Traveling in Life’s Slow Lane Is Fine With Larry Carlton

Shortly after Larry Carlton moved here five years ago, the veteran guitarist went to lunch with a leading country music record producer, Tony Brown. When the producer asked him what he planned to do in Nashville, Carlton answered, “Nothing.”

The 51-year-old native of Torrance may have once ranked among the busiest studio guitarists in Los Angeles, but these days he prefers a quiet home life that he interrupts only for his own recordings and concert tours.

“I’m not a workaholic,” says Carlton, who performs at the Hollywood Bowl Sunday night with an assortment of other jazz artists. “I love my time at home. I love my fishing time and my wife time and my kid time and my border collie time. If I have two weeks off, I don’t have to find something to do.”

It wasn’t always that way: In the 1970s, Carlton worked on more than 3,000 recordings, contributing signature guitar lines to Joni Mitchell’s “Court and Spark,” Steely Dan’s “Aja” and a string of contemporary jazz records by the Crusaders. His resume also includes stints with everyone from Sammy Davis Jr. to John Lennon, from Michael Jackson to Neil Diamond.

He also released a string of instrumental albums that helped forge the smooth jazz movement. By 1977, when he first signed with Warner Bros. Records, he moved away from session work to focus on his own career.

When the guitarist moved to Music City U.S.A. in 1996 at the height of the country music boom, some Nashville boosters thought Carlton might return to studio work. Instead, Carlton says he moved here for two reasons: To be close to his two children, who had moved to Lebanon, Tenn., with their mother, Carlton’s ex-wife; and to fulfill a lifelong dream to live in the country on a farm.

“I knew in my 20s that I wanted to eventually live a more rural lifestyle,” Carlton says. “I was born and raised in Torrance, but my parents are Okies. As a kid, I’d go on vacations to farms in southeastern Oklahoma. We’d fish and hunt, and I’d ride horses and play along the rivers and creeks. I always loved that, and I wanted to have that kind of a life as an adult.”

These days, Carlton has just that. He resides in Leiper’s Fork, Tenn., with his second wife, former contemporary Christian singer Michele Pillar, who raises Arabian horses on the couple’s 100-acre farm.

“My tendency to be laid-back existed long before I got here,” he says. “Now it’s just firmly planted.”

Nonetheless, the instrumentalist still performs from 75 to 140 concert dates a year, including an annual monthly sojourn to Japan, where his spare, sweetly melodic pop-jazz has proven especially popular. He also still regularly releases albums. His latest, “Fingerprints,” marked his return to Warner Bros. after being off the label for 17 years. The title song spent several weeks at No. 1 on the contemporary jazz album charts.

“I don’t think this particular CD offers anything new from me,” Carlton says with typical candor. “But it’s encouraged me in that it tells me that what I’m doing is very accessible and that people still like it.”

The album’s success wasn’t necessarily a shoo-in. Even though Carlton helped pioneer the smooth sound of the contemporary jazz movement, the musical format is different today than when he recorded his first hit albums in the 1970s.

Therefore, Carlton was anxious the first time he took new songs into a meeting with Matt Pierson, the head of the jazz division of Warner Bros. Records. The veteran guitarist had scored his initial instrumental hits on Warner Bros., but he left in 1982 when the label cut a majority of its jazz roster.

As Carlton remembers it, Pierson reacted enthusiastically to his initial recordings. “I played him six or seven tunes I’d cut, and he liked them a lot,” Carlton recalls. “He said it was a great representation of who I am and where I’m at musically and all of that.”

But Pierson also made it clear that the label wanted Carlton’s album to contain the elements necessary to get airplay on contemporary jazz radio stations. “He asked me, ‘How would you feel about working with Paul Brown to finish the album?’ ” Carlton says.

Brown is a successful contemporary jazz producer who has collaborated with Boney James, Rick Braun and George Benson, among others. “Matt told me, ‘Since you’ve made your statement, now let’s make sure radio is covered,’ ” Carlton says. “I said, ‘Yeah, man, why not?’ ”

Carlton had never met Brown, nor had he heard any of his work. His willingness to collaborate with a stranger with a popular touch suggests that Carlton is a pragmatist who is as interested in success as he is in personal expression. When he talks about his music, he mentions formats and airplay more than he speaks of inspiration and innovation.

“The way Paul works is, he puts together tracks with no melodies,” Carlton relates. “When we met, he played tracks for me, and I’d pick one out and say, ‘Yeah, I dig that one.’ Then I’d compose the melody and play the stuff right on the track. In the end, it sounds like Larry Carlton, but it’s got the hip production behind it.”

In other words, Brown provides the modern radio formula, while Carlton gives it a dash of personal flavor. “Paul’s aware of what works for our market,” the guitarist explains. “So far, we’ve had a No. 1 single, so it’s working terrifically.”

Asked if he has any qualms about making music in such calculated fashion, Carlton scoffs. “We’re all veterans,” he explains. “Paul’s a consummate pro. It was very comfortable. He puts together some very hip things that I wouldn’t think of. I don’t analyze our market like he does. I’m a guitar player. What he provided was just a different backdrop. The rest of it is me doing what I like to do.”

Meanwhile, Carlton looks forward to visiting Los Angeles. He’ll see his folks, he says, and stop by his favorite Mexican restaurant in Burbank. But he doesn’t miss living there, he says. He long ago got over a brush with death that occurred when he was shot in the neck in an unprovoked attack in the front yard of his former Los Angeles home. He didn’t leave L.A. to escape violence, he says. He left to find solitude and a leisurely lifestyle.

To illustrate how well he and his wife have acclimated themselves to Tennessee, he cites an incident when his wife was visiting Southern California recently and decided to drive up the coast.

“A highway patrolman actually pulled alongside her and told her to speed up because she was driving too slow,” Carlton says with a laugh. “Can you imagine that happening here? I think that shows how we’re just naturally more inclined to live at the kind of slower pace we have here.”