Pianist’s Strong Mind Is Again Joined by a Strong Body : Jazz: The Chinese medical art of Chi Gong gives JoAnne Brackeen the strength for sustained playing of intricate, angled, highly evolved music. She makes a rare Southern California appearance this weekend.

The spare New York loft of JoAnne Brackeen is dominated by two grand pianos, facing and tucked into each other, the melding of curves a happy if formidable yin/yang. But nearby, on her wood writing desk, is the image that telegraphs so much more: a photo of Brackeen at the keyboard, characteristically bent forward while summoning canyon-like walls of chords, with a strange fuzzy cloud of light hovering over her.

Is it a defect in the print emulsion? An eerie accident of flash lighting?

“Energy. It’s the energy,” says Brackeen. “If you can see it, then you know it.”

The Energy. Right.

If anything characterizes this protean jazz artist, who makes a rare appearance in town tonight and Saturday at the Jazz Bakery, it is her seemingly exhaustion-proof capacity for the sustained playing of intricate, angled, highly evolved music that often rides a nervous edge between atonal anarchy and lavish, unapologetic romanticism. A fair amount of energy is required of the listener, not to mention the practitioner, and so energy and its management take on a special role in the Brackeen conception.

But it hasn’t come easy.

In the mid-’80s, Brackeen was poised to enjoy the central role in modern jazz music that musicians and critics often prognosticated for her: to be a dominant force in the evolution of jazz piano. She had served with distinction the apprenticeships reserved for those very few up-and-comers who show not only facility but imagination.

Dexter Gordon, Art Blakey, Stan Getz, Joe Henderson--each had in his band the woman whose playing complemented the band’s sound yet whose solos at times edged toward space, the odd chord, the roiling 3-D knit of new sounds. Brackeen, in the late 1970s, would go her own way, be her own force.

By the early 1980s, she’d achieved considerable artistic success as both composer and recording artist, notably with her 1981 LP “Special Identity,” featuring Eddie Gomez on bass and Jack DeJohnette on drums. She would, however, find herself struggling to find an identity as a band leader who might find easy booking at New York’s hallowed but male-dominated jazz clubs.

But her music expanded further in both solo and trio formats, and her sound became ever-singular. Critics struggled for modifiers of comparison. While McCoy Tyner’s name serially appeared to account for her thunder and Bill Evans’ legacy arose as compass to her tender side, it was clear that the only workable references would be spiritual and bear no similarity in style or content: Ornette Coleman for his freedom, his spaciousness, his daring; Cecil “What’s-He-Doing?” Taylor for just that mysterious quality.

In being true to her idiosyncratic vision, however, Brackeen eluded many who classify and promote music. By 1987, Brackeen had become not a household name but one of jazz’s inside players, lost on the mass audience but winning critical notice and passionate listeners willing to summon the energy to meet her on her own ground. If she wasn’t at the Village Vanguard, she was nearby at Bradleys, the premier piano-bass room in America, happily exploring the outer limits of duo playing with the formidable bassist Cecil McBee.

But the Brackeen constellation also was undergoing a far worse threat than that posed by a fickle jazz marketplace. Her energy--the very source of her complex, demanding art--was threatened. In 1987 she was experiencing deep bouts of fatigue and, in her arms, pain and muscle failure--symptoms she prefers not to name medically but refers to as “problems we all have at some point.”

That’s when she met the man who would help her find the cloud of light in the picture, help her commence what has since--through the release last month of “Take a Chance,” her latest CD--been the most fecund period of her career.

*

Brackeen appeared recently at the University of Hawaii to perform and deliver a lecture titled “Jazz, Chi Gong and I.” In the audience was Dr. Chu Chow, Brackeen’s Toronto-based master of Chi Gong, an ancient Chinese medical practice that seeks to establish balance between one’s output of physical energy and one’s capacity to receive, or renew, it.

Chow, says Brackeen, “changed everything. He teaches me, and Chi Gong has given me my life back.”

