Trombonist’s Direction Comes Out of His Shells : Improvisation: Since he heard ‘the sound of tranquillity’ in 1968, Steve Turre has been collecting and playing conchs and whelks.

In 1968, Steve Turre was playing trombone in San Francisco with the great reed player Rahsaan Roland Kirk when Kirk suddenly blew a note on a sea shell. It changed Turre’s life.

“Roland would bang on a gong, and that would sound like chaos, then he’d blow on the shell and it would be peaceful, the sound of tranquillity,” Turre recalls.

Fascinated, Turre started amassing a collection of 30 shells, large and small, which he has played alongside trumpeter Woody Shaw and drummer Art Blakey, among others. Last year, he took this fixation a step further, recording an album called “Sanctified Shells” (on the Antilles label) with a three-man shell choir, creating exotic, compelling musical moods bolstered by zesty rhythmic and brass accompaniment.

These days, he’s touring with a 10-piece, New York-based “Sanctified Shells” ensemble. It makes its West Coast debut Friday night at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa.

Turre’s shells range from brown-and-flesh-colored conchs three or four inches long and two inches wide to immense white whelks, about 18 inches long and eight inches across. He carves, by hand or mechanically, circular mouthpieces into the shells and then blows inside, using an embouchure similar to the one he uses for trombone. Each shell reaches about five notes, depending on where inside the shell he places his hand.

“With a brass or reed instrument, the sound is directional. It comes right at you. The shell sound is non-directional. It surrounds you, caresses you,” Turre says.

He further notes that while, say, a trombone is manufactured to sound pretty much like any other trombone, each shell is unique. “You have to accept it the way it is, get to know it as an individual. There’s a spirit in it, the way it speaks to you, from nature. If you’re looking for something intellectual, you might miss” what the shell has to offer.

Given the limited melodic range of each shell, Turre has to switch from one to another if he wants to extend the range of a solo. “I have to allow space in the improvisation so that I can put one down and pick another one up.”

Born 45 years ago in Nebraska, Turre was raised in the San Francisco Bay Area and moved to New York in 1973 when he joined Blakey’s band (Turre lives in New Jersey). “I was thrilled to death and scared to death to be playing with Art,” he recalls. “Back then, it wasn’t popular to play with Art Blakey. Fusion and free jazz were in, and musicians asked me why I was playing be-bop. I told them, ‘Because it’s kicking my butt, and I want to learn how to play it.’ ”

He went on to work with Shaw, the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra and Dizzy Gillespie’s United Nation Orchestra, and still says that if you can play be-bop, “you can play anything. If you have deliberately not messed with it, you’re cheating yourself. There’s a lot of beauty and joy, and it will always be there to challenge me.

“Still, I’m not trying to live in the past. I always want to go forward. The shells are proof of that.”

* Steve Turre’s “Sanctified Shells” ensemble opens for the Toshiko Akiyoshi Jazz Orchestra Friday at 8 p.m. at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. $12-$30. (714) 556-2787.