SAN DIEGO — Billy Childs was all smiles in February as he walked to the backstage media center at Crypto.com Arena, cradling his sixth and most recent Grammy Award.

His Best Jazz Instrumental Album victory came for “The Winds of Change,” his 15th album as a band leader. It’s an apt title for a genre-blurring pianist, composer, arranger and band leader who soars equally with jazz, classical, pop and soul, and whose collaborators range from Yo-Yo Ma, Wayne Shorter and Sting to Alison Krauss, Kronos Quartet and the San Diego Symphony.

“I always had in mind that I didn’t just want to be doing only one genre of music and that I wanted to incorporate jazz with other genres — and always at an organic level,” Childs said, in response to a backstage question from the San Diego Union-Tribune.

The Los Angeles native smiled when asked how he juggled his music composition studies at the University of Southern California in the late 1970s while concurrently being the pianist in jazz trumpet great Freddie Hubbard’s touring band.

“I played with Freddie from my junior year all the way to four or five years after I graduated,” Childs recalled. “And Freddie would always say: ‘He got his bachelor’s from USC, but he’s getting his master’s from me!’ “

Childs, who is now composing his first opera, graduated from USC in 1979. In the decades since then he has established himself as a singular artist whose creativity knows few bounds. His versatility will be showcased in two very different ways for San Diegans in the next two months.

On Dec. 1, he will perform at the Athenaeum Music & Arts Library in La Jolla with his jazz quartet. Their repertoire will feature music from his three most recent albums for the Mack Avenue record label, “The Winds of Change,” “Acceptance” and “Rebirth.”

“I love the Athenaeum; it’s one of my favorite places to play,” said the supple pianist, who made his debut there in 1996. “It’s such an intimate venue, the sound is really good, it has a great piano and the people in the audience are right next to you.”

Childs will return here on Jan. 31 and Feb. 1 for the world premiere of his “Concerto for Orchestra,” which will be performed by the San Diego Symphony at Jacobs Music Center. It was commissioned by the symphony, which last fall opened its 2023-24 season with Childs’ “Diaspora: Concerto for Saxophone and Orchestra.” Rafael Payare, the symphony’s music director, was suitably wowed by Childs.

“His orchestrations are really great,” Payare said in a May Union-Tribune interview. “I’m very excited because Billy has the ability to do it all. We played his ‘Diaspora: Concerto for Saxophone and Orchestra’ last fall at The Rady Shell at Jacobs Park, and you could hear how he has such a distinctive way of painting a musical story.”

A showcase for classical saxophone marvel Steven Banks, “Diaspora” was inspired by the poems of Maya Angelou, Nayyirah Waheed and Claude McKay. Drawing from classical, jazz, gospel and other genres, Childs’ sublime composition deftly traces the arc of the African American experience from the horrors of slavery to the Civil Rights movement and beyond.

“The San Diego Symphony was one of 10 national orchestras to co-commission ‘Diaspora,’ and they played one of my favorite renditions of it,” Childs said, speaking from Los Angeles recently.

“Rafael is a consummate conductor who pays attention to every detail and is a brilliant musician. It’s an extremely fortunate situation when I get to work with someone of his level for the second time, and I hope I can do it again.”

No matter the idiom, Childs’ music is inventive yet inviting. He consistently creates a multifaceted sonic tapestry that combines instrumental vigor and emotional depth in equal measure.

‘Absolute magic’

“Billy has composed many symphonic works and his harmonic capabilities have enabled him to create a musical language all his own,” said San Diego guitar standout Peter Sprague, who has performed multiple times with Childs. “He is one of my favorite musicians and composers that ever walked the earth. Billy is, at his core, a jazz musician. But then he adds into the mix rock, Brazilian, classical and pop influences, and the final output is absolute magic.”

“I feel the same way about Peter,” said Childs, who featured Sprague on the 2015 and 2016 concert tour that showcased the music from “Map to the Treasure: “Reimagining Laura Nyro.”

That Grammy-winning album by Childs found him saluting and extending the legacy of the late Nyro, a singer-songwriter whose genre-fluid work had long appealed to him. To bring her songs to life anew, he collaborated with such high-profile artists as Reneé Fleming, Esperanza Spalding, Rickie Lee Jones, Ledisi and Susan Tedeschi.

Such a range of collaborators is nothing new for Childs. His numerous past recording credits range from Gladys Knight, Joshua Bell and the Los Angeles Master Chorale to the Herbie Hancock-led band Headhunters, Brazilian vocal star Dori Caymmi and former San Diego electric guitar innovator Allan Holdsworth.

The stylistic differences between these artists are so pronounced one can only marvel at Childs’ ability to enhance the music of each of them. Are there certain qualities he seeks to bring to every project he works on, no matter how dissimilar they may be?

