Patrice Rushen is having a moment, and it’s about time.
The Los Angeles keyboardist, vocalist and composer returns to the Monterey Jazz Festival on Friday, Sept. 27, as a featured member of the funk-powered Christian McBride Situation, a group the bass star designed to deliver a kaleidoscopic array of African American musical idioms.
Rushen has performed around the region with McBride’s Situation since he launched the project in 2005, but what’s different this time is that her illustrious past has finally caught up to her. Since July, she’s received a burst of national attention sparked by Strut Records releasing “Remind Me: The Classic Elektra Recordings 1978-1984.”
While not a box set for completists, the well-curated release is more than a greatest-hits package, bringing together Rushen’s most influential tracks from albums like 1979’s “Pizzazz” and 1982’s “Straight From the Heart.” The latter features the hit single “Forget Me Nots,” a song sampled dozens of times and repurposed for later hits by Will Smith (“Men in Black”) and George Michael (“Fastlove”).
Gratified doesn’t quite describe how she’s feeling to have her music back in circulation. “In a word, it’s awesome,” said Rushen, 64, after escaping a meeting at the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music, where she’s an assistant professor and chair of the Popular Music Program.
Signed as part of Elektra/Asylum’s initiative to create a pop/jazz division, Rushen faced immediate pressure to deliver radio-friendly hits. Already a veteran recording artist who joined Berkeley-based Prestige Records in 1974 at the age of 20, she was a jazz and classical prodigy who had soaked up black popular music in her South L.A. neighborhood as a teenager, even dancing half a dozen times on Don Cornelius’ “Soul Train.”
Her albums did well on the R&B charts, but Elektra was looking for crossover material.
“There were all these ‘ifs’ attached to whether or not the attention it was getting on black radio was important,” Rushen said. “That didn’t bother me. I was already on the winning side, doing the music that I wanted to do.”
Rushen’s prodigious talent has long been recognized by her colleagues in and outside of jazz. Trumpet great Wallace Roney, a protege of Miles Davis, has said that the pianists Davis wanted to work with most before his death in 1991 were Rushen and George Duke.
McBride recruited her when he assembled his first Situation at the 2005 Monterey Jazz Festival, and she has been a regular part of Situational proceedings ever since. This incarnation of the combo includes powerhouse vocalist Alyson Williams, turntablist DJ Logic and tenor saxophonist Ron Blake.
Rushen’s stylistic versatility make her an ideal creative catalyst for the band, “but the real core of her greatness lies in jazz language,” McBride said.
“Because she became who she became in the pop world, many people don’t realize how deep a player and improviser she is. I still see people after the gig who say, ‘I didn’t know Patrice Rushen was such a great pianist!’ Where you have been? I love working with her.”
No institution has played a more significant role in showcasing Rushen’s instrumental prowess than the Monterey Jazz Festival. She was a senior when the Locke High School combo she led won first place in the jazz festival’s high school competition and performed on Monterey’s main stage in 1972.
Three years later, she returned to the festival for a piano summit with Bill Evans, John Lewis and Marian McPartland.
Coming into her own as a composer, player, vocalist and recording artist in the mid-1970s put her in the thick of a rapidly evolving movement as jazz/rock fusion absorbed funk, gospel, soul, samba and other international currents. She was part of an L.A. scene that included pianist Rodney Franklin, bassist Alphonso Johnson, and fellow Locke High alum drummer Ndugu Chancler, young players similarly steeped in jazz.
“All of the experiments didn’t work,” she said, but watching what Davis, Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter were doing “gave us permission to continue on our path. I can listen to John Coltrane, Big Mama Thornton and James Brown and love all of it.”
The Christian McBride Situation with Patrice Rushen: Monterey Jazz Festival. Friday, Sept. 27. $20-$435. Monterey County Fairgrounds, 2004 Fairground Road, Monterey. 888-248-6499. www.montereyjazzfestival.org