One Marketer’s Nightmare Is a Music Fan’s . . .

With more than a touch of irony in his voice, Lew Tabackin recalls a review of his last recording, the 3-year-old “Tenority.”

“The reviewer said something like, ‘If Lew was 30 years younger and didn’t look so professorial, he would be a marketer’s dream, because he is on the cutting edge of retro-bop.’ He went on to say how I always gave myself away [as not being young] because my phrasing was too good.”

The reviewer may have missed the point about the 58-year-old Tabackin, a decidedly non-retro, go-your-own-way saxophonist-flutist without peer in any generation. But the suggestion that marketing now trumps craft in the jazz world is right on the mark, according to Tabackin.

In a recent phone interview from the Manhattan apartment he shares with his wife, composer-bandleader-pianist Toshiko Akiyoshi, Tabackin talked frankly about the jazz business and how it affects middle-generation musicians like himself.

“The situation today is that nobody in the recording business cares about music. It’s a marketing people’s business; they make decisions on what gets released and promoted. Jazz, as an art form, they basically ignore.”

It’s easy to understand Tabackin’s frustration. Despite his high standing in the jazz world, he’s without a recording contract. And, at a time when corporate-owned labels are consolidating their rosters and dismissing artists young and old, there’s little reason for hope.

“About 15 years ago, [record companies] made a decision to increase the jazz audience,” Tabackin says, “so they figured that if they emphasized hip, attractive, young musicians, they would be able to attract a younger audience. It was a principle adopted by the accountants and the lawyers. They tried to make it like pop music. Now they’re reaping the results.

“They didn’t gain a younger audience. They just confused what jazz is; anything that’s not classical is now [considered] jazz. And they alienated the older audience, who got tired of hearing the toy version of something they’d experienced the first time around.”

It’s the retro movement that seems to bother Tabackin the most. “You can’t have 22-year-olds regurgitate 40-year-old music. They’ve turned it into a circus. And it’s the marketing people who are to blame.

“I’m just not a retro guy. I’m always playing for tomorrow, not yesterday. Every time I play, I try to push a little bit, try to make it better. Like [trumpeter] Clark Terry says, ‘There’s a fine line between a groove and a grave.’ I don’t want to be so secure that I won’t stretch and expand horizons. That’s always been my attitude.”

Tabackin came out of Philadelphia to become a soloist of repute in the bands of Maynard Ferguson, Thad Jones-Mel Lewis, trumpeter Terry, Duke Pearson and a host of others. While living in Los Angeles during the ‘70s, he recorded with the big bands of Louie Bellson and Bill Berry, and he and Akiyoshi formed the rehearsal band that later became the Toshiko Akiyoshi Jazz Orchestra. Tabackin has been its principal soloist since its formation.

Tabackin’s own combos have provided a vehicle for his style of expression. The 1989 Concord recording “Desert Lady,” which finds him in the company of pianist Hank Jones, bassist Dave Holland and drummer Victor Lewis, is a fine example of the varying approaches Tabackin uses on flute and tenor. Seen live, Tabackin is muscular and robust when playing tenor, almost bullying the lines from his horn as he stomps his foot and charges ahead. On flute, he is light and dancing, sometimes creating tones that recall the tradition of the Japanese shakuhachi flute.

“I don’t think of the flute as another jazz instrument,” he explains, “but as another way to express feelings that I can’t [express] on the saxophone. It gives me another look at things, provides another way of creating.

“For a while there, when Hubert [Laws] was popular, and Jean-Pierre Rampal and James Galway were happening, it was a flute world. But it’s kind of fizzled out. There’s not a lot of us jazz players left doing it.”

Despite his dim view of the present state of jazz, Tabackin maintains optimism. He notes the increasing number of musicians taking the initiative to release their own material, often on their own labels, and he cites Akiyoshi’s efforts with her own short-lived label, Ascent, in the ‘70s.

“[Akiyoshi’s experience] shows that if one person can make a profit recording a big band, and big bands don’t come cheap, think what a record company could accomplish if they knew what they were doing. Small technologies will find a way, through the Internet and all the other technologies that I don’t know anything about, to deal with distribution and sales. Smaller labels will get back in the mainstream. It’s not a hopeless situation.”

Tabackin keeps busy working in and around New York with his trio mates, bassist Phillipe Aerts and drummer Mark Taylor. Tabackin says 1999 will be a good year for the Akiyoshi Orchestra, which plays every Monday night at New York’s Birdland jazz club. The orchestra will appear this year at the Monterey Jazz festival, performing a new Akiyoshi suite commissioned by the festival, and will tour Japan. Tabackin is also putting together a spring European tour for his trio.

“[The jazz audience] always treats me with respect, and that’s encouraging. I’m getting calls for dates in the year 2000, so I’m looking forward to the future. It’s just the whole commercial aspect of the music that’s frustrating. It’s the people in the business, not the [music fans], who don’t know what to think of how I play. It’s very confusing for them.”

* Lew Tabackin appears with pianist Alan Broadbent, bassist Darek Oles and drummer Joe LaBarbera at Steamers Cafe, 138 W. Commonwealth Ave., Fullerton, 8 p.m. Friday-Sunday. Two-item minimum plus cover. (714) 871-8800.