Taking His Family Along as He Goes His Own Way

It’s not a tune that is included in Ronnie Laws’ many hits, but his performance Monday at Playboy Jazz in Central Park in Pasadena will be very much a family affair.

Joining Laws in the front line will be his son, tenor saxophonist Jaron Laws, and the vocal chores will be handled by his sisters, Eloise and Debra, and his daughter, Michelle.

“It’s going to be great,” says Laws. “We have so much fun when we get together like this.”

The performance of the Laws family will be one of the high points in a three-day program, beginning Saturday, that showcases dozens of musical performances. Although it’s not publicized as such, the fusion-R&B-smooth; jazz qualities of the event make it one of the Southland’s largest, most extensive presentations of music largely based beyond the mainstream genre.

For Laws, that’s an area in which he has operated comfortably since the release of his first album, “Pressure Sensitive,” in 1975.

“I don’t really consider myself primarily a jazz musician,” he says, “because I come from a very mixed culture of music. I was raised in Texas, where the blues are always with you, and I was very influenced by that kind of music. I loved Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane, but if you were from Texas, there was another saxophone style that you couldn’t avoid: the distinct sound of players like Arnett Cobb, David ‘Fathead’ Newman, James Clay, guys like that.”

Some of his earliest jobs, in fact, were with Cobb, a legendary tenor saxophonist prominently featured with the Lionel Hampton Orchestra and a frequent partner in clamorous tenor battles with Illinois Jacquet. Laws, who started out on alto saxophone before concentrating on tenor and soprano, developed his own variation on the Texas style, adding a gentler quality to its hard-driving exuberance.

He recorded “Pressure Sensitive” after a stint with Earth, Wind & Fire. But, despite the popularity of such similarly oriented performers as Grover Washington Jr., Joe Sample, George Duke and Maurice White, and such groups as the Crusaders, Sly & the Family Stone, the Funkadelics and numerous others, Laws was greeted by a surprising amount of criticism. Its intensity may have had something to do with an assumption that he would follow in the footsteps of his older, somewhat more mainstream-oriented brother, flutist Hubert Laws.

“It was hard to understand,” says Laws. “For me, music is a very broad art form. Innovators like [Thelonious] Monk and Miles [Davis] and Coltrane were always stretching the lines of demarcation, and that’s what the music is all about. What it should be about. When I did ‘Pressure Sensitive,’ it was a genuine effort to express what I was interested in musically. It wasn’t about targeting any market but, thankfully, it was something that people gravitated to. And I’m grateful that they like it, because it’s what has sustained me to this day.”

Laws’ 1996 album, “Tribute to Legendary Eddie Harris,” was a surprise to those observers who had pretty much decided that he was going to remain outside the jazz mainstream.

“Eddie was actually a major, major influence on me,” says Laws, “because of his music, and because he had a broader view, with a great comedic side, a real sense of humor.”

Despite the generally favorable reviews, Laws has no intention of revisiting that particular source. Referring to it as a unique “project”--a term he frequently uses to describe his activities--he adds, “I did what I wanted to do, and I’ll keep it at that.”

He does, however, regret what he views as the too-narrow categorizing that appears to be endemic to the music business, at least in this country.

“We’re working much too hard to try to define the music, as far as terminology is concerned,” he says. “When ‘Pressure Sensitive’ first hit the scene, they really didn’t know how to characterize it, and it perplexed the industry. What category should it be put in? And that was the dilemma I had to deal with at the time.

“And in that sense, I really appreciate the European approach to formatting music, because they have a much more eclectic mentality. I think that approach benefits the listeners much more, as opposed to programming and conditioning listeners to accept a single format. Seems like common sense to me: Put it all out there and let the listeners decide.”

That’s exactly what Laws will be doing on Monday, comfortably surrounded by family, unhesitatingly following his own musical path.

* Playboy Jazz in Central Park at Central Park in Pasadena, Fair Oaks Avenue at Del Mar Boulevard. 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Saturday: Tolu, Mike Lington, the Bruce Lofgren Jazz Orchestra, Louis Van Taylor, Excursion, Robert Kyle and Raya Yarbrough. Sunday: Steve Cole, the Rudy Regalado Orchestra, Jeff Robinson, Solar Wind, Tomas Janzon and Catarina New. Monday: Ronnie Laws, Pachito Alonso Y Sus Kini, Thom Teresi, Leslie Paula, Joel Gaines, 2AZZ1 and David Arnay. Free admission.

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Remembering Miles: Today is the 75th anniversary of the birth of Miles Davis. Saturday night at UCLA’s Royce Hall, he and drummer Billy Higgins will be honored in a tribute concert. Anyone who was ever fortunate enough to have had some sort of personal contact with the iconic jazz artist has a story to tell. He was that charismatic. And unpredictable. And memorable.

It was not uncommon for Miles to generously spend time with someone in warm and amiable fashion and then fail to acknowledge the same person at a random meeting a few days later. I was one of many who had that experience.

But Miles knew that he was constantly surrounded by people who wanted a piece of him, who wanted to bathe in his reflected aura, who somehow thought that some aspect of what made him so special and unique might rub off. It’s not surprising that his intimate friends were few or that he worked as hard as he did at maintaining distance.

I prefer to remember him for the eagerness with which he embraced life, for his constant quest for new ideas and for his sometimes whimsical sense of humor. I was fortunate enough to experience them all.

One day in the early ‘70s, in the elegant surroundings of his Upper West Side house in New York, he was intensely excited about a studio session he’d just completed. He tried to demonstrate the music at the piano, and when that didn’t quite work, he called Columbia, insisting that an engineer play back the tracks for me to hear over the phone. When my response wasn’t enthusiastic enough, he went back to the piano to make sure that I understood, in detail, exactly what he was doing. I finally did.

On another occasion, distressed by the conservatism of my typical Ralph Lauren garb, he drove me down to a leather specialist in the West Village who was creating Davis’ own increasingly colorful outfits. Following his instructions, the tailor produced a black suede outfit, complete with bell bottoms and a draw-string top.

I only wore it once, to show to Miles. He took one long look, shook his head and--in his inimitable voice--said, “Man, don’t ever wear that again.”