Jarrett Keeps Looking for the Edge

Keith Jarrett arrives in town Sunday night for his first concert since the attacks of Sept. 11. Like virtually everyone else, he has experienced a continuing flow of feelings about the tragic event. But when his trio--with bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Jack DeJohnette--takes the stage at UCLA’s Royce Hall, the music will move to the center of their focus.

“It can’t be allowed to destroy the things that are most important to us,” Jarrett says. “It’s had the effect of making everything into soft focus, like gauzy photos. Which gives us a purpose--maybe a bigger purpose than before--to look for clarity and dimensionality.”

That sense of purpose has surfaced with surprising synchronicity in some of the material on the trio’s new CD, “Inside Out.” Unlike past CDs, which emphasized standard songs, “Inside Out” displays the trio in a series of freely improvised live performances. That Jarrett should have released an album displaying a shift from the structured music of the standard performances to the wide-open, unplanned spontaneity of free playing, at a time when the complacent certainties of the ‘90s have given way to the chaotic unpredictability of the post-Sept. 11 era, is fascinating.

“It is kind of strange,” says Jarrett. “Even the title. Everything really has changed. But you know, in many ways, jazz players look for a crisis. You try to find the place where you touch the world, and that’s always at an edge.”

Edges, of course, can be sharp. And that’s the point at which Jarrett’s newly emerging stage separates him from what he describes as the jazz “conservatism” of the ‘90s.

“You could almost equate the new conservatism with complacency,” he says. “And in that sense, there’s a definite relationship between the way we’re doing our free playing and the way the world feels now. The looking-back people in jazz see an ideal age in which everything worked the right way. And now it doesn’t; and there’s the connection. What we’ve always done with the trio--first with the standards, and now with free playing--has been to remember that there are always things that haven’t been addressed, that need to be addressed.”

Don’t expect the Jarrett Trio to make any plans about what music will surface on Sunday night. Spontaneity, by definition, has to be unanticipated. As Ornette Coleman once said, “How can I know what I’m going to play before I play it?”

“We don’t try to make it happen,” adds Jarrett. “Then it would be nothing. It wouldn’t be free. So people who expect, ‘Well, that’s what the trio does now,’ they’ll be wrong. But maybe. Maybe we will. We won’t know until Sunday.”

The best solution for listeners, at Royce and beyond, is to do what Jarrett, Peacock and DeJohnette do.

“Try to approach listening the way we approach playing,” he says. “If you listen for something specific, they you’ll be disappointed. If you do what we do--go out there without anything in our heads--that’s when the miracle happens.”

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The Keith Jarrett Trio at Royce Hall on the UCLA campus. Sunday, 8 p.m. Tickets and information: (310) 825-2101.

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Celebrating Catalina’s. Jazz clubs are not exactly famous for their longevity. A very few manage to survive long enough to become a part of the music’s history--Manhattan’s Village Vanguard is a prime example. Most others surface briefly, arc brightly across the jazz horizon and quickly fade from view.

All of which makes the 15th anniversary of the opening of Catalina Bar & Grill on Monday an especially notable event. The club, now one of the Southland’s two primary destinations (the other is the Jazz Bakery) for performances by internationally known jazz artists, opened on Oct. 23, 1986, with saxophonist/flutist Buddy Collette’s quartet as the featured act. On Monday he returns to serve as host and master of ceremonies for an evening that promises to include an all-star jam session of Southland jazz artists, with the Donald Vega Quartet as the house rhythm section.

Romanian-born Catalina Popescu established the room with virtually no experience in jazz, but a great love of the music.

“I heard it a lot when I was a teenager in Romania,” she says, “and I liked it, even though I really didn’t understand it at that time.”

Her education came on the job, slowly building her programming from one or two days a week to a full schedule. Collette was vital to her learning process.

“Buddy gave me all the information in regard to musicians, how to approach them,” says Catalina. “He taught me about everything, and he was the one who got on the phone and persuaded musicians that we were going to be a good place to work.”

The one American jazz artist she remembered hearing in Romania was Dizzy Gillespie. So it was especially appropriate that the legendary jazz trumpeter was the first international artist to be booked in the room. As it turned out, the booking resulted in what Catalina describes as her most memorable evening at the club.

“It was on the second night of Dizzy’s run,” she recalls. “He invited a lot of friends down and then asked them to come up and play. They all did. Miles Davis, Freddie Hubbard, Carmen McRae. On the same bandstand at the same time. It was amazing.”

Bookings in succeeding years embracing virtually every major jazz artist. To mention only a few: Art Blakey, McCoy Tyner, Chick Corea, Ray Brown, Carmen McRae, Joe Henderson, Joshua Redman, Pharoah Sanders, Jane Monheit, Benny Carter, Bobby Short.

Maintaining any business for 15 years of shifting economies hasn’t all been a bed of roses, and jazz clubs can be particularly risky. But Catalina has no regrets.

“Absolutely none,” she says emphatically. “I never regretted doing this, starting a jazz club. No matter how hard the times were, no matter how difficult everything was.

“We’ve had some rough periods,” she admits, “but a lot more times when everything was going great--which it was until Sept. 11. But it will be better again soon, and I have to tell you, I would do it all over again, without a doubt.”

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The 15-Year Anniversary of Catalina Bar & Grill, 1640 N. Cahuenga Blvd., Hollywood. Monday, 9 p.m. The Donald Vega Quartet. Currently scheduled guest performers include Gerry Wiggins, Bob Shepard, Julie Kelly, Kenny Burrell and Barbara Morrison. No cover charge; donations accepted for the David L. Abell Jazz Education Fund. (323) 466-2210.

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Tribute concert. The Los Angeles Jazz Society’s 19th Annual Tribute and Awards Concert takes place Sunday at the Regal Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. This year’s honoree is Gerald Wilson, with other awards going to Herb Ellis, Marlena Shaw, Elmer Bernstein, Fernando Pullum, the Pedrini Family and the LACHSA Jazz Choir Ensemble. Among the performers scheduled to appear: Ellis, Shaw, Gerry Wiggins and the Gerald Wilson Orchestra. Dinner and concert tickets are $100; concert-only tickets are $35. Information: (818) 882-7672.