Low Visibility, High Resolution

LOS ANGELES — Last weekend, just over the hill from the Hollywood Bowl where 18,000 jazz fans were partying down at the Playboy Jazz Festival, a much smaller audience squeezed into the dim confines of a nightclub to see composer-saxophonist John Klemmer.

In the past, Klemmer had often played in front of crowds as large as the one packing up to leave the Bowl. Now he was tuning up a new band after being virtually invisible for a decade. Where had he been and what had he been doing, people wondered. Theories ran the gamut from “just burned out” to dire health problems.

As the electric bass and keyboards struck up a groove Sunday, no saxophonist appeared in the tiny space that is the Baked Potato’s bandstand. But moments later a saxophone could be heard finding places here and there to fit inside the beat.

Soon Klemmer, looking much as he did 20 years ago, entered from the back of the room. Hitting a series of notes as he passed the bar, he took his place between a synthesizer and a canvas director’s chair. The warm quality of his sound and mood were immediately familiar.

A string of albums, crowned by the best-selling 1975 release “Touch,” had established Klemmer first as a gritty progressive player out of the Coltrane school, then as a purveyor of melodic, accessible instrumental songs decorated with electronic effects that proved intensely popular with jazz and pop fans alike.

His success had opened up fresh horizons, and record contracts, for a genre of artists who fall in the smooth jazz and New Age categories, the sort championed on the WAVE and similar FM radio stations.

Performing Sunday, Klemmer floated in and over the music, playing both tenor and soprano, occasionally adding atmospherics on his synthesizer. Finally, after pushing his band into a more insistent rhythm with hand gestures and his own play, Klemmer, still blowing, acknowledged his group with a sweep of his arm, took a modest bow and disappeared out the back door as the music churned on.

He never said a word.

A few days later, Klemmer is sitting on a park bench in Santa Monica’s Palisades Park, overlooking Will Rogers State Beach and the gray sea beyond. He comes here often in the late afternoon to consider possibilities. On this day, he addresses the rumors about his long absence from the stage.

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He denies, as one recent jazz publication claimed, that he “dropped out of music altogether” in 1981 because of “physical and mental problems,” pointing to a number of albums and concert performances in the ‘80s.

“I was involved in a lot of activities during that time, including pursuing my pet ambition to be a songwriter, collaborating on material for the Manhattan Transfer [who recorded his tune ‘Walk in Love’] and some others.”

But he doesn’t deny that, beginning around his mother’s death in 1989, he retreated from public view.

Drugs?

“Absolutely not,” he responds. “I’m really ultra-sensitive to [that charge] because I’ve never done drugs and always tried to have clean bands. But people make assumptions about musicians.”

Another theory had it that Klemmer was uncomfortable in crowds, possibly even agoraphobic, a notion his behavior at the Baked Potato seemed to validate.

“That’s just showmanship,” he says of his late entry and early exit. “Isn’t it funny how people interpret stuff? All my life I’ve been much of a loner. I was never the kind of person that hung out or made the scene.”

Illness, then?

“Yeah, someone I know said, ‘I hear John is really sick, that he’s dying of cancer.’ No, not cancer or anything else.”

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The real cause of his disappearance, he says, was an outbreak of losses, and the way he dealt with them. First, his mother was found to have cancer. Shortly after she died, Klemmer lost a lifelong friend. Still another old friend, a conga player, died suddenly. His wife of some 25 years left him. His father passed away.

“When it all started to happen, I responded like I did when I was a kid and started to fight. Rather than rolling with the punches, I leaned into them. I kept on doing more concerts and recordings, fatiguing my emotions, not really aware that all of it was beginning to cut into me.”

A depression took hold, he admits. “Depression is a wicked thing,” he says. “It masks itself and sneaks up on you, starts affecting all of life’s habits--sleeping, eating. It was a very rough time. I sort of lost my bearings.”

And it became difficult to perform. “When you’re in all this pain and feeling weird inside, you start getting self-conscious about being on stage. I don’t want to get up there and have everybody see me bleeding. You don’t want people to see you crying your guts out. It got to be harder and harder to mask it.”

In the past few years, Klemmer has gathered strength. “I walked in the hills, exercised; I had the help of some really great, loving, talented people. And the passing of time helped the healing.”

Slowly he’s picking up the pace. His first album in eight years, a “Best of” collection from GRP Records focusing on his ‘70s work, came out in 1996. “Simpatico,” a duo album recorded with guitarist Oscar Castro-Neves for the JVC label, is scheduled for release this year.

Now deeply interested in computers, Klemmer says he is creating a Web page to help dispel all the rumors. And he’s working on a multimedia presentation that would incorporate a long-held love of hand puppets.

“I see myself as a conceptualizer more than a composer. ‘Touch’ was more of a concept than it was a piece of music. This will be the next step past ‘Touch.’ ”

That album also came after a self-imposed hiatus.

“I was on the stage at Montreux [jazz festival] playing this pounding, far-out music, and right in the middle of it I thought, ‘Where can I go with this?’ I came off the stage thinking, ‘I’ll never do this music again.’ ”

Klemmer took nearly two years to arrive at his new direction, a period full of “bliss and peace” during which he concentrated on the fundamentals: melody, harmony, rhythm. The result was his landmark “Touch.”

A similar though less dramatic change could be underway. When a fan followed Klemmer outside between sets at the Baked Potato to express his appreciation and request Klemmer’s most recognized tune, the saxophonist politely declined: “That’s a long way back. I’m doing things a little differently now.”

* John Klemmer appears tonight at the Galaxy Concert Theatre, 3503 Harbor Blvd., Santa Ana, 8 p.m. $19.50-$21.50. (714) 957-0600.