Three Is a Magic Number

On the cover of his new album, “Right on My Way Home,” Bob Dorough is seated comfortably behind the wheel of a classic convertible. A Panama hat cocked rakishly on his head, a boyish smile on his face, he is the very image of the perennial hipster.

It’s an image that has been around since the ‘50s, yet one that still fits Dorough. A jazz survivor at 74, he is what he has always been--a gifted pianist-singer-composer (“Call me a ‘singing jazz piano player,’ ” he says), a performer whose innate sense of humor has kept his music alive through decades of changing fashion.

“When I heard his song ‘Blue Xmas’ on Miles Davis’ record,” says singer Lena Horne, “it blew my mind. Now I have all his other work, and I think he’s fabulous.”

Dennis Hopper, another of Dorough’s many fans, asked him to write a theme for the 1994 Hopper-directed film “Chasers,” and the tune is now the title track from the new Blue Note album. Hopper describes Dorough’s blend of rich musicality and foot-tapping accessibility in a phrase tinged with a typically Dorough-like touch of sardonic wit. “Bob,” Hopper says, “is a unique musical genius and as common as a pet dog.”

But Dorough, who opens a three-night run Tuesday at the Jazz Bakery in Culver City, is more than a jazz cult figure. Although few in Generation X are familiar with his name, his voice is instantly recognizable as the voice of ABC-TV’s popular, long-running Saturday morning “Schoolhouse Rock” cartoons.

“Ever since it came on the air,” Dorough says in a phone conversation from his home in eastern Pennsylvania, “I can find myself working in a bar someplace and a waiter or a waitress comes up and says, ‘Your voice sounds familiar. Did you do . . . “ and I’ll answer, ‘Yeah, that was me.’ And they say, ‘Oh, wow, do “Conjunction Junction” ’ or ‘Do “Three Is a Magic Number.” ’ So I finally realized I had to work the material into my nightclub act.”

Dorough views his unexpected success with “Schoolhouse Rock” with a typically bemused attitude.

“The financial rewards have definitely been a plus,” he says, “but I also like what happens sometimes after a gig in which I play some straight-ahead jazz and some selections from ‘Schoolhouse Rock.’ Young fans often come up and say, ‘Oh, you saved my life, you got me through school.’ And then they add, ‘But, you know, that stuff you played earlier tonight, I liked that too.’ It kind of makes me feel like I might be proselytizing a little bit for jazz.”

Dorough’s affection for jazz is unremitting, despite the fact that the music itself has not exactly provided him with a high level of financial success. “Right on My Way Home” is his first as a leader for a major jazz label since “Devil May Care,” released in 1956 by Bethlehem (and currently available on Evidence).

Amazingly, his down-home Arkansas twang and world-weary way with a lyric--trademark elements in his style--have changed little in the four decades between the two albums. The consistency traces to a remarkably flexible, musically accurate voice and an unerring sense of humor.

“I think Bobby’s brilliant,” says singer Annie Ross. “His work is happy and humorous and swinging. Jazz is a happy music, and Bob Dorough makes it that way.”

Equally significant is his gift for storytelling, and the subtext to all of Dorough’s work is his own personal story, a classic rendering of a jazz musician’s odyssey through the latter half of the 20th century.

Dorough was born Dec. 12, 1923, in Cherry Hill, Ark. (“a feed store and a Texaco station with a post office in the feed store,” he says), and made the choice to hazard a musical life at an early age. At 14, after just two weeks in his high school band, he told his parents, “I’m gonna be a musician.”

“My mother said, ‘That’s nice.’ And my father said, ‘You’re good at math--but, well, you gotta do what you want, I guess.’ To me that meant that the gate was open, and out I went!” Dorough recalls.

Drafted into the Army in 1942, he initially served in an antiaircraft artillery unit before a punctured eardrum led to his transfer to a band unit, where he met jazz musicians from New York and Chicago. After his discharge in 1945, he studied composition at North Texas State Teachers College (one of the first American universities to establish a jazz curriculum).

“That’s when I first heard Charlie Parker,” says Dorough, recalling the alto saxophonist and magisterial bop legend. “I was playing a kind of primitive piano at the time, when I met a couple of guys who had Parker’s bebop recordings on Dial. They invited me up to the room to hear things like ‘Hot House’ and ‘Groovin High’ and explained how they were actually based on the chords to tunes I might know.

