A Torch Song’s Eternal Flame

I’m standing outside the ordinary-looking Santa Monica apartment of one of the most extraordinary talents you’ve never heard of.

Inside, Alan Broadbent, painfully shy and unassuming, is wondering how he’s going to explain how he does what he does.

The story begins five years ago, when I took advantage of one of the greatest freebies in all of Southern California.

I went to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to catch a pianist in the outdoor concert series, and his playing was so lyrical that I got the urge to reach for someone and make out.

Luckily, I was with my wife. We didn’t know much about Broadbent at the time, except that he had gigged with bass player Charlie Haden on the great Quartet West albums.

Broadbent was back at LACMA this past summer, and as I watched him close his eyes and disappear into a ballad, I wondered what it must be like to have that much talent and still toil in relative obscurity.

And then, last week, I saw Broadbent’s name in the paper.

The native of New Zealand had won a Grammy nomination for his rendition of “What’s New” on the album “You and the Night and the Music.”

He’s up against two jazz giants -- Herbie Hancock and John Scofield -- in the jazz instrumental solo category, along with two other musicians.

I walk up the stairs to the second-floor apartment and Broadbent answers the door in jeans and slippers, slight, blond, boyish-looking at 57.

We go into his music studio, a converted bedroom, and Broadbent confesses he’s not sure what to say about the subject I mentioned on the phone.

I wanted to know how you take a song about unrequited love that was written in 1939, a melancholy ballad that has been played a million times in the smoky clubs and glittering dance halls of the world, and put your fingerprints all over it 65 years later, making it yours.

Broadbent doesn’t have a quick answer that fits a neat quote.

How could he?

He strolls the beach in Malibu, he studies the chaos of the world in the morning paper, he revels in the classical music he studied as a boy, he hugs his 5-year-old son even though the kid likes disco, he admires the drive of his wife the struggling actress, he tries to stay a step ahead of the demons that killed his musical heroes, he looks at his sketch of Gustav Mahler and then he turns to the keyboard with a single purpose:

To play in a way he’s never played before.

“I can’t intellectualize it,” he says after 40 years of dancing with the blessing and the curse of creative desire. “I experience a feeling and that becomes the mood. I hadn’t recorded ‘What’s New’ for a long time, and I’ll never be able to play it this way again, ever. If I had to, I wouldn’t be interested in it.”

As a teenager in Auckland, he tinkered with his father’s sheet music and learned the notes but not the swing of American standards.

So when the Dave Brubeck band visited Auckland and saxophonist Paul Desmond blew a solo on the jazz classic “Tangerine,” Broadbent’s head exploded.

“I’d never heard anything like it.”

Broadbent had developed his ear studying classical arrangements, so he marveled at the harmonic complexities and stratospheric improvisational leaps of Brubeck and his band. It was like seeing through a window to another world.

First came the scholarship to the Berklee College of Music in Boston, then the sessions with mentors Lee Konitz and Lenny Tristano, and, at 22, a job as an arranger with the Woody Herman Band.

The kid was hot.

When Herman’s Thundering Herd came west in 1972, Los Angeles looked more like New Zealand than anything Broadbent had seen back East, so he got off the bus for good and ended up arranging for Nelson Riddle, Natalie Cole, Linda Ronstadt and Diana Krall.

And then came a phone call in the early 1980s, but it’s more fun to hear about it from the other end:

“I was driving in Santa Monica with my wife,” says Charlie Haden, the exalted jazz bass player and west San Fernando Valley resident who last week won his 15th Grammy nomination, for the album “Land of the Sun.”

“I was trying to put a West Coast band together and we were listening to KKGO when I heard this piano solo.”

Haden turned to his wife, Ruth, and said:

“Man, he’s good.”

Haden pulled off the road, called the radio station, and asked DJ Chuck Niles who in the world was playing “What Is This Thing Called Love?”

Alan Broadbent, Niles said. And he lives in L.A.

In addition to playing piano on the Quartet West series, Broadbent won a Grammy for arranging Haden’s “The Art of the Song,” and he won another for arranging a Natalie Cole album.

“Alan is a genius as far as I’m concerned, and he’s a great improviser that hardly anyone knows about” beyond Los Angeles, Haden said. That’s partly because Broadbent chose to settle down with his family and partly because the market for jazz continues to shrink, a great American art form doing a slow fade.

“In an improvised solo, there’s no tomorrow and no yesterday,” Haden says. “You’re only there in that moment.” And what Broadbent brings to that moment, he suggests, is humility, love and beauty.

In his music room, Broadbent’s two Grammys have no special place.

They’re part of the clutter, one sitting so high on a shelf it’s unreadable, the other on a window sill next to a fan. Not that he wouldn’t love getting one for his playing, rather than his arranging.

It’s the playing he loves, so much so that he looks forward to jamming in a buddy’s South Pasadena garage every week.

“It’s like I’m still 19,” he says.

The day of the Grammy-nominated recording, Broadbent put Charlie Parker and Bud Powell into the CD player as he drove to a Topanga Canyon recording studio.

He nailed “What’s New” on the first take. Eight minutes of humility, love and beauty.

Win or lose a Grammy, his CD will probably sell only 3,000 copies.

And the man JazzTimes called “one of the major keyboard figures of the day” will be in his modest apartment on Stanford Street, still searching for what’s new.

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Steve Lopez can be reached at steve.lopez@latimes.com.