Life’s Riffs : SHOWTIME’S ‘LUSH LIFE’ EXPLORES A RELATIONSHIP BASED ON MUSIC, FRIENDSHIP AND FATE

For the characters populating the new Showtime movie “Lush Life,” jazz is more than just a popular form of music. It’s a way of life, bordering on religion.

Set in New York, “Lush Life” focuses on the relationship between two jazz musicians, saxophonist Al Gorky (Jeff Goldblum) and trumpeter Buddy Chester (Forest Whitaker). Though not superstars, they’re well-respected sidemen, playing everywhere and everything from bar mitzvahs and weddings to commercials, Broadway and be-bop.

Gorky’s love for the horn, though, has waned. A middle-aged Peter Pan, he spends most of his time chasing women, much to the dismay of his wife Janis (Kathy Baker), a former singer who’s now an assistant school principal looking for another way of life.

Their carefree existence changes forever when Chester is diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor and has only a few months to live. Chester asks Gorky to throw him a great party and invite all of his musician friends--without letting anyone know about his illness. As Gorky prepares for his buddy’s party, he begins to grow up.

“Lush Life” was filmed in New York and Los Angeles. For the past few days the production has taken over the Wilshire Ebell Theatre near downtown Los Angeles. The building’s big hall has been transformed into the Park Avenue apartment where Gorky holds Chester’s party. As writer-director Michael Elias yells, “Action,” the cast dances to prerecorded jazz music penned by Lennie Niehaus, who wrote the music for Clint Eastwood’s “Bird” and “Unforgiven.”

This project is a change of pace for Elias, who was co-creator and executive producer of the ABC sitcom “Head of the Class” and also wrote the screenplays for the feature films “The Jerk” and “The Frisco Kid.”

Elias wrote “Lush Life” eight years ago, but discovered the feature world didn’t think it was commercially viable. ‘It was cursed,” Elias explains. “It was a small movie. I kept saying, ‘I can make it big. I really can. I will spend as much money as you would like me to spend.’ I thought it was a perfectly nice movie about three people who love each other, and one of them dies.”

Eventually the project found its way to Showtime, where Elias hooked up with executive producers Jana Sue Memel and Jonathan Sanger of Chanticleer Films, who have produced several award-winning shorts for the cable network.

“Showtime was great and entirely supportive and nonobtrusive,” Elias says. And more importantly, they allowed him to direct. “I had to direct this one because there’s a lot of personal things in it. But this is the one I knew I was going to direct. I could have sold it from time to time and let somebody else direct it. I held out.”

Elias was interested in depicting the healing and corrective power of music and work. “In ‘Lush Life,’ the Jeff Goldblum character sort of gets his soul back because he starts practicing again and repairs his life through his work, which is what Forest Whitaker’s Buddy really intended for him to do.”

Gorky and Chester are not great musicians, Elias says, but “they are excellent. That’s what I think most artists, in a funny kind of way, are. This is also what I wanted to write about: those people who are not extraordinarily famous or great. But without them, you wouldn’t have enough musicians to go around.”

Elias’ love affair with jazz began when he was a youngster in upstate New York. “You couldn’t listen to the radio because it was all country and Western,” he recalls. “My father used to go to New York. Every time he would bring back a jazz record. Boy, that started it.”

He loves jazz because it’s both ordered and free. “I love Dixieland, which is sometimes called traditional,” Elias says. “I especially love mainstream and be-bop, which is Charlie Parker and Miles Davis. They work within boundaries. What they do within those boundaries and how they express themselves to such unbelievable heights seem to combine discipline, order and freedom all at the same time. A lot of that music is in the movie.”

Elias was thrilled when Niehaus agreed to compose the film’s original music and arrange the standards. “I was amazed. I was thinking, ‘We have this little television cable movie’ and his last movies were ‘Bird’ and ‘Unforgiven.’ But he threw himself into this. We had a great collaboration. I knew what kind of music I wanted. He was great.”

Several jazz musicians appear in the film, including Jack Sheldon of “The Merv Griffin Show” fame and Buddy Arnold, who played with Stan Kenton. “The music was recorded by a lot of jazz musicians who are here,” Elias says. “Lennie assembled them.”

