A Gist Cause : Meaning--That’s What It’s All About for Toshiko Akiyoshi When It Comes to Her Music

Toshiko Akiyoshi, who has been leading her Jazz Orchestra since 1972, says she doesn’t really like big bands too much.

What?

“Most big bands do not make my heart beat faster,” she said. “Someone like Tommy Dorsey, one of those yesteryear bands that people think of when they think of jazz big bands, I’m not very fond of.”

Even Count Basie’s band of the ‘50s, the one that scored such hits as “April in Paris,” doesn’t give her much of a charge.

“Basie had a great band. Everybody swings together; they did it better than anybody,” she said. “But it still does not make my heart beat faster.”

One band that does get to her is that of Duke Ellington, her idol and primary inspiration.

“ That band had such a strong individual personality,” she said. And that’s just what composer-arranger-pianist Akiyoshi strives for with her own ensemble.

It’s not enough, she said, for her music to swing in a distinctive way or to boldly blend Asian elements with American jazz. She believes it is essential that her music be about something and have a meaning that goes beyond notes on a page.

“I always want my music to have a certain attitude, a certain philosophic point of view,” she said. She and the group play tonight at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa.

“Kogun,” one of her first compositions for a large ensemble, is a dramatic piece that musically describes a Japanese army officer who, in the ‘70s, was discovered living in the Burmese jungle, unaware that World War II had ended. Akiyoshi’s later “Tales of a Courtesan” is a poignant epic about a young Japanese woman sold into prostitution in 17th-Century Japan.

“Desert Lady/Fantasy,” the title track of her new Columbia album, was based on a tune written by her husband, Lew Tabackin. Akiyoshi added a lengthy, alluring section that features a conga drummer and orchestral colors that provide Tabackin, the orchestra’s principal soloist, with a dynamic backdrop for his compelling flute work.

Tabackin based the tune on the Japanese film “Woman in the Dunes” (1964), but Akiyoshi heard it differently.

“It didn’t feel Japanese to me,” she said. “Rather, I was thinking more of Morocco, Arabia, that African or Middle Eastern desert. Basically, I was trying to tell the story of the desert, and of this woman who lives in the desert.

“Quite a long time ago, I decided to try to focus on my position as a woman and a Japanese in jazz, to use my heritage to bring something into jazz that wasn’t there before, to repay the jazz world that has given me so much.”

She was born in Darien, Manchuria, of Japanese parents and was raised on the Japanese island of Kyushu. She discovered jazz as a teen-ager, came to the United States in 1956 and soon became an acknowledged practitioner of be-bop. After years as a pianist, she formed her orchestra while she and Tabackin were living in North Hollywood. He then was a member of Doc Severinsen’s “Tonight Show” band.

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A couple of years later, Akiyoshi, moved by Ellington’s death, started writing pieces such as “Kogun” and “that seemed to be where my value lay,” she said. “People started to pay more attention.” Since then, she and the band have received 12 Grammy nominations. She also has topped numerous polls by magazines from downbeat to Japan’s Swing Journal.

She points out that “having a big band is no picnic.” This year, the band will work a total of about eight weeks, hardly enough to pay for itself. Akiyoshi and Tabackin sustain the orchestra through their own work as soloists and through her compositional commissions.

Still, she relishes having a “band at my disposal” (the group rehearses once a week in New York when it isn’t performing) that is made up of musicians who are “wonderful. They feel a certain challenge is in my music. It’s not like playing a Broadway show, where you only get a few notes to play. My music is based on the be-bop tradition, so there are lots of notes, and you have to be able to execute those notes.”

Akiyoshi’s challenge is to write meaningful music for these musicians.

“I try to write every day and, of course, to write something better than what I have written before,” she said. “Sometimes that happens, sometimes not. But I feel lucky that I have found something I can spend the rest of my life trying to perfect.”

* Toshiko Akiyoshi’s Jazz Orchestra featuring Lew Tabackin plays tonight at 8 in the Robert B. Moore Theatre at Orange Coast College, 2701 Fairview Road, Costa Mesa. $20 to $26. (714) 432-5880. Hear Toshiko Akiyoshi: * To hear a sample of the album “Desert Lady/Fantasy,” call TimesLine at 808-8463 and press *5560.

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