Oscar Brown Jr. Carries Many Tunes : Influence of Shakespearean Sonnets, Black Poetry Blend in Work of Singer/Songwriter

Oscar Brown Jr.’s best known lyric, the words he put to Miles Davis’ tune “All Blues,” were written in an airplane.

“I was flying out of Los Angeles and the plane was blue, the seats in the plane were blue, the sky was blue, the whole thing was blue,” Brown explained in a phone conversation from his home in Inglewood. “So it all came to me while taking off from LAX.”

At the time, Brown, who sings tonight at Birdland West in Long Beach, was a neighbor of Davis’ in New York. “His wife (Betty) and mine were good friends. We weren’t especially close, but I did hang out at his place a couple of times.”

It was 1962 when Brown put words to Davis’ tune from the trend-setting “Kind of Blue” album. The singer had been in L.A. to play as Davis’ opening act.

“But after two nights, they made Miles the opening act,” he said. “Miles was being cool, kind of ignoring the audience, doing his act. So, in a way, he got what he wanted.”

Since then, Brown has written dozens of his own tunes, often with socially relevant themes, as well as supplying lyrics for such standards as Nat Adderley’s “Work Song,” which became a minor hit for the singer-songwriter.

He was visible in the early ‘60s as the host of the television series “Jazz Scene USA,” where he welcomed such guests as Lou Rawls, Stan Kenton, Al Hirt and the Jazz Crusaders.

But surprisingly, Brown, now 67, didn’t begin to pursue his career as a singer-songwriter until well into his 30s. Born in Chicago, his father, Oscar Brown Sr., wanted his son to follow in his footsteps and become a lawyer.

“He was a political activist and president of the NAACP in Chicago at one point,” Brown said. “He gave me political direction and the exposure to such figures as W.E.B. DuBois and Paul Robeson. But I disappointed him to a certain extent. He had a monumental redemptive love; if I flunked out of school, he gave me another chance.”

Bad grades contributed to Brown’s change in career goals.

“I flunked everything in college my first year except composition, and in that I got an A-plus. I was inclined to poetry, it was something of a gift. So I changed my major to English.”

“I admired Shakespeare, even though originally it had been forced on me, but I was influenced by the sonnets. That was a form I liked. And I read Keats, Shelley, Robert Burns, Edgar Allan Poe. Then I discovered the black poets, like Langston Hughes, and got a lot of direction and inspiration from them.”

Out of college, Brown put his elocution skills to work by acting and working in radio. In the late ‘40s, he was the anchor for one of Chicago’s first black newscasts, “Negro Newsfront.”

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“I moved around the dial to different stations, always getting kicked off the air eventually,” he said. “I was kind of radical in my editorial reviews. The biggest hassle came when I accused a major chemical company of being a war profiteer. The station began insisting to see my editorials before they were read. They had me censored.”

He served in the Army in the mid-’50s and worked in real estate briefly after. But songwriting kept rearing its head.

“I was constantly writing songs, lullabies, torch tunes. It was a hobby. But it was like what Moliere said about prostitution: First, you do it for love, then for a few friends and finally for money. That’s the way it developed for me: bit by bit.”

His first recorded song, “Brown Baby,” written for his son, was sung by Mahalia Jackson. Over the years, he has composed a large body of work and has put words to such jazz standards as Bobby Timmons’ “Dat Dere” and Les McCann’s “So Help Me.”

His career as a vocalist developed more suddenly.

“I didn’t expect to become a singer. But I got a record contract (with Columbia in 1960); the company asked me to do a personal performance and that was it,” he said. “I had entertained some in the service, and always longed to do it.”

That first performance, after a few warm-up appearances in Chicago, was at New York’s landmark Village Vanguard.

Also in 1960, Brown contributed, somewhat unwittingly, to Max Roach’s project “We Insist! Freedom Now,” an effort that melded the civil-rights struggle of the period with the rebelliousness of jazz.

“I wrote that material originally for a larger project, a musical chronology of Afro-American history, that began in Africa and moved through Freedom Day and all those things. Max (Roach) actually cannibalized that project. I was given credit on the disc, but no cash.”

Brown has since appeared on the same bill with Roach, and the two, who had been introduced by singer Abbey Lincoln, are friends.

The songwriter says that he has been unusually productive since the recent Northridge earthquake.

“It shook loose a couple of dozen songs. I’ve written more in the last eight weeks than in any other period of my life,” he said.

He’s hoping that some of these tunes will come together in a recording that will be “like a mural of L.A., a musical documentary of the city. With all the heavy hits we’ve taken lately, it just seems the thing to do.”

And, in a reflection of Brown’s interest in the social fabric of his adopted hometown, one of the tunes is titled “Can We All Just Get Along?”

* Oscar Brown Jr. appears with pianist-trumpeter Bobby Bryant’s Quintet tonight at 9 and 11 at Birdland West, 105 W. Broadway, Long Beach. $15. (310) 436-9341.