“I listened to ‘Hot House’ and said, ‘Wow, that’s weird,’ and they told me it was actually based on ‘What Is This Thing Called Love?’ And I said, ‘Really? Oh, yeah!’ It was wild, a really thrilling musical breakthrough for me.”

In 1949, Dorough moved to Manhattan with one primary goal in mind--to play jazz. And like most of the other young musicians present during the exhilarating years in which bebop was rapidly spreading throughout the New York jazz scene, he sought every opportunity he could to experience firsthand the playing of “Bird” Parker.

“One day, through some freak thing,” Dorough says, “Bird asked this bass player I knew to book him a band for a club date in a bar in Queens. So the bass player came to my house and played a trick on me. He said, ‘Are you working tonight?’ I said, ‘No.’ And he said, ‘Well, grab your jacket, you got a gig.’ I didn’t ask any questions, I just brushed my hair and my teeth and grabbed my jacket.

“When I got down to his car he said, ‘You’re working with Bird tonight.’ I went stone-cold dead in the market. But it was cool. Bird had a broken leg in a cast, and they just sort of propped him up with one leg elevated, and he played all the tunes we knew--standards and bebop. Of course, as usual, a lot of cats showed up to sit in, [alto saxophonist] Lee Konitz and [tenor saxophonist] Warne Marsh among them. But that was typical. Word always got around New York if Bird was playing somewhere.”

Despite the fact that he frequented the Big Apple’s many jam sessions and even organized one of his own in a cold-water flat he rented in the East 70s, Dorough discovered that jazz was a difficult profession. Other forms of musical employment beckoned and, in 1952, he was hired by Sugar Ray Robinson to direct the music for the former boxing champion’s touring revue.

“We went down south on Count Basie’s bus,” Dorough says. “It was quite a tour: the Dominoes, Ruth Brown, Count Basie and Sugar Ray Robinson. And let me tell you, it could get a little hairy in the South at that time. I got some real funny looks whenever I’d check in at the same hotel with the guys in the Basie band.

“But onstage it was something else. Imagine this: Count Basie would open up, and when they’d announce Sugar Ray, the Count would disappear, and I’d sit right there on his hot bench. And, man, it was so easy to lead that band. The music was apple pie to them. I’d say, ‘One, two,’ and they were off. A lot of my gigs with Sugar Ray, I’d have to wave my arms and fight to get the music right, but with the Basie band, there were no problems.”

What Dorough likes to describe as his initial “shot at high visibility” came when he became the first--and only--vocalist to record with Miles Davis.

“Miles happened to hear my Bethlehem album at a mutual friend’s house,” Dorough says. “He dug it, and that’s how I met him and got a little tight with him.”

Asked by Davis to write a song for a 1962 Christmas album, Dorough came up with “Blue Xmas.”

“And since we were going into the studio,” Dorough recalls, “Miles said, ‘Let’s do that other tune too.’ It was ‘Nothing Like You,’ a song he’d always ask me to do whenever I’d visit him or cross him at a party [it was eventually released on Davis’ “The Sorcerer” in 1967]. Then, the same week, we did ‘Devil May Care,’ with all the tunes arranged by Gil Evans.”

Dorough remembers Davis as a strong presence in the recording studio:

“You had to take his word. He didn’t waste any strokes, either. If it started off badly he’d stop you right away. It was a thrilling experience, because I never knew exactly where it would go.”

But Dorough was less pleased when “Blue Xmas” came out with a credit line indicating co-authorship with Davis.

“It happened without him calling me and saying ‘Can I have the publishing rights’ or anything like that,” Dorough says. “It wasn’t fair, but I think Miles was impervious to the needs of other guys, although I can’t imagine why. He couldn’t have been greedy, because he already had everything. But there are all sorts of little stories around jazz like ‘Hey, Miles didn’t write that at all. Somebody else wrote it, and he stole it!’ ”

Davis, of course, was simply following a fairly common practice around the music business for bandleaders and singers to take partial credit--and a piece of the royalties--for the music they recorded.

“I sometimes wonder,” Dorough says with a chuckle, “if Gil Evans ever got together to commiserate with Billy Strayhorn. Can’t you see it, them sitting together at a bar, and Strayhorn saying, ‘Yeah, Duke [Ellington] stole me out of thousands,’ and Gil saying, ‘Yeah, well Miles did too, you know what I mean.’ ”

Dorough’s “shot at high visibility” with the Davis recordings was largely undercut by the arrival of the rock era in the ‘60s.

