A Classic Work by a Jazzman : Concert: ‘Homage’ will be given its West Coast premiere tonight at the Performing Arts Center by the Juilliard String Quartet and Billy Taylor Trio.

Who says jazz and classical music make strange bedfellows? Not pianist/composer/educator/Dr. Billy Taylor or the members of the Juilliard String Quartet.

Commissioned by the Madison Civic Center in Wisconsin to come up with a piece to celebrate the center’s 10th anniversary, the quartet invited Taylor to concoct something. The result--”Homage (for String Quartet and Jazz Trio),” a three-movement piece that integrates jazz and classical formats--featured the JSQ (founding member Robert Mann and Joel Smirnoff on violins, Samuel Rhodes on viola and Joel Krosnick on cello) and Taylor’s trio (with Victor Gaskin on bass, Bobby Thomas on drums) in the debut performance in Madison 13 months ago.

Played only occasionally since then, the piece will be given its West Coast premiere tonight at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa, where it is being presented by the Orange County Philharmonic Society. Again, the Quartet (which also will play Beethoven’s Quartet in F Minor, Op. 95) and the Trio will share the bandstand.

As it happened, fate--or happenstance, or the vagaries of airline schedules (call it what you will)--played a major role in the Quartet’s decision to seek out work by a jazzman.

“We’d commissioned so many classical works in the past that in this instance we wanted to do something different,” Rhodes recalled from his hotel room in Monte Carlo last week. “Joel Krosnick chanced to sit next to Billy Taylor on a plane, and the idea for this piece came up. In later discussions, we (in the quartet) all thought it was intriguing to have a piece by a musician who is a master of the (jazz) idiom and amazingly literate in other idioms as well.”

Indeed, 69-year-old Taylor--known to many not just from his music but also from his regular appearances as a segment host on CBS’ “Sunday Morning”--was on very familiar turf with his classical cohorts. He holds a bachelor’s degree in music and a doctorate in music education, and already had written “Suite for Jazz Piano and Orchestra,” commissioned in 1973 for the Utah Symphony by then-conductor Maurice Abravanel.

Still, it took him awhile to find the right tone for the new, 45-minute piece.

“I started off in a more contemporary classical direction, with some of those textures but with jazz feeling,” he recalled recently from his home in New York City. “But then I went to a (JSQ) performance and heard the members play the Ravel Quartet, and I hadn’t thought of using that piece as a point of reference. The internal (harmonic) voicings reminded me so much of what I wanted to hear in a jazz work that I tore up what I had written and went on and wrote ‘Homage.’ ”

The piece is dedicated to four great jazz string players--violinists Stuff Smith and Eddie South, and bassists Oscar Pettiford and Slam Stewart, all of whom Taylor worked with early in his career.

“Eddie South led the first group I went on the road with, in 1944,” Taylor said. “At the same time Stuff Smith had a trio. They were friendly rivals. When Eddie would go see Stuff, Stuff would play with a more classical feeling than he usually did, and when Stuff came to see Eddie, Eddie would play the blues and ‘I Got Rhythm’ and other things that he didn’t play much.

“I met Oscar on 52nd Street, where I heard him with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. Later he was in my trio, when I was the house pianist at Birdland from 1949 to ’51. He was one of the swingingest bass players I ever worked with in my life, and some of the best things that I ever did were with him.

“Slam, who was a member of my trio for a while, worked with Art Tatum’s trio at the Three Deuces (on 52nd Street) when I was working opposite Art. That was when I became Art’s protege.”

The themes of the three movements in “Homage”--which in democratic fashion are delivered by various players from both groups--draw on the musical styles of Smith, South, Pettiford and Stewart as Taylor remembers them.

“The first movement,” Taylor said, “is a jazz waltz that evokes aspects of Stuff and Eddie--and actually Slam too, though on cello, not on bass. The second movement--which starts slowly, gets faster, then gets slower again--is a little more tongue-in-cheek and is really evocative of both violinists.

“I kept mixing them up in my mind. There’s a Gypsy melody that’s reminiscent of Eddie that the (quartet members) kid around with, and then there’s a modal section, which is what Stuff would play when he was in Denmark (at the end of his career.)

“The third movement climaxes with a duet between Krosnick and Gaskin which reminded me of the way Oscar, who also played cello, would trade phrases with a bass player.”

Since it is a jazz composition, “Homage” includes improvisation from all the musicians on stage--a definite first for the Juilliard ensemble. “We’ve never had any experience as a group playing jazz,” said Rhodes, who has been in the quartet for 21 years. “We did some Third Stream pieces, where everything was written out, whereas here we are playing jazz.”

Actually, Taylor did write out solos for all the quartet members except Smirnoff, the only one with any experience at jazz soloing. But he insisted that those outlines were just starting-off points.

“I told each guy, ‘You take the basic solo, look at at, and you hear other things that work, you make changes. That way it becomes something that is really you instead of me.’ ”

Taylor has gotten a big kick out of watching the quartet members tackling improvisation head-on, and discovering that audiences eat up the spontaneous combustions.

“At the premiere in Madison, Bobby Mann took his solo and the house comes down, they’re really applauding,” Taylor recalls. “And he’s completely taken aback as he realizes that they were that impressed.”

“It’s an evolving work,” Taylor added. “As we play it, it changes. What you hear now will be much different than what we played a year ago.”

“No two performances are ever the same,” agreed Rhodes, who said it has been “tremendously exciting to be involved with musicians of such quality from a different side of the profession.”

Taylor has similar admiration for the members of the JSQ.

“These guys bring the same focus that I associate with the best musicians, regardless of style,” he said. “They can do anything. They look at a piece of music, try different things, provide input. Ultimately, they make the notes leap right off the page. It’s given me a tremendously rewarding feeling to have written something that musicians of this caliber can make so much of.”

* The Orange County Philharmonic Society presents the Juilliard String Quartet and the Billy Taylor Trio in a program of chamber music and jazz including Beethoven’s Quartet in F Minor, Op. 95 “Serioso”; Taylor’s “C.A.G.” Suite for Jazz Piano; and “Homage,” tonight at 8 at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tickets: $8 to $25. Information: (714) 556-2787.