A Non-Traditional Arrangement : After making headlines as a musical oddity in the ‘50s, then nearly giving it all up in the ‘60s, pianist and big-band leader Toshiko Akiyoshi has found her place with a distinctive blend of Eastern and Western idioms

Toshiko Akiyoshi, whom the legendary Bud Powell once called “the best female pianist in jazz,” almost quit music in the late ‘60s.

The now highly regarded pianist, composer, arranger and leader of the Toshiko Akiyoshi Jazz Orchestra was quite a hit in the years after her arrival in the United States from Japan in 1956. But not, she says, because people thought she was a talented jazz musician.

“I got a lot of press. You know why? Because I was an oddity ,” Akiyoshi says. “In those days, a Japanese woman playing like Bud Powell was something very new. So all the press, the attention, wasn’t because I was authentic.

“It was because I was strange ,” she says, laughing.

There were high times and hard times in the next 10 years. The peaks included sitting in with such giants as Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Art Blakey and Max Roach, working with Charles Mingus, fronting her own trios and receiving Powell’s accolade--which brought her to tears.

“It made me feel great,” she says. “I thought, ‘I do have something.’ ”

Among the valleys were a year in the late ‘60s when she made her living playing solo piano in Holiday Inns throughout the East and Midwest and worked infrequently in New York City. By the late ‘60s, she was doubting her viability as an artist.

“There was a revolution in jazz then, and I thought I hadn’t created my revolution, created my new style, and thought maybe I should quit.

“I questioned my significance. I mean,” she says, adding with a laugh, “if I dropped dead then, the jazz scene would not suffer.”

Akiyoshi considered becoming a computer programmer and even went to an employment agency, where she found out she didn’t have the skills to do anything besides music.

“I was a useless person,” she says.

What first changed her mind about leaving music was the affirmation she received from her husband, saxophonist-flutist Lew Tabackin, whom she met in 1967 and married two years later.

“Lew told me, ‘You should stay in music. It’s part of you,’ ” she remembers. “He was a great support.”

Then, in 1974, came the death of Duke Ellington, one of Akiyoshi’s idols.

“When Duke died, I read that he was very conscious of his race, and I thought that maybe that was my role, to portray my heritage within jazz, to utilize both,” says Akiyoshi, who was born in 1929 in Dairen, Manchuria. “That was probably my most important discovery.”

Now almost 20 years after Ellington’s death, Akiyoshi is a major figure in jazz, continuing the process that began in the ‘70s. She composes works that are marked by a distinctive mixture of traditional Japanese and American jazz musics and that are by turns majestic, haunting, elegant, rhapsodic and hard-cooking. It’s her way, she says, of making a contribution to the art form she reveres.

“This is something new that wasn’t there before me,” she says by telephone from the home she and Tabackin share on New York City’s Upper West Side. “And it’s an entirely different element than had been used--not like bringing in the Brazilian samba. To make this work where everybody can identify with the music, and identify it as jazz music--that’s a worthwhile challenge.”

Akiyoshi has written and arranged about 70 pieces for her orchestra, which she founded with Tabackin while living in Los Angeles in 1973. She will lead the orchestra, which features Tabackin as the primary soloist, on Saturday at UCLA’s Royce Hall.

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Not all of her compositions blend Eastern and Western formats. She points out that the main body of her originals are more conventional big-band numbers, such as “After Mr. Teng” or “I Know Who Loves You,” which are distinguished by rich orchestral writing, particularly in her woodwind voicings.

But the compositions that mean the most to her are more serious in nature, works that, she says, “try to hit the heart, rather than just the feet,” pieces that reflect her attitudes about the world and that she hopes will touch others.

“I’m deeply interested in various social and environmental issues,” she says. “If something concerns me, then I want to express my feelings via music.”

For example, there’s “Kogun,” composed in 1974 and available on “The Toshiko Akiyoshi-Lew Tabackin Big Band” on Novus Records. The moody, dramatic opus is Akiyoshi’s instrumental version of the discovery of a Japanese army officer who had been living in isolation in the Philippine jungle for 30 years, thinking that World War II was still being waged.

“I kind of identified with him because I am also a lone wolf in a sense,” she says, referring to the fact that she is a woman of Japanese heritage who has chosen to live her life as an American jazz musician.

The more uplifting theme of world peace is examined in “Children of the Universe,” from 1992’s “Carnegie Hall Concert” on Columbia Records. The number takes a melody and interprets it in both traditional Japanese and jazz idioms.

“The piece signifies to me that we are all the same,” Akiyoshi says. “Like the ad for New York Telephone says, ‘We are all connected.’ Whether we are Japanese, African, green, brown or whatever, we are all connected.”

A classical piano student from age 6, Akiyoshi began her professional career as a dance hall pianist in Beppu, Japan, where she moved with her family at age 15. It was there that a fan heard her and introduced her to jazz, first through the recordings of pianist Teddy Wilson.

“I thought, ‘Jazz can be so beautiful,’ ” she says. “Teddy’s runs were so even, like the same-sized pearls on a string. That’s when I became a serious student of jazz.”

Ten years later, she had developed a substantial reputation in Tokyo as a jazz musician, revealing the profound influence of be-bop innovator Powell. The great Canadian pianist Oscar Peterson, traveling with Jazz at the Philharmonic in 1953, heard Akiyoshi in Tokyo and suggested she move to the United States. He ultimately helped her obtain a scholarship at the then-Berklee School of Music in Boston and a contract with Verve Records.

In the ‘70s, with a steady stream of albums on RCA Victor of Japan that were also released in the United States on the domestic RCA label, Akiyoshi’s orchestra was reasonably active, though it was never a big moneymaker. The past 10 years have been a reversal, with only three albums released and a scattering of engagements each year. Akiyoshi said she hopes her signing with Columbia, her first direct association with a major U.S. label, will turn things around, but she says now “that remains to be seen.”

Nonetheless, her orchestra has brought her a good deal of prestige, including nine Grammy nominations for best large jazz ensemble. She will record a new album for Columbia in New York next month.

The jazz artist still makes a substantial portion of her income as a small-group pianist, appearing and recording in the United States, Europe and, most steadily, in Japan. “It makes me happy, because I really enjoy playing piano with a trio and playing somebody else’s music,” she says.

Her life in music continues to sustain her and offers extensive creative expression, Akiyoshi says.

“I’m glad I didn’t quit music,” she says. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing today.”

But she also points out that it is her marriage to Tabackin, not her career, that is her true source of joy.

“I have someone who loves me, and who is dear to me,” she says. “We can share music, points of view, life. That’s the most fulfillment. That’s the bottom line.”