Otwell Back at the Keyboard After Hitting the Books

Where has Charles Otwell been? That’s the question of jazz fans who remember the Orange County-based pianist as an integral part of the Poncho Sanchez band in the 1980s. Otwell, beginning in 1979, was one of the group’s original members and wrote many of the band’s best-known arrangements, reworking jazz standards for three horns and Latin rhythm.

The simple answer is that the 50-year-old Otwell has spent most of his time in the classroom, both as student and teacher, and behind a desk writing. He has done a number of musical performances since leaving the Sanchez band in 1989 but none recently. When he plays Vanilla’s Caffe in Orange tonight, it will be his first public appearance in more than a year.

Most recently, the study of philosophy has taken him from music. Before that, he took time to write a science fiction novel. “I guess I’m a sort of Renaissance man in a time when everyone else is into a specialty,” he says, laughing, during a phone interview from his home in Orange.

But the pianist hasn’t abandoned music. He teaches piano at Orange Coast College and the history of jazz at Santa Ana College. “But I’m mainly a listener now,” he says. “I’m listening to a lot of orchestral music, a lot of choral music, a lot of Robert Shaw, the Faure Requiem, the Mozart Requiem, the Mozart masses, that kind of stuff. And I still listen to jazz. I’ve gone back to Coltrane, someone I lost track of in the ‘70s when jazz fusion was developing.”

He still plays when he can find the time and is trying to learn Chopin’s Scherzo No. 1 in B minor. “I do it for therapy,” says Otwell, who began classical piano studies at age 6. “I’m sure the scherzo is one of the things that [Cuban jazz pianist] Gonzalo Rubalcaba learned. Some of the licks he does sound like Chopin.”

Otwell spent 10 years with the Poncho Sanchez band as musical director and lead arranger. “We called them ‘little big band’ arrangements,” Otwell says, “because of the way we tried to make three horns sound like a big band, getting them to do riffs and keeping them busy, just like Count Basie did with some of his bands. One of the first arrangements we did was [the Basie hit written by Frank Foster] ‘Shiny Stockings.’ ”

When Otwell left the band in 1989, he turned to teaching for his living while doing occasional performances. “When I got off the road with Ponch, I just started reading all these things--psychology, economics, history, science, math, literature--and taking classes. I was spending so much time on campuses teaching that I thought, ‘Why not enroll?’ ”

His research and interest in literature led him to a writing workshop and his first novel, “a kind of heavy, sci-fi book,” as he describes it.

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“The novel was about what the Internet might become someday. I did a lot of general research, and it was influenced by the cyber-punk movement. The protagonist is an Interpol agent dealing with the criminal element, and I had to project what the criminals might be like in the globalized, virtual world and what police work would be like. That was the fun part.”

At the same time, he was securing a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from UC Irvine. While pursuing his graduate degree, Otwell is participating in the department as a teaching assistant, leading an undergraduate discussion group in applied ethics. The novel, still unpublished, has fallen by the wayside.

Everything else had taken a back seat to his studies until he got a recent phone call from bassist Luther Hughes asking him to play at Vanilla’s.

“I told him I couldn’t. I didn’t want to do it,” Otwell says. “And Luther said, ‘Quit your whining and do it.’ Now I’m stuck.”

Otwell will team with bassist Hughes and drummer Kendall Kay. He says he’ll bring in his electric piano and do some standards and other familiar tunes. The electric piano, he says, “will make it easy. If they had a great Steinway or something in there, I’d be worried.”

Otwell, who recently did some arranging for Sanchez band trumpeter Sal Cracchiolo and Cracchiolo’s wife, vocalist Melanie Jackson Cracchiolo, says he wants to stay involved in music even after he gets his philosophy degree. “I can see myself teaching both. I wouldn’t mind wearing more than one hat.” This from a guy who has already worn several.

* Charles Otwell plays tonight at Vanilla’s Caffe, 1948 N. Tustin Ave., Orange. 7:30 p.m. No cover, $10 minimum. (714) 921-8035.