Pianist Barron Quietly Builds a Following

Kenny Barron would have a lot easier time passing as a college professor than as a late-blooming jazz star. As it turns out, he is both.

In action, the veteran pianist is a model of efficiency and dedication. Modestly unassuming, slightly balding, neatly mustachioed, he makes few wasted motions while he plays. No physical gymnastics, no dramatics, only a pure focus on the keyboard, where his fleet fingers spin out soaring melodies and brisk, captivating rhythms with seemingly effortless grace.

Ask Barron to talk about his music, and the precise educator emerges. Never eager to waste a word, he responds in a manner as clear, uncluttered and to-the-point as his piano playing.

What is it, for example, that has made this 52-year-old--a musician’s musician for years, yet barely known to the wider audience--so highly regarded by his contemporaries?

Barron hesitates for a moment, chuckles, then identifies the essence of his musical philosophy in an almost offhanded, throwaway, but precisely accurate response.

‘Maybe,” he says, “it’s because I believe in playing it from the heart.”

It could be his mantra. At a time when new jazz pianists are arriving in bunches, all blessed with the capacity to play at faster-than-light speed, Barron calmly follows his own less-traveled road of music, a road filled with lyricism and feeling.

“If I had to say that there’s anything that I think is strong in my playing,” he continues in a phone call from a jazz clinic in Salem, Ore., “I think it would be that I’m able to play lyrically. That’s something I really strive for, not on a conscious level, but I’m aware that I’m trying to tell stories when I’m playing. You don’t just play scales and licks and patterns. You try to make something out of them.”

Barron will undoubtedly be telling more than a few musical stories tonight when he kicks off a six-night run at Catalina Bar & Grill in Hollywood with a program of standards and originals.

“I’ve been together with the guys in this trio--Ray Drummond on bass and Victor Lewis on drums--for quite a while, and I love playing with them. It’s like a kind of relaxed setting, with a lot of ESP back and forth.”

His Southland appearance comes during a period of slowly growing career momentum for Barron. Last week, his current album, “Wanton Spirit” (Verve)--a typically mixed program of Ellington, Strayhorn and Gillespie tunes, with a Barron original and contemporary items from Tom Harrell and Richie Bierach thrown in for good measure--was nominated for a Grammy Award in the jazz instrumental performance category. A new album, scheduled for release in the spring, showcases Barron in the quintet that he tries to maintain on a fairly regular basis. This ensemble includes trumpeter Eddie Henderson, tenor saxophonist John Stubblefield, bassist David Williams and Lewis on drums.

*

For the last 23 years, Barron has divided his time between performing and a position as a full professor at the Rutgers University campus in New Brunswick, N.J. He is proud of his role in the development of a program that offers bachelor’s and master’s degrees in jazz studies.

“During the school year, I’m there three long days a week,” he says. “I have about 15 piano students that I teach one on one, and I teach jazz composition and arranging and keyboard harmony for jazz majors.

“At first, it was just great to earn a steady paycheck. Now I realize how important it is for this music to be shared and passed on.”

His familiar phrase--”play it from the heart”--recurs when Barron describes his approach to jazz education.

“I think it’s the most important thing I have to communicate to them,” he notes. “Play from the heart, not from the head. Oh, sure, ideally, it’s a combination of both those things. But one of the things that happens in academic situations, especially with jazz, is that students tend to intellectualize the music, and sometimes the music begins to sound like that. They haven’t learned yet to try to tell stories, to try to feel with their music. Maybe that just comes with time and experience.”

Barron is a member of the Overlooked Generation of jazz players who came to maturity in the 1960s and ‘70s, at a time when pop and rock were dominating the music world. He views his rising visibility with a certain ironic detachment. More than two decades senior to the Young Lions who came roaring out of the jazz renaissance of the ‘90s, he has--unlike many of them--paid endless dues, performing on hundreds of albums and gigs in every imaginable jazz setting.

“A lot of these young guys are really good players,” he says, “so I can’t fault the fact that they’re getting so much attention so soon. Still, I think sometimes the record companies are a little overanxious. They push them to the point where they’ll have a catalog of four or five records by the time they’re in their late 20s, and then you don’t hear from them anymore.”

*

The problem, as Barron sees it, is that young players rarely have the opportunity to “serve an apprenticeship” of the sort that has long been a vital part of the jazz learning process.

“There aren’t any Art Blakey or Horace Silver bands around to give young guys a chance to play,” he says. “You can still get some of it in New York City, at places like Smalls, in the Village, down the street from the Vanguard. A lot of young, up-and-coming musicians play there, and there’s no liquor license so they sometimes go to 8 in the morning. Guys go there--even major guys like Roy Hargrove, too--to hang out and jam. And there are a few other places to play, a couple of spots in Brooklyn. Outside of New York? Forget it.”

Barron’s own experience began at an early age. Born in Philadelphia on June 9, 1943, he played his first professional gig at 14, working alongside his older brother and musical inspiration, the late tenor saxophonist Bill Barron. As a teenager, he performed with the likes of Philly Joe Jones, Jimmy Heath and Lee Morgan.

After moving to New York City in 1962, Barron became a jazz mainstay and the pianist of choice on dozens of recording sessions for Columbia, CTI and A&M; jazz sessions.

“Staying in town for the school year has made me much more available for sessions, which is probably why I’ve done so many,” he explains, modestly bypassing the obvious reasoning that the high quality of his playing may have had even more to do with his frequent recording calls.

It wasn’t until “People Time,” however, the 1992, Grammy-nominated duet recording with tenor saxophonist Stan Getz, that many jazz listeners began to pay serious attention to Barron’s work. The two-CD release, the culmination of a series of brilliant collaborations with Getz, chronicles four evenings at Copenhagen’s Cafe Montmartre club, recorded a few months before the saxophonist’s death from cancer at the age of 64. Barron’s fluid, symbiotic support urged Getz into his finest playing in years--a stunning, final musical testament. European jazz critic Alain Gerber described the interaction between Getz and Barron as “the tightrope walker and his guardian angel.”

Despite the exquisite playing he has been doing lately, Barron, like so many other players of his generation, is subject to the whims of an audience that tends to concentrate on Old Giants or Young Lions and ignore those in between.

“The only way I can really keep working, especially if I want to work with my quartet,” Barron says, “is to go to Europe or Japan.”

He pays his bills by teaching, doing occasional clinics and continuing his activities as a stellar rhythm section sideman. It is typical of the ups and downs of his career that although his last Los Angeles appearance with his trio drew well, Barron’s most recent Southland performance was at a sparsely attended Jazz Bakery program with Bay Area tenor saxophonist Mel Martin.

But Barron has been around the jazz scene long enough to make a practical distinction between its blandishments and its adversities.

“I like to play a lot, I enjoy teaching and I like to try different things,” he says. “Fortunately, I’m at a point where I can do all that. Sure, I’d like to work more with my trio and my quintet, but as long as I can get out there with my piano and tell my stories, I’ll be fine. You try to make the best of what you’ve got.”

* The Kenny Barron Trio at Catalina Bar & Grill through Sunday. 1640 N. Cahuenga Blvd., (213) 466-2210. $13 cover tonight through Thursday, and Sunday; $15 cover Friday and Saturday, with two-drink minimum. Barron performs two shows nightly, at 8:30 and 10:30.