Hello, porkpie hat

Some melodies just dog you, harangue you even in your sleep.

James McBride knows what that’s all about.

Consequently, he’s had little rest in the last few weeks. Long traveling days. Even longer working nights. A host of gritty-eyed mornings. All the while he’s chased by a theme or many pieces of them -- living the musician’s life. Or sort of.

Most would be quick to associate McBride’s name with a landmark memoir, “The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother” (Riverhead, 1996), the story of his Polish-immigrant mother -- a rabbi’s daughter -- who escaped to the South and then Harlem, married a black man and raised 12 children and sent them through college. His book would have such frank resonance that it would remain on the New York Times bestseller list for more than two years, selling more than 1.5 million copies.

Deep in the flow, another book followed, a novel. “Miracle at St. Anna” (Riverhead, 2002) traced the journey of an African American soldier from the 92nd Division who befriends an Italian orphan boy during World War II.

But somewhere, amid all the expectations of literary life, a theme kept circling back, crowding in, McBride recalls, chain-drinking coffee, seated in a gloomy-dark, LAX-adjacent hotel on a recent afternoon, attempting to jump-start his internal engine. He kept revisiting his other roots, another life: jazz.

Finally, he just gave in. Which is the occasion for this visit to Los Angeles -- something that McBride, also a pianist, saxophonist and composer, has dubbed, “The Riffin’ and Pontificatin’ Tour” -- his way to reconcile it all: His yearning to tell stories in all the tones and colors available to him.

Speaking and performing at high schools, universities, bookstores, hotel ballrooms -- in other words, wherever they will have him -- McBride, a former journalist, is bent on spreading not just the word, but the power of music, the creative act. “To students, yes, but whoever will listen.”

This 30-city, self-booked and largely self-funded tour (with some assistance from Philadelphia-based Comcast Cable to help mount some of the school and community-based events) is to promote his latest project, “The Process: Vol. 1.” It is the first of three CDs and a series of performances spotlighting the importance of the creative process and the storytelling value inherent in simply that very act of creation.

“I’ve always been fascinated with what goes on in the studio before the guy says, ‘One, two, three, four ... ,’ ” he explains, “the stories behind jazz.” Leaning into his own story, he fiddles with his road-and-weather-worn porkpie hat, his only blatantly sentimental “jazz-life” concession. “I’ve always felt that musicians of all types are bonded by their desires to tell stories,” he explains. “And it doesn’t matter if those stories are told by Freddie Mercury or Freddie Hubbard. The difference is who is listening and why.”

McBride’s idea was to gather friends and colleagues who were workaday jazz folk, people with family or who have regular day jobs, and have them tell their stories about why they play. “Fortunately for me,” he says, the edge of a smile crossing his face, “I’m as anonymous as the next person in my group. In jazz, I’m nobody. No jazz heavyweights are waking up at 3 in the morning and saying, ‘Oh, my God, James McBride’s in town! I’d better start practicing.’ ”

He also sees “The Process” as a creative way into the heart of a process that oftentimes feels abstract and enigmatic. Stripped down, there are the specifics: the basic building blocks, hard work, different roads taken, the compromises. And failure, stresses McBride, is just as important as success.

“We just see the outcome,” he says. And ultimately, “nobody remembers every Duke Ellington song, but they remember his style and flamboyance. Not many people can call off 10 Miles Davis songs. But they admire his ability to carry the story of his life, just by looking at him....”

It is all about the back story.

Performance mode

Although McBride may downplay his musical chops, this project isn’t just a dilettante’s turn. And though he would probably find the term a shade too fussy, one could certainly describe him as a renaissance man. At 45 he’s cut a wide if not idiosyncratic path: from the Columbia School of Journalism to touring with Jimmy Scott, to writing tunes for Anita Baker and Grover Washington Jr., to being nominated by President Bush to the National Council for the Arts (confirmation pending).

All of it has gifted him with a nonchalant, seen-it-all-gaze and a journalist’s difficult-to-ruffle demeanor. Like the best storytellers, he keeps allusion and wry aphorism at the ready. Some of that, no doubt, has come from experiencing things firsthand, not just being the filter for other people’s stories.

Growing up in Brooklyn’s Red Hook projects, he played piano in church. Picked up the clarinet at age 9. He studied at the Oberlin Conservatory for Music, then worked the East Coast jazz and blues circuit and then some: “I can play ‘Hava Nagila’ in every key.”

Though he wandered into journalism “to save the world,” he says with a snort, he was never able to completely submerge the musician thread of his story. “I always wrote music. Everyday. Practiced. I just did it quietly on my own.”

For nearly a decade he filed stories as a staffer for the Boston Globe and the Washington Post. He did a stint writing features for People magazine. “I didn’t have a social life,” he explains. “Music was the only thing that gave me peace.”

But those pieced-together moments weren’t enough. “I’d look around and see these extraordinarily talented people, and a lot of them were unhappy. At a certain point, they just outgrew the medium. I just didn’t want to be that way.”

He was nearly 30 at the time, ensconced in a job with the Washington Post in the Style section. “Working ‘til Friday and then dashing off to some club to play jazz,” recalls McBride.

He decided to do something different that weekend after the gig: to visit his stepfather’s grave.

“I’d never seen it before. So that was the epiphany. I realized that life is something that happens when you’re deciding what to do. I decided that I couldn’t wait anymore, so I just quit. I came back to the paper on Monday, gave two weeks’ notice, told them I was going to New York to play jazz.”

A few hours later, McBride trades words for his performance mode as he stands with six other musicians on the makeshift “stage” at the Barnes & Noble at the Grove in the Fairfax District. It’s an easy transition for him. For years, McBridge has been juggling passions and personas in the same way as these men and woman arranged around him. They all have workaday jobs but are still pulled by the unpinpointable lure of music. They are fathers and sisters. Teachers or community organizers. Not dressed in suits or gowns, but in jeans and T-shirts, mules or bare feet. Peeled out of mystery.

McBride settles in at the keyboard, starts in with his witty lounge patter introducing the band, not just by name, but by outlining their journey here, to this very spot.

The band digs in. Tossing around songs from the CD, a bright, not-too-challenging grab bag of pop, swing and straight-ahead bop. Students pondering geometry glance up from their graph paper; a snoozing man in watch cap and hoodie is startled awake, but his expression melts from annoyed to amused as the music starts to warm him.

While some gather books, papers and lattes and flee, he holds on to enough of them, staring quizzically at the show: at the trombonist who runs around the room, at the band, shedding their instruments and beating on plastic containers. They follow the thread, curious about the conclusion.

And that’s the point.

What music and writing share, says McBride, is an arc. “You’re always looking for the dramatic tension. There are dramatic peaks you have to hit, these lighthouses along the way. Music,” he explains, “teaches you how to cut the fat out of your writing. How not to tell the same joke twice. Everybody done heard it.”

Riffing, McBride has begun to settle in -- not get hung up on the pressure of either/or, the discord, but rather see the harmony of all of his competing passions. So it means he has to remain fluid: He’s left a new novel (about? jazz, of course) on the backburner back home, in Carversville, Pa., to pursue this symbolic venture.

The CD, the tour, “this ain’t how it’s done,” says McBride. “But for me it is though. The safe thing to do would have been to write ‘The Color of Water, Part 2.’ ” He pauses, stretching a beat or two: “But I think the most important thing to do is to keep striking out creatively. You can’t do anything in life just waiting for somebody to do it for you.”

It’s the only way he knows to live life: improvised.