It has also given Chow a tune in his name, a conceptual piece written and recorded by Brackeen in 1989 on what would become a landmark effort: the first of Concord’s CD series of solo piano performances at Berkeley’s Maybeck Recital Hall.

Chi Gong is a Tao-rooted system of animal-like body movements. Its name translates to “working with chi,” or working with life-force energy. The exercises are designed to awaken natural fields of energy throughout the body. In Brackeen it has erased pain, bolstered energy and reinforced the notion that creativity is connected to the body as much as the mind.

Brackeen gives at least two hours a day to her Chi Gong regimen but also notes that “you can live your whole day within it.” The result, she says, is a continuous restoration of energy for someone who “puts out enormous amounts of energy” performing, writing, teaching and touring.

Like Brackeen’s music, though, Chi Gong can challenge sensibility, and Brackeen’s use of it as a life and art battery charge may be singular. Pianist Marian McPartland was introduced to Chi Gong by Brackeen but found it elusive. “I can’t go with it,” McPartland says, “and (JoAnne) knows it.”

McPartland, however, is accustomed to challenge from her friend Brackeen.

“I don’t think there’s anybody like JoAnne,” McPartland says. “She has wild ideas, and she’s not afraid to try them. She’ll lay out the melodic line, such as it is, and right away I’ll think: ‘What the hell is she doing?’ Then, she’ll improvise, with variations on chords that, it seems, shouldn’t work. But it always sounds right. If I tried it, I’d be in a pickle.”

Making unlikely things sound right, of course, is at the heart of improvisation. And improvising is a peculiar deed. It involves so many things: playing in real time with band members, hearing those band members and choosing yet simultaneously playing notes that “sound right” against the band’s sonic backdrop and coalesce into a distinct statement, or solo.

It’s a subject that has pushed a professorial Wynton Marsalis to ponder consciousness and an incisive McPartland to differentiate between moments of “making choices” and moments of playing by “impulse.”

Brackeen, ever the iconoclast, will have no such talk.

“When you eat your lunch,” she says, “your stomach is working and doing things, your blood is moving all around, but all you know is the taste. Music is like that. All I know is the taste. I don’t know about descriptions. Descriptions are at odds with facing the pure energy.”

The Energy. Brackeen pauses a moment.

“I don’t think Picasso had time to go into descriptions.”

*

Brackeen, like Picasso, broke convention, and she always likely will.

The Ventura native refused to practice piano lessons as a child because, she says, “they were boring.” But she did take from those lessons the ability to read “lines and spaces,” all the notation she needed to teach herself facility on the instrument in six months.

She started gigging at age 11 at private parties. At 17 she won a scholarship to the Los Angeles Conservatory but dropped out in days because “they had names for stuff I considered very obvious.” Then it was headlong into jazz, with work in L.A. in the late 1950s with Charles Lloyd, Dexter Gordon, Harold Land. In time she would show the daunting fluency that allows her to scoff at the mechanics of improvisation, a gift succinctly stated by McPartland: “She has the technical ability to play what she thinks.”

More than most, however, Brackeen’s career is marked by one constant, jazz’s most important ingredient: change. Her newly released CD is a jazz appropriation of Brazilian music--a taste she first developed playing with Getz and later made her own in her bristling 1991 CD, “Breath of Brazil.”

The new CD, featuring longtime associate Eddie Gomez on bass, drummer Duduka da Fonseca and percussionist Waltinho Anastacio, brings an especially supple, elegant contour to the genre while managing to clearly communicate that spacious, alternately dissonant and romantic, Brackeen voice.

It also has the most apt title in her discography: “Take a Chance.”

That’s pretty much all JoAnne Brackeen does at the keyboard anyway, pretty much her only choice under that cloud of energy.

* Brackeen appears in solo performance today and Saturday at the Jazz Bakery, 3221 Hutchison Ave., Culver City, (310) 271-9039.