COVER STORY : Common Cos : Every year, one of the most powerful men in show biz relinquishes the spotlight to a few of his musician friends. Hey, hey, hey, it’s Bill Cosby, your humble Playboy Jazz Fest host.

It’s a great day for a jazz festival. The Hollywood Bowl is filled to the brim, the sun is shining, the wine is flowing, and a world-class quintet is grooving through the final choruses of a be-bop blues tune.

As the group reaches its climactic, flatted-fifth closing chord, a familiar figure leaps to his feet from a chair perched at the side of the stage.

The crowd roars its approval as Bill Cosby, multimillionaire media mogul and the perennial master of ceremonies for the Playboy Jazz Festival, leads the thunderous applause, spotlighting each musician by name before the rotating stage brings on yet another act.

It’s a scene that has taken place annually since 1979. Cosby has served the multiple role of master of ceremonies, cheerleader, coach and all-around musicians aide for 16 years, a run that exceeds even the impressive eight seasons of his hit sitcom “The Cosby Show.” On Saturday and next Sunday it happens again, with Cosby setting aside his multiple financial and entertainment interests to spend a weekend hanging out in the world of jazz.

The list of performers he has witnessed during his tenure reads like a Who’s Who of the music. Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Stan Getz, Dizzy Gillespie, Gerry Mulligan, Miles Davis and Wynton Marsalis are among the dozens of major names who have played the festival.

But the nagging question remains: Why does one of the most successful and richest men in show business--with a wealth estimated at more than $325 million by Forbes magazine last year--elect to endure eight to 10 hours onstage in the Hollywood Bowl sunlight for two long days every June? This is, after all, a man who changed the face of television sitcoms with “The Cosby Show.” Who sold more than 4 million copies of “Fatherhood,” his first book, and nearly 2 million copies of “Time Flies,” his second. Who has placed three comedy albums in Billboard’s Top 10 and been awarded eight gold records and five Grammy Awards. Who was once a major player in a significant effort to buy a major television network: NBC.

And who, again this year, will be playing a very subordinate, if highly supportive, role to a lineup of musicians who--whatever their achievements--cannot begin to match his level of entertainment business success.

But listen to Cosby’s description of why he’s there:

“As far as I’m concerned, I’ve got two customers that I have to serve. Whatever those musicians need and want at that time, in terms of what will make them play better, I try to give it to ‘em. Because when they get it, then it goes to the audience, and the important customer is the listener.”

The notion of having a comedian as jazz festival host dates to 1959, when Playboy founder Hugh Hefner asked Mort Sahl to front the first Playboy Jazz Festival in Chicago. When Hefner decided to initiate the Hollywood Bowl series of festivals in 1979, he turned to Cosby.

“Bill and I have been personal friends since the moment when he first came to the mansion back in the ‘60s,” Hefner says. “I liked the idea of having a host with a comedy connection who also loved jazz. So he was the logical choice, and I’ve just been delighted that he’s continued to do it for all these years. You never know exactly what Cos is going to do when he goes up there. But whatever it is, it’s always the best and most natural thing for jazz.”

Characteristically, Cosby puts it more simply: “I do it to get a free seat. There isn’t a jazz fan alive who would turn down the chance to have a seat at the festival and occasionally be able get up and say, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, here he is . . . Horace Silver!’ ”

Perhaps Cosby’s explanation is a bit too modest. Try to imagine, say, Johnny Carson playing a similar second banana to the Doc Severinsen Orchestra. Or try to imagine comparably influential entertainment moguls--Barbra Streisand, for example, even without her legendary stage fright, spending two days at the Hollywood Bowl running around to make sure the musicians are content with their audio monitors.

But Cosby, whose good-folks image as a mass-media entertainer is not all that different from the pleasant, easygoing image you might encounter in a one-on-one conversation, insists upon a relentlessly uncomplicated rationale for his continued presence at the festival.

“It’s looking at people enjoying themselves without having to sign any autographs,” he says with a chuckle. “And I get a chance to talk to the musicians--people I respect and listen to. Many of them are old friends. You know, it seems as if the whole of acoustical jazz hasturned 70 this year. So it’s a great feeling to just be a fan, sitting there and being able to be of service and give to these guys who’ve given so much to me and to everybody.”

Still, it’s hard not to imagine a slightly different emphasis to his rationale. Cosby, by his own admission, is a serious jazz groupie. He obviously enjoys hanging out with jazz musicians. Later this month, he’ll also emcee the JVC Jazz Festival in New York City, and he has been known to show up for the birthday parties of players he has known for years, such as drummer Roy Haynes.

Jazz musicians and jazz music have had a powerful influence upon him for most of his life. And he has consistently honored that influence by supporting the art and the players both financially and emotionally.

The extent to which the sheer ambient experience of the music can move him becomes quickly apparent when he recalls one memorable experience from the festival:

“One of the great moments happened when Lionel Hampton and his big band had to follow either Weather Report or Grover Washington Jr. They were the next-to-last act, and Lionel was going to close. . . . Well, by this time, this group had the people going up and down the aisles. It’s the kind of thing I always call V-E Day. People are kissing people they don’t know, toasting chicken legs, dancing. And the security guards are wondering why they didn’t get a job in a bakery. On the last note, a cheer went up, and you knew that these people wanted more. But the time was up.

