Jazz Career That’s a Musical Odyssey : Profile: Vinny Golia started as an artist, switched to playing saxophone and now also composes and has his own record label.

The route to Vinny Golia’s Elysian Park apartment is complicated and full of twists and turns, much like his jazz career.

The visitor ascends a steep, winding path of lefts and rights, finally arriving at a dirt lane cut into a hillside that leads to an eroded patch of ground where Golia’s vintage Volvo station wagon sits at a precarious angle. From there, the way is on foot, up to a stucco building, then down a narrow and uneven set of concrete steps, bordered by bamboo screens and tangles of ivy. The air is filled with the nervous yelps of hidden dogs.

Suddenly the way ends at a large patio, shaded by a broad-shouldered pine that gives peek-a-boo views of the freeway and Los Angeles River below.

Inside are the tools of Golia’s trade: a shiny contra-alto clarinet lounges on a folded futon while a bass clarinet stands crane-like near a music stand bristling with sheet music. The walls are decorated with various reed pipes and black-and-white pictures of past and present members of Golia’s various jazz ensembles. Upstairs, his neighbor, trumpeter John Fumo, is practicing scales.

Past the kitchen is another room cluttered with music and instruments as well as the computer where he now does most of his composing. Against one wall is a stack of recent releases from Golia’s 9 Winds record label. Despite the clutter, everything seems to fit just so.

The man himself, scheduled to perform at System M in Long Beach tonight, is telling a story from his art school days back in New York when he would sit in the clubs and sketch musicians as they played. This one’s about how he met the late bassist-composer Charles Mingus.

“He started out the night bugged about something--Mingus was strange to begin with--but by the end of the night he was cool. As I was leaving, I felt this big hand on my shoulder. It was (saxophonist) Pharoah Sanders. ‘I saw you drawing,’ he said. ‘Let’s see what you’ve got.’

“After thumbing through my sketches, he asked if Mingus had seen them. He must have seen the fear in my eyes and started to laugh. ‘Hey, Ming,’ he said. ‘Come over and look at these.’ So Mingus waddles over . . .” and here Golia begins to imitate the sizable bassist’s “Hmmphs!” and grunts as he examines the sketches.

“So I ended up giving him one. After that, he noticed me whenever I went in to see him and he’d say hello.”

It was at another of these jazz and sketch-pad sessions in a Rhode Island club that Golia’s life took a turn. The saxophonist he came to hear, his name now long forgotten, became too drunk to play and Golia volunteered to take over. It was the first time he ever handled a saxophone. “I’m sure it sounded terrible,” Golia related in an earlier interview. “But they didn’t seem to mind.”

He progressed quickly, taking a few lessons from avant-garde composer and wind instrumentalist Anthony Braxton. By the time he relocated to Los Angeles, there were few wind instruments he didn’t play.

Today, Golia divides his time between playing and composing, while managing his own record company, 9 Winds, which in its 17-year history has some 70 releases.

“I originally started doing (the record company) so I could get my own albums out. But there were other musicians that I liked that weren’t getting anything in the way of record contracts, so I started to promote them. Though most of the releases are now done on a cooperative basis, because I was losing too much money, I end up doing most of the work. But I don’t mind because I like the music.”

The range of 9 Winds’ releases reflects Golia’s interest in a wide array of styles. The label covers straight-ahead sessions, such as drummer Dick Berk’s record, as well as more adventurous outings from vocalist Bonnie Barnett, bassist Steuart Liebig, guitarist G.E. Stinson and trombonist Joey Sellers. There are also duo, quintet and large ensemble recordings under Golia’s name.

“It does include a little bit of everything,” the 48-year-old Golia says. “But now I try to focus on America’s West Coast, to present an overview of the music that’s heard here.”

Golia is a big part of that scene, both as a new music composer and an instrumentalist, though his contribution has been acknowledged by only a select audience, an injustice that seems to be changing. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art gave Golia a month’s worth of Fridays in April to appear with various editions of his quintet. He has also appeared numerous times with his group and others at the New Music Monday series at Santa Monica’s Alligator Lounge.

It’s been a year since he’s had a day job, mainly because he’s been on the road so much--all but about 14 days since January. Golia spent March touring the country with trombonist Michael Vlatkovitch. He’s been to Europe twice this year and will return again next week to play an avant-garde festival in Kiev, capital of the Ukraine.

“It turns out they play a lot of my stuff on Radio Free Europe, so I’m known over there. The BBC (the United Kingdom’s public radio station) did a show on me last January,” he says, displaying a taped copy. “I ran into some guys in Austria not long ago who said, ‘Man, we used to listen to your records in college.’ That was very gratifying. It’s nice to know you have an impact on the scene even when you think you don’t.”

When he’s not touring, Golia wrestles with the split between playing and composing. “It’s a fight, I’ll tell you. I spend a lot of time writing, which is a holdover from my painting days when I was always working on producing something. But playing is so exhilarating. And it’s hard to play several instruments without treating all but one as second fiddle.”

In addition to playing a bevy of instruments, Golia appears in several formats. “I play a lot of duos, which are heavy with improvisation. I play in two types of trios: bass and drums, and piano-bass. There’s minimal writing for them. You end up playing a lot. It’s like a pyramid, nobody can line up against you. The key is how the bass will react. It can lock you into a 4/4 jazz beat, or a good bassist will work in more of a classical idiom and you can really open up.”

The quintet setting, which is how he’ll appear Monday at System M, finds him using the second horn, usually trumpet, as a foil while he adds color switching between flute, clarinet and bassoon. With his largest ensemble, now up to a hefty 26 pieces, Golia plays less (“because there are so many great soloists in the orchestra”) but covers more instruments.

“The original idea of the large ensemble was to bring the various L.A. musical factions together: the black jazz players, the classical players, the guys more out of the (jazz) tradition and the ones more on the fringes of the music, like me. We end up with something much greater than the sum of its parts.”

Though the road is difficult for those like Golia whose sense of exploration and disdain for commercial categories keeps them struggling for financial success, he says he never sours on his chosen path. “Sometimes I’ll play just one clarinet note and think, wow, that’s great. Or I’ll hear Alex (percussionist Alex Cline) hit a gong with the large ensemble behind him and it will just take me to another place. The only thing that gets me sour is not going to that place enough.”

The Vinny Golia Ensemble plays tonight at 8 and 10 at System M, 213A Pine Ave., Long Beach. No cover. (310) 435-2525.