Putting Jazz First : Alan Pasqua is back to pursuing a passion after years of leading the pragmatic life of a studio musician.

Alan Pasqua, who appears tonight and Saturday at Le Cafe, was so excited about playing his first jazz job in Los Angeles as a leader that he almost couldn’t go into the club.

“I walked up to the room, Bon Appetit in Westwood, and the place was packed, and I just walked on by,” he says with fond remembrance of the event five years ago. “I just had to go around the block once more. It meant so much to me to play this music again. It was so important to me.”

With his smooth, rhythmic flow and generous, melodic imagination, pianist Pasqua indeed seems to have been born to be a jazz improviser. A thoughtful listen to one of his live performances or his new album, “Milagro,” on Postcards Records, confirms this.

But instead of traveling the often horrendous valleys and now-and-then thrilling peaks a career in jazz can bring, Pasqua, like many others, opted for the more pragmatic life of a mainly non-jazz L.A. studio musician. Steadily from 1976 through 1989, he played keyboard on countless television and film soundtracks and jingles, and he also toured and recorded with rock musicians such as Bob Dylan, Carlos Santana and John Fogerty.

And although he has never completely abandoned the jazz world, Pasqua says that if he avoids his favorite music he is diminished as a person. “I woke up one morning about 10 years ago,” he says, “and though I was a pretty successful studio musician, I felt this emptiness. Some part of me wasn’t being nurtured. What was missing was my real purpose in being a musician, that I had something to say with my compositions and improvisations.”

That night at the now-defunct Bon Appetit, Pasqua made a major step toward returning to the jazz life he had been immersed in while studying with pianist Jaki Byard at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston and later while recording and performing internationally with drummer Tony Williams in the mid-’70s.

“It was so important to find that people wanted to listen to my own music,” Pasqua says from the Sherman Oaks home he shares with his wife, Kathleen. “Playing that night gave me a wonderful feeling and sense of peace, and I slept better than I had in a long time. I realized I was on the right path again.”

Still, it took him another five years to put jazz on the front burner. He moved to Sante Fe, N.M., and pursued his jazz career with intermittent engagements while flying to Los Angeles for the occasional studio call. Recently, with the release of “Milagro” and its solid airplay on jazz radio nationally, he has decided that it is essential to live in Southern California. Hence the move to Sherman Oaks.

“I’ve gotten a little visibility; now I need to be around other musicians,” he says. “L.A. is such a thriving musical community, and I came to play.”

In 1989, Pasqua’s trio featured bassist Chuck Domanico and drummer Vinnie Colaiuta. Now the pianist’s band spotlights John Patitucci and Peter Erskine, two esteemed artists who collectively have played with such greats as Chick Corea, Wayne Shorter and Stan Kenton. Both have made numerous recordings under their own names: drummer Erskine’s “Time Being” was just released on ECM Records, and bassist Patitucci’s “Mistura Fina” will be out on GRP Records next month.

Pasqua enthuses about his colleagues, who will join him at Le Cafe.

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“Peter’s an amazing interpreter of music,” says the pianist, who roomed with Erskine while both were students at the University of Indiana in Bloomington in the late ‘60s, although they haven’t played together much since. “He seems to know almost instinctively what a piece needs rhythmically, texturally. And since he’s a composer, and a damn good one, he has that ability to bring something to the music that was not there before, that I didn’t know could be brought.

“John, who can be such a free spirit, is very, very melodic,” Pasqua says. “He plays lines that really tug at people’s heartstrings.”

Dale Jaffe, owner of Le Cafe, is looking forward to hearing Pasqua’s trio. “This band is in the tradition of the great acoustic music that I like to present at Le Cafe,” he says.

Born in 1952 in Roselle Park, N.J., Pasqua grew up in a musical family: His father was a bass player and his grandfather was a piano builder. Lessons ensued at age 7, and Pasqua’s enthusiasm for music led him to the University of Indiana and then to the New England Conservatory, where he also studied composition and arranging with George Russell and Thad Jones.

In 1975, Pasqua joined Williams, performing on the drummer’s Columbia Records albums “Believe It!” and “Million Dollar Legs.” Pasqua remembers the group--which featured guitarist Allan Holdsworth--as much for its volume as for its music-making.

“It was a really loud, loud band, and even though I didn’t use earplugs, I didn’t lose any of my hearing,” Pasqua says. “But it was also a very interesting band, a power band that was a lot of fun.”

Pasqua has long wanted to play with Williams in a straight-ahead jazz situation. “Maybe that will happen in 1995,” he says.

* Zan Stewart writes regularly about jazz for The Times.

WHERE AND WHEN,

What: Alan Pasqua’s trio.

Location: The Room Upstairs at Le Cafe, 14633 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks.

Hours: 9 and 11 tonight and Saturday.

Price: $12 cover, two-drink minimum.

Call: (818) 986-2662.