“The stage started to spin, and I said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Lionel Hampton.’ But from where I sat, people were leaving, I mean in packs and droves. For them it was over. Hamp came marching out, and the fellows in his band went into the vamp for ‘Hamp’s Boogie Woogie.’ And I felt sorry for him, because people were carrying out their coolers.”

“Then, all of a sudden,” Cosby continues, “the band hit a full chord, and Hamp started to solo and the brass section started to chant with their horns behind him, along with the reeds. This set a pulse, and people started to come back in. They left their lunch baskets out beside their cars and came back in. That Bowl filled back up again.

“And I never had so much fun watching the absolute change that took place. It showed that Duke Ellington was right with ‘It Don’t Mean a Thing,’ because if you have that thing, people will find it. Hamp was a winner, but that’s what he’s known for, and ‘Hamp’s Boogie Woogie’ held up, even for those who were enjoying Weather Report and Grover Washington Jr.”

*

Cosby’s connection with jazz reaches back to a boyhood spent in the simmering musical caldron of Philadelphia in the ‘40s and ‘50s. (He was born July 12, 1937.) His earliest companions were the childhood friends--Fat Albert, Weird Harold, Dumb Donald, Rudy, Nolan and Weasel--he later memorialized in his comedy routines and in Filmation’s classic “Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids” animation series. Later, the music of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie provided an equally important companionship.

It was a time when every new record release seemed to bring fascinating new sounds. Cosby was just entering his teens when Miles Davis created his influential “Birth of the Cool” albums. When Cosby started high school, Sonny Rollins was beginning to make a name for himself, and Clifford Brown and Max Roach were leading a hot new hard-bop band. Cosby turned 18 the year Charlie Parker died.

Both Cosby’s mother and father--William and Anna, now both deceased--were jazz fans. His mother, in particular, encouraged the comedic verbal improvisations that were Cosby’s personal method of expressing himself in a jazz-like fashion. His father--a career Navy man, who had major influence on his son--had more specific opinions about jazz and did not hesitate to critique the unfolding new sounds.

“My father was OK with Dizzy Gillespie,” Cosby recalls, “but when he heard Miles Davis, he looked at me and he said, ‘What is that?’ Then, of course, in the ‘50s, when I started buying anything that had John Coltrane’s name on it, my father started saying, ‘Well, what’s wrong with him?’

“He understood Max Roach’s group, but he wouldn’t buy a ticket for it, because it wasn’t a big band--you know, with the Kansas City drive, etc. And he claimed that Charlie Mingus was confused about what Duke Ellington was doing and that Mingus needed to go to school. And Ornette Coleman? He just looked at me and he said, ‘We won’t even discuss this one.’ ”

Given that Cosby had the opportunity to experience jazz in one of its most innovative and productive eras, it’s not surprising that he has remained so strongly associated with the music of those early years.

His experience with jazz, first in Philadelphia, later in Green wich Village, clearly also affected his approach to comedy. He has often analogized the connection between the improvisational approaches of Parker, Mingus, Davis and Louis Armstrong and his own comedic efforts to find new, entertaining and informative ways to re-express familiar themes.

“I’m a storyteller,” Cosby says. “And essentially that’s what happens with jazz, with me and the music. You can be a comedian who gets out there and has all of the jokes, but if it doesn’t come from the soul of it, you’re not going to get through to your audience. And there’s some jazz like that too.

“It’s also a matter of commitment. If you’re committed to being a comedian or a funny storyteller, you say, ‘This is who I am, and this is who I want to be for as long as I want to be that.’ That’s a commitment. Or you can be a person who says, ‘Wait a minute, if I can just get onstage and say some funny things for about 12 minutes, and somebody sees me and then they put me in a television series or in a movie, that’s all I want to do.’ That’s a great difference.

“And I’m not talking about paying dues, I’m just talking about whether a person has made a commitment or not. And I think with many people, the commitment is to get up, be recognized and then get into TV or the movies. The material itself is no longer important--unique or whatever. It’s the projection of volume, sound, to show that all you want to do is to show people that there is a funny person there who can deliver something funny. And that’s just more 16th notes, stop on a dime.”

His own leap from stand-up to television did not come via a carefully tailored sitcom but through the far more creatively risky process of a racial barrier-breaking lead role in the 1965-68 action series “I Spy.” Cosby’s role as an undercover agent co-starred him with actor Robert Culp. The equal pairing of African American and white performers was, for the period, a historic casting breakthrough for television. Before the series ended, Cosby had won three Emmy Awards.

Cosby went on to do a number of other TV series, various specials, more than 20 comedy albums, four books and a series of smash concert performances while creating the 1984-92 hit series “The Cosby Show.” In addition to its scenes of family comedy, the show was, for many struggling parents, a guiding light of sanity in a confused era of child-raising.

