollow-body guitar. He sat around his apartment, playing jazz classics by people such as Monk, Horace Silver, Lee Morgan and others that he had first attracted him to jazz.

He recorded an unaccompanied album, with overdubs, called “Evidence” (reissued recently on BMG/Novus Records), and he started jamming with drummer Steve Jordan and bassist Anthony Jackson. Along with percussionist Manolo Badrena, they formed a new band, Eyewitness.

“We made a lot of that music by improvising,” he said. “We’d turn on a tape recorder and from that came a composition. I still do that a lot.”

Khan feels that what he did with Eyewitness, which stayed together until the mid-’80s, and the music he’s offering now are similar. “The tunes are different, but the approach is the same,” he said. “It’s really all about how one goes about making music with other players.”

The guitarist, whose famous father wrote the lyrics to such pop standards as “All the Way” and and “Darn That Dream,” grew up in rarefied air in the posh Holmby Hills area. Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin were regular dinner guests. Art Linkletter lived next door, across the street were Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, Judy Garland, and Lana Turner and Lex Barker. Khan’s childhood friends included Liza Minelli and Tina Sinatra.

Still, all that glistered was not gold, acknowledged Khan, who changed his name when he was 22.

“My Dad wanted me and my sister Laurie to have everything he didn’t have growing up in the poorest section of New York, so we started piano at 5 or 6,” he said. “I’d rather have been out playing ball. But it all worked out in the end.”

* Steve Khan plays tonight and Saturday at 8:30 and 10:30 p.m. and Sunday at 4 and 6 p.m., at Maxwell’s by the Sea, 317 Pacific Coast Highway, Huntington Beach. $5 cover, plus $7 food-drink minimum. (714) 536-2555.