Haynes No Longer Plays Follow the Leader : Jazz: At 58, the bassist has gone out on his own, booking a full schedule of club and session dates. And he couldn’t be happier.

Bassist Bobby Haynes spent a good part of his life paying dues as a sideman, starting out in the late ‘50s playing upright with Percy Mayfield and, three decades later, playing electric for bluesman John Mayall. In between he spent time with a host of performers including Chico Hamilton, Dexter Gordon, the Jazz Crusaders, Lou Rawls, Diana Ross and Lena Horne. Once, he even toured Europe and South America with Raquel Welch.

But after he left Mayall, he says, “I decided that 30 years as a sideman was enough. I was going to be a leader.”

At 58, he has become just that, having put together a full schedule of club dates (he plays regularly at Spaghettini in Seal Beach) and “casuals,” jobs that include weddings, private parties and other functions, as well as the odd session date for TV and the movies. And he couldn’t be happier.

“I have more control over my own destiny now,” he said on the phone from his home in Los Angeles. “As a sideman, you sit by the phone and wait for people to call you. As a leader, you’ve got to go out there and make things happen for yourself.”

It’s doubtful that Haynes ever spent much time waiting by the phone. Born in East St. Louis (family legend has it that his dentist there was Miles Davis’ father), he moved to L.A. with his family when he was 10. Already he’d studied piano, starting with lessons from his mother.

“But I never could learn to improvise on the piano, so I kinda lost interest in it after a while. The neighborhood I grew up in, Watts, didn’t think much of classical music at all. Boogie-woogie, blues, jazz or some kind of pop was it. Anything but classical.”

He picked up the bass at 14, and at Jefferson High School he had the same band instructor as legendary bassist Charles Mingus. By 17, Haynes was hanging out with trumpeter Don Cherry and heading to an East L.A. club, Armand’s, to jam with Ornette Coleman and others.

“One of the drummers from Armand’s got me the gig with Percy Mayfield. With Percy, we played a lot locally and covered every inch of the South.”

Traveling the circuit in the ‘50s was much different than it was in the ‘80s when Haynes toured with Mayall. The first time around, “we couldn’t check into hotels (because they were black), so we stayed in boarding houses. It was good in a way, because all the musicians were together. You really got a chance to hang out. Traveling with Mayall, we went to some of the same places in the South where we wouldn’t have been able to even think about staying in a hotel and got first-class treatment.”

In the Mayfield band, Haynes met drummer Frank Butler, who would go on to work with Harold Land and to record with John Coltrane (he was the second drummer on ‘Trane’s landmark “Kula Se Mama” recording). “We got tight in the Mayfield band because we were the two youngest guys,” Haynes recalled. “Frank was very instrumental in helping me get into jazz.”

It was through Butler that Haynes met another of his major influences, Dexter Gordon, with whom he traveled at various times during the late ‘50s. “Dexter was great to me. He’d come to my room and work with me on harmony and stuff and then just sit there while I practiced, offering his criticisms. I have to give him a lot of credit for being where I am now.”

Guitarist John Pisano recommended Haynes for his stint with drummer Hamilton. Haynes remembers “auditioning with Chico right in his garage. He liked me mainly because I read the book so well. That was the one thing about playing with Chico Hamilton--you had to do everything possible on the instrument. He’d break the group down into different trios and I’d be playing with the cello and the guitar, sometimes just me and Chico playing on the stage.”

After a couple of years with Hamilton, he was recruited by drummer Stix Hooper to join a group of Texas expatriates known as the Night Hawks. The band changed its name to the Jazz Crusaders (shortened later to the Crusaders), and Haynes spent another two years touring the country, this time in a Volkswagen bus.

During a break in the travel, he began to do so much studio work--most of it for Motown artists--that when the Jazz Crusaders approached him for another tour, he turned them down. “I was doing eight or 10 dates a day and just didn’t want to leave behind the money. We did rhythm tracks for the Supremes, Marvin Gaye, Martha and the Vandellas. Many times, we wouldn’t know what it was or for whom we were working. We’d do the recordings here, and they’d send them back to Detroit for the vocals.”

It was also during this time, around 1967, that he picked up the electric bass. “I was getting so many calls to play it that I decided I’d better get one. You think playing one would be much like playing an upright, but it’s a different instrument altogether.”

He joined Lou Rawls’ band in ’67 and spent the next three years with it. After that, he did television and toured with Diana Ross, Dusty Springfield and Raquel Welch. He ended the ‘70s working with Lena Horne and was assistant conductor for her appearances in “Pal Joey.”

A fellow bassist, the late Allen Jackson, recommended him for the Mayall gig, which lasted six years. “The great thing about that gig, besides John being a great guy, is that we went all over the globe. That’s where I learned to play loud. Frank Butler, when he played with Coltrane, said, ‘Man, we’re really playing loud, but there’s something in playing loud, I can’t explain it.’ We played extremely loud with the Mayall group and I came to the same conclusion. There’s something there. But it can also drive you deaf.”

His appearances at Spaghettini are decidedly not the loud sort. His group there includes saxophonist Clarence Webb, pianist Charles Blaker and drummer Dale Alexander, and “we play standards, some originals, some be-bop styled tunes. We’ll get requests for Charlie Parker, so we play ‘Scrapple From the Apple’ or something like that. We even get requests for Coltrane. And the ladies all like Kenny G, so we do something of his.”

Haynes has taken on additional responsibilities booking bands into Spaghettini and other clubs, including Los Angeles’ Paradise Club. Does he miss the excitement of being on the road? “No, not now,” he answered. “Music has been good to me over the years. I’ve had some down times like everybody else. But this isn’t one of them.”

* The Bobby Haynes Quartet plays Spaghettini, 3005 Old Ranch Parkway, Seal Beach, every Saturday in September at 8 p.m. No cover. (310) 596-2199.