Cashing In Childhood Currency

Youngsters reared in one of Orange County’s raw, new communities of the 1950s and 1960s were surrounded by bean fields, orange groves, beaches, Disneyland and a growing commercial sprawl--a world still defining itself.

Artists and musicians-to-be often found valuable mentors in their neighborhoods and endured meaningful (if sometimes painful) experiences that helped shape their later work.

A boy fascinated by the trombone had fine music teachers at his public school, where he befriended other kids equally passionate about marching band or chorus. As a teenager, he got gigs at pizza houses that employed amateur Dixieland-style bands.

A child of Latino and Native American heritage who saw his peaceful rural community become a sea of tract homes--and himself and his neighbors become “those Mexicans”--would go on to make art about what it means to be a member of a minority group.

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Jazz trombonist Dan Barrett is 42, but he still remembers in vivid detail the day the music man came to visit his fifth-grade class at Harper Elementary School in Costa Mesa.

“Our teacher said, ‘Boys and girls, I’m going to introduce you to Mr. Owen. He teaches music at Kaiser Junior High School, and he’s here to start a beginning band program.’ ”

Ken Owen looked out at rows of expectant 11-year-old faces. “Music is around you almost every day of our lives,” he said. “How many of you have a favorite television program you like to watch? Well, have you ever noticed the music in the background of those programs? Maybe some of you have thought about trying to make music yourself.”

Owen told the students to think about which three instruments they’d like to play. When he came back the following week, he set out instruments on tables and had each child sit beside his or her first choice.

Barrett sat next to the trumpet.

“I’d seen a production of ‘The Music Man,’ which featured my older brother, who had a surf rock group in the ‘60s,” Barrett said. “Something about the shiny brass instruments caught my eye. I guess even then I realized the trumpet was the primary instrument for playing the melody.

“Mr. Owen did a cursory examination of my embouchure”--the way he pursed his lips on the mouthpiece--”and my jaw and teeth, and he said, ‘You might be physically more adapted to the trombone.’ ”

It turned out that Owen was fibbing a bit: The band had 15 trumpet players and only three would-be trombonists. But when he caught Barrett practicing his chosen instrument on the sly, Owen gave the boy free trumpet lessons on his own time.

Band became the center of Barrett’s life. The high school group was 110 kids strong. But his musical world soon expanded.

Barrett was too young for a driver’s license when his parents drove him to Larchmont Hall in Los Angeles, which held regular meetings for jazzmen who made up impromptu bands--anyone from professional musicians slumming on their day off to a 15-year-old from Costa Mesa.

Closer to home, there was Pizza Palace. All through high school, he spent nearly every Friday and Saturday night playing with the South Frisco Jazz Band, a seven-piece New Orleans-style group that performed at the Huntington Beach restaurant. Barrett’s parents, who stopped by one night to see if he was in good hands, became regulars.

Barrett met Howard Alden, a young musician from Huntington Beach, when they both were employed by South Coast Village to play for shoppers. Alden had become fascinated with a banjo and a guitar he found at home at age 9. That led to lessons with a retired banjo and guitar player. A few years later, he too was playing in pizza parlors.

Many more gigs came Barrett’s way as a teenager, finally obliging him to join the musicians union. A summer job playing with a Disneyland band, the Banjo Kings, resulted in a special kind of serendipity.

One of the Kings was Bill Campbell, who became “a great influence on me, musically and spiritually,” Barrett said. “He was a great believer in Zen, a very intelligent individual on some different spiritual plane than we mere mortals.”

He also introduced the youth to a world beyond jazz. One day, Campbell invited Barrett to “hear the maestro”--renowned classical guitarist Andres Segovia.

“Bill really understood things about the music that only people of that generation really understand,” Barrett said. “That’s what I’m trying to shoot for . . . a truth and a soul and an honesty.”

In the mid-1970s, Barrett majored in music education, figuring that he’d become a school band director and relegate his performances to off-hours. But he didn’t feel encouraged at Cal State Long Beach.

In 1977, “about a semester and a half away from graduating or being suspended--I’m not sure which,” he said, Barrett was invited to play at the Breda International Jazz Festival in Holland.

It changed his life, Barrett said, because he finally realized he could be a professional jazzman, not just an avocational musician.

In Orange County, however, he couldn’t find much work. Still living at home at age 26, he had a heart-to-heart talk with his father, who pledged the family’s continued support--so long as Barrett could earn some money.

A telephone call from Barrett’s old buddy, Alden, who had moved to Manhattan in 1982, saved him. Alden extolled the virtues of New York as a place where you could actually make a living playing jazz.

Barrett even had a job waiting for him, playing the trombone with a swing band.

“The beauty of this business is that there’s always a surprise at the other end of the phone,” he said. “Usually it’s a good one.”

Since then, Barrett has played valve and slide trombone on the soundtracks of “The Cotton Club,” “Brighton Beach Memoirs” and numerous Woody Allen films, including “Mighty Aphrodite,” “Bullets Over Broadway”--in which he had a cameo as a musician--and a documentary about Allen, “Wild Man Blues.”

Barrett has performed at Carnegie Hall, soloed with Benny Goodman and recorded his own album, “Jubilesta!” for Arbors Records of Clearwater, Fla.