Even here, Cosby remained the perennial jazz fan, often using his clout with the show to introduce (and provide good paychecks) to well-known jazz musicians.

“ ‘The Cosby Show’ was a situation comedy, of course,” he says. “And I remember a situation comedy director working with us on an episode that had Tito Puente, Art Blakey, Jimmy Heath, etc., and the director had no idea who these people were. Art was wearing his hearing aid at the time, and I think he had turned it off.

“Well, when you make sound for television, of course, it can bleed all over the place, and this director didn’t want Art to hit the crash cymbal, because then nobody could hear the rest of the musicians. So he stopped me and said, ‘The drummer fellow. What is his name?’ And you know I had to catch myself before I said, ‘Hey man, that’s Art Blakey .’ But I just told him it was Art Blakey, and he went over to him and he said, ‘Uh, Mr. Art . . . , ‘ and I fell on the floor laughing. ‘Mr. Art!’ ”

More recently, Cosby has appeared in a syndicated remake of the old Groucho Marx vehicle “You Bet Your Life” and “The Cosby Mysteries” on NBC. Last year, he also reprised his “I Spy” role as Alexander Scott in the two-hour CBS TV movie “I Spy Returns” with his original partner, Culp. Although none of these efforts were remotely as auspicious as “The Cosby Show,” they illustrated the freedom Cosby has to take creative flyers in whatever direction amuses him.

Cosby, a graduate of Temple University in Philadelphia, received his master’s degree and doctorate in education from the University of Massachusetts. He and his wife, the former Camille Hanks (who also has a doctorate in education), have been married since 1964. They live outside Amherst, Mass., with their four daughters and one son.

When Cosby takes the stage at the Playboy Jazz Festival on Saturday, he will be looking ahead to a program that will contain a healthy sampling of the straight-ahead sounds he has always favored. If his tenure at the festival has had any consistent effect, it surely has been the encouragement of music that reflects his preference for jazz that can be listened to and danced to and, yes, partied to--a precise definition of what the Playboy Jazz Festival is all about.

That definition will be further illustrated in one of the highlights of this year’s festival--the appearance next Sunday afternoon of the Cos of Good Music, a Cosby-assembled group similar to the past all-star ensembles he has occasionally put together for the festival. The group is a mixture of established players and newer arrivals: veterans Stanley Turrentine (tenor saxophone) and Charles McPherson (alto saxophone) and emerging young stars James Carter and Craig Handy (saxophones), Benny Green (piano), Christian McBride (bass) and Greg Hutchinson (drums).

“My idea,” says Cosby, who will lead the ensemble, “was to put these young men together and try to find a 1995-style energy to set up the blowing session. I feel that that has been missing lately. It won’t be a challenge, where one guy is going to challenge the other, but certainly I want them to open themselves up--to play their style, to play whatever they want.”

There is no final word yet on whether Cosby will sit in on drums, as he has occasionally done in the past. But he emphasizes his intention to let the musicians do their own thing by describing a time when he was sitting with Max Roach and absent-mindedly started drumming with his fingers. “Max reached over,” Cosby recalls, “put his hand over my fingers and said, ‘Don’t ever do that again.’ ”

Cosby’s long-term dedication to the festival is manifest in his unelicited defense--whimsical counterattack, actually--against the critics who have described the event as a vast party in which little attention is paid to the music.

“This festival, this situation--tables, people bringing food--is unlike a traditional concert in which you might come, bring your food, bring your wine and be quiet and listen. Nor is it a booking of five rock ‘n’ roll, rhythm ‘n’ blues bands--whatever that genre would be--in which everybody is one and the party flows because the words that shoot out are everybody’s hit tune.

“This is jazz at the Hollywood Bowl--two days . . . of people who come together in sort of a party celebration. Sure, sometimes 75% are talking and running around and throwing the beach ball, while the MJQ [Modern Jazz Quartet] plays ‘Cortege.’ And Milt Jackson’s notes are being attacked by a beach ball, and the crowd is cheering because two people decided to take their clothes off and do the rub.”

But Cosby is also aware that the party atmosphere can be disconcerting to some musicians as well as listeners.

“Sometimes,” he explains, “I’ve had to go to certain artists and say, ‘Now listen, you guys, when we spin you around, and you look out there, you’re going to see people who are eating, people who are drinking wine, and mostly you’re going to see people who aren’t paying attention. And the truth is, they’re not paying attention. But you have to understand that you are also responsible, out of the 18,000 people in that place, for the other people, the people who may have hired a baby-sitter, driven 300 miles and booked a hotel for the weekend just to hear the music. You can’t let them down.’ And most of the guys respond very well to that.

“My feeling is to just let the people enjoy. Let them enjoy the celebration. Something is getting to them.

“So forget the negatory,” Cosby concludes with a final whimsical word-twist, “and think about the positive: There’s nothing wrong with people having a party when they go out to hear jazz.”

* Bill Cosby hosts the Playboy Jazz Festival, Saturday and next Sunday at the Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N. Highland Ave. (213) 850-2000.