Pianist Liz Story Is Very Sensitive About Her New Age : Music: She loathes the catch-all label, which ‘carries all the baggage of crystals and brown rice and meditation.’

Liz Story has come down from the mountain. The reason? To use the phone.

The 34-year-old pianist, who plays solo Saturday at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano and Sunday at the Strand in Redondo Beach, lives in a geodesic dome she erected on 20 secluded acres in the hills above Prescott, Ariz.

“Actually, I was going to build two,” the pianist said recently in a phone interview from a friend’s house, “but I’ve only finished one so far. It’s a real small space: there’s room for a piano and a table and a small loft with a bed. I don’t have a phone, though not by choice--the lines just didn’t run up there. I do have some electricity, though.”

Story’s series of improvisational solo albums are a mix of traditional forms and jazz improvisation sensibilities. The 34-year-old native of Southern California received classical training as a youth and performed Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 11 before her 12th birthday.

She gave up the keyboard in her teens for softball but soon returned to her studies, this time in New York. One night, while studying theory at Hunter College in the late ‘70s, she wandered into the Bottom Line, the landmark Greenwich Village jazz and folk club, and heard the late Bill Evans at the keyboard.

“Until that time, I hadn’t written any music and couldn’t really conceive how one did it. Somehow I had ended up never having heard improvised music. I probably heard it on records but didn’t get it. And when I saw Bill Evans, heard him live, that was the first time it was really apparent to me that he was improvising, and it became very clear to me all of a sudden how somebody wrote music, just in one night.”

The effect of the experience, she said, was to reveal “that the nature of music is language, that you acquire a sense of vocabulary and syntax. Suddenly, it wasn’t as mystifying. Before that, I was just kind of wandering around music school. After I heard him, I started to listen to jazz altogether differently. It was quite an ear change for me. I think Bill Evans was very easy for me to hear. He was very tonal, even though he was extremely chromatic. He had a kind of logic that I can hear.”

Story approached Evans after the performance and asked if she could study with him. He didn’t have any students, so he recommended an improvisation teacher, and the young keyboardist was on her way.

Back in Los Angeles, Story began studying jazz at the Dick Grove School of Music in Van Nuys. “I focused on jazz because jazz tunes are where the most sophisticated language is used, regardless of what style you’re playing in. That’s where you have the most color. But the frustration at Grove was that while I was busy learning the language, I really wasn’t interested on copping a be-bop style. It’s difficult, because that’s what you study.”

It was a lounge gig in a now-defunct French bistro across from Paramount Studios that got the keyboardist’s career as an improvisational soloist rolling.

“It was a small restaurant with a little old, funky upright in the back. I could play anything I wanted. I wasn’t restricted to playing standards or requests, which was fortunate, because I couldn’t do it. When I went in to do my first day, I had the idea that I would use the time to become a good sight-reader. I brought in all this music, including some classical pieces. But when I got there, there was no place to put the music; the whole front casing on this upright was missing.

“I was supposed to play three hours, and I had maybe 20 minutes of music that I could just sort of play. So I just improvised.”

It was during her year at the restaurant, playing three hours a day, sometimes five days a week, that she prepared the music for her first Windham Hill recording, “Solid Colors.” But, in an attempt to escape the label’s New Age association, she moved over to RCA/Novus after the release of her second album, “Unaccountable Effect” in 1985. The experience didn’t turn out as she hoped.

“Where I fell between the cracks before, there I really fell between the cracks. The company has a system, and you either fit in that system or it doesn’t work. And I never escaped the New Age tag anyway.”

Story explains her lack of respect for the category. “It carries all the baggage of crystals and brown rice and meditation. It’s a category by default. You don’t play what could traditionally be called jazz, you don’t play classical, you’re not R&B;, you’re not folk, you’re not pop and you’re not rock. So by virtue of not being anything, you end up being New Age.

“There’s some special irony in everyone’s life, and mine is if I saw an advertisement in the paper for an artist who was described as New Age, I wouldn’t go.

“When people ask me what I do, I tell them I play solo piano. It says a lot about the compositional style I play in and says something about the stretching out I do.”

Now the keyboardist is back with Windham Hill. Her latest recording, “Escape of the Circus Ponies,” contains more written material than her previous recordings and moves along with, in places, a distinct Spanish feel. The music also carries a certain optimism that, Story thinks, was influenced by her isolated living conditions.

“I used to say that I lived in the city and that I wrote in the studio, just to deny the New Age tag. This last album was written entirely up here,” outside Prescott, she said. “In some strange way, the isolation makes the music more communal--I hate that term--a lot less dark and a lot less solitary than my previous work.”

And, yes, the telephone, or the lack of one, played a part. “I think everyone should live without a phone for about a month. It will radically change you, your rhythms of life, even how you sit. That phone call is a punctuation of your life, the speed at which you live.”

Liz Story plays Saturday at 9 p.m. at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. Tickets: $13.50. Information: (714) 496-8930.