Return Engagements

Halloween marks an inauspicious anniversary for trumpeter and actor Jack Sheldon. It was two years ago on Halloween that Sheldon found out he had colon cancer. Surgery and a year of chemotherapy followed.

Now, Jack is back. “I’m feeling good,” the 66-year-old musician said recently by phone from his home in the Hollywood Hills. “I’m getting stronger. It was quite an ordeal, but, considering the alternative . . . .”

As proof of that recovery, just look at his schedule for the end of this week. Thursday he leads his big band on the Queen Mary as part of the Modern Sounds jazz festival. Friday he leads his quartet at Steamers Cafe in Fullerton. And Sunday he appears, as he does every week, with pianist Ross Tompkins at Chadney’s in Burbank.

In fact, 1998 has been a big year for Sheldon. Blue Note Records re-released “Jack Sheldon: The Quartet & the Quintet,” with some of his earliest recordings, dating to the mid-’50s, as part of the label’s West Coast Classics series. Butterfly Records has just released “Class Act,” a new recording of Sheldon singing and playing trumpet with Tompkins.

In one of Sheldon’s higher-profile appearances this year, he opened Merv Griffin’s Coconut Club at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, playing trumpet one-handed because of a broken wrist suffered while taping “The People’s Choice Awards.”

“I was playing a solo and just fell back in my chair,” he explained. “[The wrist] is still not right. I had about nine pins in there holding it together.”

Throw in some movie work for a trio of made-for-television films starring his old buddy Burt Reynolds, voice-over exposure on frequently aired commercials for an indigestion remedy, continuing interest in ABC’s “Schoolhouse Rock” educational series for children from the ‘70s and ‘80s--that’s him singing “I’m Just a Bill” and “Conjunction Junction”--and there’s no doubt that Sheldon is running full steam ahead, no problem.

“Well, one problem,” he said disarmingly. “I’m fat. I’m a terribly compulsive eater.”

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Though born in Florida and raised in Detroit, Sheldon is the prototypical Hollywood musician with a career that spans music, movies and television.

“When I first came [to L.A.], I got a job at my uncle’s candy shop in the Central Market downtown, right next to the Million Dollar Theater on Broadway,” he said. “I must have been around 14 at the time, and Dizzy Gillespie’s big band was playing the theater.

“I hear Dizzy warming up out back, and I went up to him and said ‘I’m a trumpet player too. Can you get me into the show?’ He got me in every day for the two weeks they were there,” he recalled. “Sammy Davis Jr. was the opening act.”

In the early ‘50s, Sheldon became a fixture on the L.A. scene, working around town with saxophonist Wardell Gray, sitting in at with Howard Rumsey’s Lighthouse All Stars and recording with clarinetist Jimmy Giuffre. He played in the bands of saxophonists Art Pepper and Herb Geller and bassist Curtis Counce, and he made extra money by giving swimming lessons.

“When Gillespie would see me later, he called me the Golfer because I was so tan from being around the pool,” he said. “I taught a lot of star’s kids to swim, including Natalie Cole.”

Before going off with Stan Kenton and, later, Benny Goodman, he played piano in a combo behind fellow trumpeter Chet Baker, whom he still refers to as “Chettie.”

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While Baker’s reserved style defined West Coast cool, Sheldon stuck closer to bebop. It’s been said that Sheldon’s bop-fired sound limited his recording because it ran contrary to the prevailing notion of what constituted “the California sound.”

“It’s true that [Pacific Jazz Records producer] Dick Bock was always kind of cool to me,” he said. “And he had Chettie on his label, he didn’t need another trumpeter. I always liked [the playing of] Dizzy more than Chettie. I do love my bebop.”

The recordings on “The Quartet & the Quintet,” only three of which were supervised by West Coast producing legend Bock, feature Sheldon playing with such notables as saxophonist Zoot Sims, pianists Kenny Drew and Walter Norris, drummer Larance Marable and bassist Leroy Vinnegar. Along with such standards as “Cheek to Cheek,” and “Get Out of Town,” it includes Sheldon’s bop anthem, done Gillespie-style: “Groovus Mentus.”

It was with Goodman in the late ‘50s that Sheldon began to sing, specifically in New York at the club Basin Street East. The song was “My Baby Done Told Me.” Sheldon’s distinctive tones, instrumental sense of phrasing and unerring sense of timing, in tandem with his trumpet playing, have made him one of the more admired vocalists who also plays a horn.

“I’m having a little trouble with the high notes now,” he said. “They had a tube down my throat for a while, and it messed up my vocals. But I’m getting it back.”

Sheldon continues to be big with jazz fans who love his bop-inspired play, his warm style of singing and his ability to wisecrack and banter between sets.

There are those who remember him as bandleader on “The Merv Griffin Show,” his short-lived 1966 television series “Run Buddy Run” and a host of movie appearances.

“I’m glad that I’m still here to do music and work with wonderful musicians,” he said. “It’s the one thing that I really love.”

* The Jack Sheldon Big Band plays Thursday for the Modern Sound Jazz Festival, Queen Mary, Long Beach. 1 p.m. The festival runs Thursday-Sunday. $300 for four-day registration. (562) 985-7072. The Jack Sheldon Quartet plays Friday at Steamers Cafe, 138 W. Commonwealth Ave., Fullerton. 8:30 p.m. Two-item minimum. (714) 871-8800.