“You had to be truly famous,” he says, “to get work in jazz in the ‘60s.”

Instead, Dorough took another pathway, this time into advertising, accompanying singers, doing occasional studio dates. He became co-musical director (with his partner, guitarist Stuart Scharf) for pop singer Chad Mitchell and co-produced the folk-rock Top 40 band Spanky and Our Gang. The recording included a Dorough tune, “Love,” with lyrics from the Webster’s dictionary definition. And it was this offbeat number that eventually led him to “Schoolhouse Rock.”

Bassist Ben Tucker, who also was working advertising sessions, was asked if he knew anyone who could set the multiplication tables to music for an educational recording project. He immediately recommended Dorough.

“Ben brought me the Spanky and Our Gang recording of ‘Love,’ ” says “Schoolhouse Rock” co-producer George Newall, “and I immediately knew that Bob was the perfect person for the job.”

Dorough himself wasn’t so sure.

“When I heard about it, I’m thinking, ‘Oh, jeez, this is going to be dumb,’ ” he says. “But when they told me I didn’t have to write down to the kids, that I could avoid the kind of singsong drivel that’s usually done for kids, I got a lot more interested. So the first one I wrote was ‘Three Is a Magic Number.’ After that, they started laying budget money on me.”

When Newall, who is also a jazz pianist, took the initial material to the Bank Street College of Education in New York, it was immediately described as both effective and entertaining.

“That’s when we got the idea of trying the tunes out as cartoons,” Newall says. “So we went to ABC. It took a while to persuade executives like Michael Eisner, who was then at ABC, that it was a good idea. But once Chuck Jones, the veteran Bugs Bunny animation director, approved it, we got a go-ahead.”

From 1973 to 1985 the “Schoolhouse Rock” project moved through four subjects: multiplication, reading, America (because of the bicentennial) and science. Off the air in the late ‘80s, it returned to ABC in the ‘90s and two “Schoolhouse Rock” numbers continue to be aired every Saturday morning.

Although Dorough continued to record on various small labels, including his own Laissez-Faire Records, the new Blue Note album is his return to the front line, a third shot at high visibility.

“I was happy to have the opportunity to sign Bob,” says Blue Note label President Bruce Lundvall. “He’s one of the true jazz originals. It’s hard to say why there was such a gap in his recording career. But Bob’s a relaxed kind of guy, and I guess the years just slipped by, and he continued to make the albums he wanted to make for smaller companies.”

Dorough has lived for the last 30 years in eastern Pennsylvania, near the Delaware Water Gap, an area that has become a virtual jazz refuge. Phil Woods lives nearby, and the late tenor saxophonist Al Cohn had a home in the area. The Deer Head Inn, a near-legendary musical hangout for decades, continues to provide jazz, and was the site for one of Keith Jarrett’s recording sessions.

“We still all take turns working there,” says Dorough, “the local guys as well as the New York acts.”

His daughter, Aralee, 36, is the principal flutist with the Houston Symphony and has frequently performed with her father, singing the “Four Legged Zoo” song in the ABC “Rock” series. Dorough is now married to his third wife, Sally.

Despite the promised new visibility that the Blue Note signing provides, Dorough has no illusions, content to face the future with the optimism and high spirits that have characterized his entire career.

“Look,” he says, “when I was real young, I picked cotton, I worked in a drugstore and I delivered papers and washed dishes trying to get the college thing together. And I was in the Army, where you had to do everything unimaginable. When I got out, I said to myself, ‘I’m going to be a musician, and that’s it.’ And that’s what I’ve done, even though I’ve done it in a lot of ways I never imagined in the beginning.

“But the bottom line is that I must be a little bit of a ham, because I truly love to step out on the stage in front of an attentive, hip audience and go through my repertoire. That’s what I like most. The fact that I play piano is a part of it, the fact that I get to sing is part of it and the fact that I do some of my own songs is another part of it. So I guess you can just call me a lucky man.”

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Bob Dorough Trio, Jazz Bakery, 3233 Helms Ave., Culver City. Tuesday through Thursday, 8:30 and 10 p.m. $18-$20. (310) 271-9039.