Now married, with a 10-year-old son, Barrett recently resettled in Costa Mesa, to be closer to his and his wife’s families.

“When it looked like traveling was going to be my primary source of income, my wife pointed out there was a perfectly nice airport in Orange County,” Barrett said.

When he’s not flying to gigs and festivals, Barrett plays in a quartet that has regular dates at the Torrance and Anaheim locations of El Pollo Inka, a Peruvian chain restaurant.

“The management seems to understand that I have to take off frequently,” he said, laughing. “As a friend of mine points out, one is not a prophet in one’s hometown.”

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Performance artist James Luna grew up on a Fountain Valley farm that his Native American maternal grandparents bought when they left their Luiseno reservation in north San Diego County. He remembers the wood stove, the outhouse, the coyotes and the clear view of the beach from his front door.

Known as Colonia Juarez, the neighborhood was predominantly Latino in the 1950s, with some white and Japanese households and one black family.

“We lived multiculturalism,” recalled Luna, 48, who moved to the La Jolla Reservation in north San Diego County more than two decades ago. “We didn’t think about it; we just lived it. We celebrated all the holidays. It was a real communal thing.”

But in the early 1960s, when tract homes started sprouting between vegetable plots and grazing farm animals, everything changed.

“All of a sudden we were a minority,” said Luna, whose father was Latino. “We became ‘those Mexicans’ and the neighborhood became like a ghetto.

“It doesn’t seem a poor existence so long as you have plenty to eat and warm clothes,” he said. “But when you compare it to another world with air-conditioning and name brands, it starts to change your head a little bit.”

There also was an inescapable tension about living simultaneously in two places: a rural community where some people spoke only Spanish and nobody sent their kids to college, and the surrounding white world of surfing and high school sports and student government.

“People would call you a surfer the same way they’d call you a [racial slur],” Luna remembered. “There was the same meanness. Fortunately, I was big, and tough enough. That was my saving grace.

“But in high school, when I started to get into art, what that did for me was enable me to be a real individual in something. Fortunately, I had some real good instructors who saw something in me and my work.”

One was an English teacher, a Mr. Wilson, who showed more concern with the originality of Luna’s ideas--”the storytelling, how I said things”--than his grammar and spelling.

Still, as a youth, Luna was “just in awe” of the “Ozzie and Harriet” lifestyle of his Costa Mesa cousins, high school football heroes and, later, students at Orange Coast College.

“They used to have cases of Coke. Cases! We used to sit on the fence and pretend we could see the movie at the Apollo drive-in. I thought, ‘Wow, it’s not unheard of for you to be a college student. That could be part of your existence.’ ”

Luna enrolled at Golden West College in Huntington Beach but lacked the motivation to keep up with classes. Active in the Brown Culture Society, a Santa Ana-based group seeking to empower Chicanos, American Indians and Samoans, Luna found himself in a swirl of identity politics, with the Black Panthers and various left-leaning politicians trying to win endorsements from the society.

In the early 1970s, UC Irvine came calling, to recruit kids like Luna--who had never heard of the school--under an affirmative action program. Despite special counseling and the summer “bridge program” to bring him up to speed academically, Luna dropped out after two years.

Personal problems weighed on Luna, and he keenly felt the lack of role models in the predominantly white world of fine art.

“I was painting these hard-edge paintings that had to do with Indian basket and beadwork designs. [Because of my themes], I never got the real critiques I wanted to get.”

Adrift, Luna worked at a number of jobs in Los Angeles and the Valley. The last one, at an aircraft screw factory in Stanton, made Luna realize that he had to do something with his life.

Back at UCI, he finally excelled.

“My art took off,” Luna said. “I was more serious about it. I was more in tune with who I was and what I wanted to say.”

Introduced to performance art--which typically involves monologues and other activities related to the artist’s own life and personal concerns--he finally could address issues “that were eating at me personally, politically and culturally.”

Paradoxically, it wasn’t until Luna--a Native American living in a white culture--came to grips with what it means not to be a “reservation Indian” that his art took on a distinctive identity.

“When I do an entrance singing Frank Sinatra’s ‘My Way,’ sitting on an exercise bike, wearing a war bonnet, and playing Junior Brown’s ‘Surf Melody,’ people perk up,” he said. “I’m deconstructing the warrior image.”

Another Luna performance, “Take a Picture With a Real Indian,” from 1991, relates to his childhood visits to a buffalo ranch in Irvine.

“You went up there as a tourist,” Luna explains. “Our grandparents were full-blooded, but those weren’t our people. It was a big treat to take a picture with an Indian in full regalia.”

In Luna’s piece, he invites people to take a picture with a cutout photograph of himself, wearing a war bonnet. It’s a way to get people thinking of how other ethnicities often treat Native Americans as “picturesque” without realizing they are perpetuating the same stereotypes others hold about them.

Luna performs and shows his work frequently at museums and universities across the country, and he has won prestigious awards--including a 1991 Bessie award from the New York Dance and Theater Workshop. But his art does not bring in enough money to live on.

That’s OK with Luna. For the past 17 years, he has made his living as a counselor at Palomar Community College in San Marcos, with recent stints as a guest instructor in studio art in the UC system.

“I keep busy,” he said. “It allows me to take chances.”

Editor’s note: Cathy Curtis was The Times’ visual arts critic from 1988 through March.