Loss Leads Saunders on ‘Personal Healing Tour’

Merl Saunders is still in mourning. The San Francisco keyboardist, best known for his duet albums with the late Jerry Garcia, has yet to recover from the death last year of the Grateful Dead front man.

Although Saunders has had a long and varied career of his own, he kept coming back to the subject of Garcia during a recent phone interview, relating him to almost any topic of discussion. There was a palpable sadness to Saunders’ voice, along with a ready admission that he hasn’t yet been able to fully grasp and accept the loss.

“No, I haven’t gotten over it,” he said. “I’m playing a lot because this is my personal healing tour.” That tour brings him to the Coach House on Thursday. “I feel him onstage with me when I play some of the songs Jerry and I used to play together, songs he asked me to play.

“It was really a shocker, yet I knew it was going to happen,” said Saunders, who declined to give his age, except for saying he is “getting close to being a senior citizen.”

“A fan had asked me if I’d talked to Jerry, and I said, ‘Say a prayer for him,’ then two or three days later it happened. He did it himself, and he did it quietly. . . . He’d had these very down, down, down feelings for a while.

“In the end, we had kind of separated because of the path he took. I can’t be around that because of my grandkids, and well, because of myself. The only way to clean your life is to be away from it. But Jerry basically lived a happy life. He did what he wanted to and gave the finger to things he didn’t want to do. He detested notoriety--it had to come to his level.”

Saunders has a new live album out called “Still Having Fun” on the Sumertone label, recorded at several shows in 1993. The five albums the duo recorded together had an indelible effect on Saunders’ approach to playing, and his longtime backing guitarist, Michael Hinton, sounds so much like Garcia that it’s positively eerie.

“It’s just a coincidence,” Saunders said. “We’ve been playing together for about 15 years. In fact, when I recorded for [the 1980s CBS-TV revival of] ‘The Twilight Zone’ and Jerry couldn’t make it because he was sick or out of town, I’d bring Hinton in there. The people at CBS would say, ‘Man, Jerry’s playing was great,’ and I’d just say, ‘Yes, it sure was.’ ”

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Don’t get the wrong impression--there’s much more to Merl Saunders than his noted partnership with Garcia.

Saunders’ career began back in the ‘50s, when Johnny Mathis was the singer in his band. He went on to become a noted session player, working with such diverse artists as Harry Belafonte, Miles Davis, B.B. King, the Statler Brothers, Lionel Hampton, Sonny Stitt, Paul Butterfield, Mike Bloomfield and Papa John Creach, as well as recording eight solo albums and writing music for television.

Saunders’ sound is wildly eclectic, encompassing everything from jazz to funk to rock to blues to New Age. That essential open-mindedness has been something of a cross to bear however, perhaps preventing Saunders from achieving wider renown as a gifted instrumentalist. The world of jazz, in particular, can be unforgiving to those who stray from its parameters.

Even his peers often winced at Saunders’ musical open-mindedness. A long friendship with jazz organ titan Jimmy Smith sometimes yielded good-natured ribbing.

“Jimmy and I used to practice together quite a bit--six or seven hours a day every time he came to town,” Saunders said. “I had my concept of playing organ way before I heard Jimmy Smith, yet I wanted to take it further. I was not a heavy jazz player, more into a feel-good thing where you wanted to dance. Jimmy used to kind of snarl at me--’You, you, rock ‘n’ roller you!’--and I’d just say, ‘Well, that’s the way I am!’ ”

Saunders also received early encouragement from a man many consider to be the finest jazz composer of all time.

“At a very young age, I talked to Duke Ellington. He said, ‘I’m Duke Ellington, and I play Duke Ellington. You’re Merl Saunders, you play Merl Saunders. Play all types of music and never call yourself a jazz musician. Play everything you want to play.’ And that’s what I’ve always tried to do, play everything.”

Yet for all the legends Saunders has played with and all the records he’s made, the albums and concerts with Garcia will forever hold a special place in his heart.

“It’s hard to describe what we had together,” Saunders said. “It was a charisma, a chemistry. You can’t question it. We wouldn’t play together for a couple years, then we’d walk onstage and sound like we’d been playing together every day. That’s called knowing. Sometimes I still play off him; I hear what he’s doing, the notes he’d be playing, even though he’s gone.”

* Merl Saunders & the Rainforest Band play Thursday at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. 8 p.m. $15-$17. (714) 496-8930.