Elias thinks his cast is pretty terrific too. “When I wrote it I don’t know who I had in my mind,” he says. “‘But when these guys, the three of them, all agreed to do it, it turned outthey were who I had in my mind.”

Goldblum, who was last seen being chased by dinosaurs in “Jurassic Park,” thought the character of Gorky would be a real challenge. The film, he says, “has got interesting and difficult and real-life issues in it that were a mouthful. I felt for this character, you know. I guess we all have to grow up in our own way--certainly confront death and the loss of our friends and the potential loss of major relationships, if they be family or wives or husbands. I’m not unfamiliar with that. This fellow, I think, heroically faces growing up in his own adult way and that Zen act of giving to someone sort of changes him. It’s a nice human story. An adult human story. These days, they don’t do many of those.”

Baker’s Janis Gorky also is a complex woman, says the Emmy Award-winning star of CBS’ “Picket Fences.” “She’s an artist inside but trying to be mainstream because she probably makes the money for the family. I thought she was pretty much a modern-day woman. She has a pretty realistic relationship with her husband, finally telling him that she has had enough of his philandering. She stayed with him a long time. I think that is more typical of a woman to stay for a long time. She is a woman who has had to give up a lot.”

Before filming began, Baker says, she, Goldblum and Whitaker sat down to create a history for their characters. “They met at clubs hanging out,” Baker says. “Jeff was more persistent.”

Baker is especially fond of a poignant, subtle scene she has with Whitaker near the film’s conclusion. “I love that scene,” she says. “If I hadn’t had that scene with Forest, I don’t think I would have wanted to do it as much. It gives her great balance; otherwise, she is just sort of the wife and getting screwed over. But that great scene with Forest where they talk about the past and she tries to get him to talk about what is going on with him and he won’t. It’s just beautiful.”

In the film, Chester wants to commit suicide before he gets too ill. “He realizes he won’t be able to care for himself,” Whitaker explains. “He’s the person who takes care of everything. He is the one who books the gigs. Al is the one who comes along for the ride. He supports Al and his wife in that relationship and himself. But he won’t be able to do anything. He is (already) starting to forget.”

After receiving rave reviews five years ago as Charlie Parker, the legendary man with a horn in “Bird,” Whitaker relished the opportunity to play a working musician who was not at all famous.

“This character is not as complicated,” Whitaker explains. “I’m not saying he doesn’t have complexities in his own life, but the range, emotions and complexities are not really comparable.”

Nonetheless, Whitaker was concerned about looking like a musician. “People look at me and say, ‘You really look like a musician, in the way we behave.’ Musicians are all different, but there are certain things they do alike. I can look at guys and tell who is a good player and who is not by the way they handle their instrument. It’s an attitude about the horn itself.”

Both Whitaker and Goldblum came to “Lush Life” with their own attitudes about music and horns, as well as strong musical backgrounds. “I like the sound of jazz,” Goldblum says. “It is poetical and kind of sexy and romantic and evocative and exciting. Even my acting, the kind I like to see and aspire to, has some structure to it, but there is room for spontaneity and immediacy. I guess that’s what I like about jazz.”

Goldblum, who plays the piano daily, was taught how to play the sax to the prerecorded music by a professional saxophonist. “I could play by the time I got (to the set). I could play songs because I could read music, so I learned all the notes. We luckily prerecorded the music, so I would just listen to it over and over again and practice with the horn. With all those long improvisational solos, I just listened to it and tried to get familiar with the breathing, kind of wiggled my fingers along and tried to go with it.”

Whitaker also was guided by a coach. “I worked out the fingers and I practiced to make it as correct as possible,” he says. “Some of the stuff thrown at me--sometimes decisions are made on the spot--it isn’t as accurate as it could be. Most of the songs I knew I was going to play, so the way I play them is pretty accurate. Lennie and I worked together on ‘Bird.’ He trusts me. Music is something I have a pretty strong handle on.”

“Lush Life,” Elias says, will be released theatrically this year in Europe. In fact, it recently screened at the London Film Festival. “It got a great review,” Elias says. “I went over because I wanted to see it in front of a huge audience. It did very well.”

“It’s like a European feature,” Baker concludes. “It has a European feel. If it was a feature in America, it would last about a minute. So it’s good it’s on cable.”

“Lush Life” premieres Friday at 9 p.m. on Showtime and repeats May 26 at 8 p.m.