Traveling Without a Map

By JAY COCKS

It is not really his fault, mind, but some confusion has always attended John Jarvis' music. When he was pumping the piano in Rod Stewart's band, he bore down hard on the rockers. Then he would slip on down the street to another recording studio and move gently along the keys for an Art Garfunkel ballad. When Stewart and Garfunkel once got to comparing the merits of their favorite keyboardists, it took them a while to realize that they were both talking about Jarvis.

When Jarvis, 33, finally sat down to play some of the tunes he had worked up over the years, a publisher pal said that with lyrics added, they would be surefire pop hits. A year later another publisher said, "That's not pop, that's country." So Jarvis took his family and left Los Angeles for Nashville, where he burnished his tunes some more before playing them for the folks at MCA Records. "That's not country," they said, "that's jazz."

"I don't even know what it is anymore," says the composer-performer, but at least MCA signed him up. So far, it has released two inventive, ebullient Jarvis albums, hedging the corporate bets by including them in a series being marketed as New Age music. Jarvis' lilting, funky compositions do not fit very snugly in this category either. But if New Age is background music for fern bars, Jarvis brings to the genre a welcome whiff of down home and the backwoods.

Wide Open Spaces, the new single off the second album, Something Constructive, is making waves on both the country and "adult contemporary" charts. Jarvis, just finishing a tour, has already started work on a third record, playing, as usual, all keyboards and drum machines himself. Songs like Scrumpy Cider, A View from Above and Dancing by Candlelight have country tinges, rock overtones and jazz underpinnings that all work together to make the music go down easy and linger a good long while.

A native of Pasadena, Calif., Jarvis made his first musical appearances as an aspiring classical pianist, sporting heavy horn-rims and a bowl haircut. He quit as soon as his parents would let him -- at 14 -- and a year later dropped out of high school to scuffle around on the Los Angeles music scene. He was playing with Stewart by the age of 20, rocking out in performance, then going home at night to write "these real melodic, pretty songs." The fact that he finally has those songs out on record still does not entirely dispel confusion over what kind of music this is. Ask Jarvis about a jazzman like, say, Keith Jarrett, and he will profess great admiration, then add, "I feel closer to Floyd Cramer."

Cramer, of course, was a very uptown kind of country keyboard man, and Jarvis admits, "I'd like to be an instrumental guy for this new country music. The kind of stuff Hank Williams Jr. and Steve Earle do." Fair enough. That is country music without clear borders, and Jarvis has started to do just fine traveling without a map. After another record or two, maybe he will not have to keep showing his passport. By then, enough people should have come around to recognizing the territory Jarvis can already call his own.

With reporting by Elizabeth L. Bland/Nashville