He’s Still Very Much a Player : Music: Pianist Dave Brubeck, who has also been writing as much as ever, has stayed in favor through the years. His quartet will perform in Costa Mesa tonight.

A musician’s style can be charted through his recordings. Compare the 1959 version of Dave Brubeck’s tune “Strange Meadowlark” from his now-famous “Time Out” album to the version heard on his 1994 solo CD “Just You, Just Me,” and you can hear the evolution.

The recent recording is more direct and spare, played in a simple singing style that moves easily with a grace born of wisdom and experience. The earlier date, especially the pianist’s unaccompanied introduction, is more dense and colored with ambition. Both reflect their maker at a particular time.

One thing remains the same, however. Through the years, Brubeck and his shadings have never been out of favor.

But not since 1954, when he appeared on the cover of Time magazine, has the pianist been as visible. Or as busy.

Awarded a National Medal of the Arts last year, Brubeck was also voted into Downbeat magazine’s Hall of Fame, beating out such names as Clark Terry, Horace Silver and Milt Jackson. “Just You, Just Me,” his first solo effort in some 40 years, has been issued to consistently favorable reviews.

And the pianist, who’ll celebrate his 75th birthday in December with performances of his “Christmas Cantata” in Vienna and London, continues to appear frequently in front of college audiences, much as he did in the ‘50s. The attention, and the activity, seems to surprise even Brubeck himself, much as it did in 1954.

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Brubeck’s cool sophistication surfaced on his first album, “Jazz at Oberlin College” in 1952, which followed several trio recordings.

“The Time magazine article was a real surprise,” Brubeck said from a motel in Jacksonville, where he was appearing at the University of North Florida. “I knew they had interviewed me, but when I saw the story on the cover, well, it was a big event. The trio had won best new combo awards in Downbeat and Metronome but nothing like this.”

With the passion of be-bop leading the way in the early ‘50s, critics rejected Brubeck’s approach as something of an anomaly. But Brubeck’s popularity was undeniable, especially among the college crowd.

“I didn’t feel outside the music in the ‘50s,” he explained, “because I was accepted by other musicians. Almost everybody who came through San Francisco would come in to hear the group. Even (record producer) John Hammond in New York wrote a great article about us, saying this is a guy to watch, he’s leading a new direction.”

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That new direction was a style that worked from unusual time signatures and harmonic structures more associated with 20th-Century classical music than with jazz. Brubeck was influenced in that direction by his mother, a classical pianist, and later studies with composers Darius Milhaud and Arnold Schoenberg in the late 1940s. But, Brubeck is quick to point out, he was never a classical piano player.

“I heard classical music all my life, but I never played it. That’s something that’s very hard to get over with the people who write about me. My mother had me studying the simplest kinds of harmony early on. I would ask her to write down simple melodies that I was thinking of when I was 4 or 5 years old. But she realized I was going in a different direction from my brother Howard, who was an excellent classical pianist.”

He cites the three graduate years he studied with French composer Milhaud at Mills College under the GI Bill as his most formative experience.

“He encouraged jazz and jazz study and suggested to the jazz musicians in our class that we write our assignments as jazz. He believed it was very important that, if you were an American and a composer, that you use the jazz idiom. He thought Ellington and (George) Gershwin were America’s two greatest composers.

“My first octet grew out of his composition class. Five of the eight guys in the group were in that class. And he arranged for our first concert there at Mills College. There are always a few people leading up to the point where you meet the person who motivates you the most. I had several good instructors at the College of the Pacific in Stockton, where I graduated. But Milhaud had the biggest influence.”

From the time of his first successes in the ‘50s, Brubeck has never been out of the public eye. Recordings with saxophonist Paul Desmond, notably Desmond’s “Take Five,” have become musical fixtures, covered frequently by upstart jazz groups and sampled by hip-hop artists. The extent of Brubeck’s influence becomes apparent listening to the 1992 anthology “Time Signatures: A Career Retrospective,” a four-CD, 59-song set that spans the years 1946-1991.

Coupled with Brubeck’s notes on the selections, the set effectively covers one of the most distinguished careers in jazz. But the pianist found the process of putting the anthology together a bit frustrating.

“I knew that it was about as good as we could do. We put in about four months of work, trying to be representative of the different periods. But there are a lot of other tracks that I would have loved to have had on there.

“One track--it’s been going through my mind--I’m really sorry isn’t there. It’s Gerry Mulligan, Paul Desmond, Allan Dawson and myself and we’re playing very free, very unconventional for what you’d expect of us. It was a tune called ‘Truth,’ recorded live in Berlin, I believe. But you can’t get everything in.”

Last year’s “Just You, Just Me” may be one of the most revealing recordings he’s made in several years as the pianist paces lyrical variations from his right hand with striding rhythmic accompaniment from his left. But recording the album took some doing.

“I had some physical problems when I did some of the takes, some numbness in my thumb and first finger of both hands. But the date was set and I went straight from the neurologist’s office to the studio. I told the engineer that I was having some problems and to keep his ears open. After the third tune, he said, ‘It’s too bad you didn’t break your wrist, the way you’re playing.’

“It turned out not to be the worst thing, that I didn’t have to do a lot of technical things on the songs. I was able to play from what Milhaud used to call the deeper part of your mind.”

Brubeck is also writing as much as ever these days, often in formats that include jazz and classical idioms. His Mass “To Hope” will be recorded later this year at the National Cathedral in Washington, and Warner Bros. has just published the music for his “Chromatic Fantasy Sonata.”

But when Brubeck’s quartet takes the stage tonight at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, fans can expect to hear old favorites, as well as a few new jazz numbers.

“We’ll go back to the ‘Time Out’ stuff: ‘Blue Rondo,’ ‘Take Five,’ ‘Three to Get Ready.’ Everybody expects that. But I’m writing new things every day and always try to work some of them in. It’s difficult rehearsing them when you’re out on the road, but I was reworking some things just today. Let’s see what I can get ready.”

Doesn’t he ever wish he could just step back from all this activity and just go fishing?

“It’s funny you should say that,” he said, laughing. “At my home in Connecticut, I have a pond in the back yard, with a little island in the middle where there’s a small studio. I’ve put all these fishing poles in there so I could go out there and go fishing. But I always end up going there and writing instead.”

* The Dave Brubeck Quartet appears tonight at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. 8 p.m. $20-$40. (714) 556-2787.