Jazzing Up Tribute to Duke : Sax Man Charles Owens, Who Plays With Ellington Band, Will Bring Invigorating Style to System M

When saxophonist Charles Owens celebrates Duke Ellington’s birthday tonight at System M, he’ll bring more than just respect to the bandstand.

For the past 10 years, Owens has been involved with the Ellington Orchestra directed by the bandleader’s brother Mercer, touring the country, playing the charts and meeting the survivors of the most heralded jazz ensemble to ever appear on the planet. The bandleader was born April 29, 1899, and died in 1974.

“Duke Ellington invented jazz,” Owens declared earlier this week in a phone conversation from his home in Los Angeles. “He and Louis Armstrong are the guys who set the whole thing up for us today. All of the great arrangers had to go through Duke to get their own voicings. Gil Evans, (Thelonious) Monk, (Charles) Mingus were all inspired to arrange music because of Duke. If you listen, you can hear little things here and there that they got from him.”

Though he never worked with the orchestra while Ellington was alive, Owens, who turns 55 on Wednesday, recalls seeing the band as a fourth-grader in his hometown of San Diego. He credits that concert with steering him toward a career as a musician.

“I remember Harry Carney getting up on clarinet and playing this incredible circular breathing passage (a technique that allows a phrase to continue without a break for breath). And I thought, ‘That’s what I want to do.’ ”

“Until I began playing with Mercer, it took me a while to become sophisticated enough to dig Duke’s music. There were so many subtle voices that it went by me. I remember when I first joined the band and looked at the chart I was supposed to play, I thought, ‘This isn’t going to work, it’s pitched too high.’ But once I played it with the band, it all fell together perfectly.”

Owens’ association with Mercer Ellington and the orchestra began in 1983, when the group was in Los Angeles for the Schubert’s production of “Sophisticated Ladies.”

“They needed a sub on tenor and all the top guys--Marshall Royal, Jackie Kelso, Herman Riley--were working,” he said, laughing modestly. “So they hired me. I have to tell it like it was, you know.

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Here, the modesty disappears.

“I’d learned the stuff, the band was hot, and one night, I got a five-minute ovation after soloing on ‘Cottontail.’ I’d put in quotes from all these other Ellington tunes and it really went over.

“When he got back to the East Coast, Mercer called and said: ‘What would it take to get you to come back and play some gigs with us?’ ”

Owens jumped at the chance. The job led to his inclusion on the all-star recording session “Digital Duke” (GRP), which won a Grammy in 1987.

“It was colder than a well digger’s foot when we recorded that in New York,” recalled Owens, who played baritone, clarinet and bass clarinet on the date, which included such notables as saxophonist Branford Marsalis, trumpeters Clark Terry and Lew Soloff, clarinetist Eddie Daniels and pianist Roland Hanna.

“It was as if Duke’s spirit came into the hall when we played. It was a very special, very reverent session, the kind of thing that makes a person want to leave some kind of mark of their own.”

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Owens has made his mark with a number of bands over the years. After leaving the service in the mid-’60s, he traveled to Boston, where he studied his craft with at the Berklee College of Music with Joe Viola. In 1967, he joined the Buddy Rich band, and is heard on Rich’s album “Mercy, Mercy,” for which he arranged the pop lament “Ode to Billy Joe.”

He left Rich after two years to join percussionist Mongo Santamaria’s band, replacing saxophonist-flutist Hadley Caliman. Tiring of the road, he began to study oboe, clarinet and flute so that he could come to Los Angeles and “make a million as a studio musician.”

During the ‘70s and ‘80s, Owens was one of the most visible reed men on the scene, adding his invigorating style to the bands of trumpeters Gerald Wilson and Bobby Bryant, singer Lorez Alexandria, pianist Horace Tapscott and the late composer-clarinetist John Carter. He also recorded a pair of respected albums with flutist-composer James Newton (now a UC Irvine instructor).

Surprisingly, Owens also spent time with the bands of John Mayall and Frank Zappa. He recorded a live album with Mayall at the Whiskey in Los Angeles that was never released, and when the bluesman asked him to go on the road, he turned the job down.

“That might have been a mistake,” he said. “The pay was great, but his music was too dumb. If it wasn’t hip, I wasn’t going for it.”

Zappa’s music was a different story.

“It was the ‘Grand Wazoo’ period. Frank’s music was hip, it was hard. I could barely hang in the band. We played England for a week, and some other places. The group was happening, everything was electrified: saxes, trumpets, even marimbas and congas.”

Owens was lured to Las Vegas in the late ‘80s to play in the house band at Caesar’s Palace, where he backed stars ranging from Natalie Cole to George Burns. But he found the work largely unsatisfying.

“It was a good experience, but it was just too comfortable. Anytime you get satisfied, you lose your edge.”

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Today, Owens works and records with a number of West Coast bands, including the Clayton-Hamilton Orchestra and Jimmie and Jeannie Cheatham’s Sweet Baby Blues Band. But his most satisfying work has been with Ellington.

“Mercer treats all the musicians like kings. You get good treatment, the money is good and you get to play all that good Ellington music. It’s simply heaven for a musician.”

Owens, who will work with drummer Donald Dean and bassist Louis (Rather) Large at System M, says he will concentrate on the Ellington-Billy Strayhorn songbook for the Ellington homage.

“That’s the good thing about tributes,” he said. “It opens you up to new music. I’ll do a lot of the better-known tunes--’Cottontail,’ ‘Come Sunday,’ ‘A-Train,’ ‘Lush Life’--and probably a little calypso I wrote called ‘For Duke.’ One thing I can guarantee: It’ll be smokin’.”

* The Charles Owens Trio, with drummer Donald Dean and bassist Louis Large, plays at 9 and 11 tonight at System M, 213A Pine Ave., Long Beach. $5. Call (310) 435-2525.