“I just try to figure out what the artist’s vision is. Whether the person is hiring me as a player, arranger or composer, what are they trying to say?” he replied. “And if it’s my project, it’s important for me to be clear and truthful about what I’m trying to say, and doing it with imagination, in a way that is approachable, layered and complex.”

Childs’ most recent Athenaeum date was a livestreamed appearance in early 2021, when the pandemic shutdown was still in effect. In 2006, he performed an Athenaeum Jazz at TSRI Auditorium concert with his Jazz Chamber Sextet, a group that featured Sprague on guitar and former Weather Report drummer Peter Erskine.

For his Dec. 1 Athenaeum concert, Childs will lead a quartet that features rising clarinetist Matthew Stubbs, bassist Dan Chimielinski and drummer Benjamin Ring. Asked what he looks for in his bandmates, Childs offered a detailed response.

“I want someone who has a good knowledge of the history of the music, is fairly open to taking risks — calculated risks — and is always thinking about the betterment of the entire group sound, rather than playing for themselves,” he said.

“They have to have a really good memory if they are going to play music I’ve written, because there are a lot of elements to it. I’m not concerned if they are the greatest sight readers, But I am concerned about their having a flexible understanding of how the music is mapped out, and also if they do things to engage the listener dramatically and emotionally. And, most important of all, if they are good people.”

Made in Japan

Childs was just 19 when he went on a tour of Japan as the pianist in a band co-led by trombone giant J.J. Johnson and trumpet star Nat Adderly. It was documented on the double-album, “Live in Yokohama.” Two years later, at 21, Childs began his extended tenure in trumpeter Hubbard’s band. Both experiences were foundational for him.

“J.J. was very nice and nurturing,” Childs recalled. “He was like a father figure. He saw that I was serious and treated me accordingly, which was great.”

What about Hubbard, the explosive trumpeter who cast an imposing figure onstage and off?

“One of the main things I got from Freddie is how to play what I already knew, in terms of jazz harmony and licks, and place it into a context of very sophisticated thinking,” Childs replied.

“And I really learned how to comp (accompany). Learning to comp with a soloist like Freddie was the best possible way, because he was a melodic genius and had an endless fountain of ideas for you to feed off and learn from. I also learned from Freddie how to lead a band, and how to put together a set.”

Childs cites such immortal composers as Stravinsky, Bartok and Hindemith as major inspirations, along with such fabled film composers as Henry Mancini, John Williams and Jerry Goldsmith. And he credits his parents for playing records at his childhood home by Nat “King” Cole, the Modern Jazz Quartet, The Swingle Sisters, bossa nova king Antonio Carlos Jobim and others.

Yet, while Childs enjoyed playing piano from the time he started lessons at the age of six, his epiphany came when he was 14. And it came from a source few, if any, major jazz pianists have ever pointed to — Keith Emerson, the virtuosic keyboardist in the pioneering English prog-rock band Emerson, Lake & Palmer.

“I played music because it was fun, but I wasn’t thinking I would do it the rest of my life,” Childs said.

“Then, I went to a boarding school in the Ojai Valley, right across from what became (Michael Jackson’s) Neverland Ranch. That’s where I heard Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s (1971 album) ‘Tarkus,’ and a light bulb went off in my head. I thought: ‘I’ve never heard anything like it before, and I want to do this.’”

While Emerson played a key role in popularizing the Moog synthesizer in rock music, “Tarkus” featured him primarily on the Hammond B-3 organ. His command of the instrument and his ability to incorporate classical influences were ear-opening for Childs.

“I’d never heard organ played like that,” he said. “I had heard (jazz organ greats) Jimmy Smith, Jack McDuff and Groove Holmes. But I’d never heard the organ played with the odd meters, great, classical-inspired melodies and compositional approach that Keith Emerson did, or in a rock context, and it blew me away. Then, when I heard him play piano, it was even more mind-blowing!”

Childs also cites Gentle Giant and Yes as two of his other favorite prog-rock bands. While his own music rarely suggests prog-rock, hearing it when he was 14 proved pivotal.

“It made me want to incorporate other elements into jazz,” Childs said. “There’s something about the European approach to classical music — and all the forms in it you can use — that really appeals to me. I heard Keith Emerson putting those classical music forms in the rock music he played, and I wanted to do that with jazz. He’s the reason I started playing jazz seriously. And I got to thank him in person a few years before he took his life (in 2016).”

Childs’ music cover so many bases so well, and so thoroughly transcends easy categorization, that one can easily conclude he does it all.

“That’s one way to look at it,” he said. “But I’d prefer people looked at it like I came up with my own musical language. Regardless of what the genre happens to be, I’d like them to think just one thing: ‘Billy Childs.’”

Billy Childs Quartet

When: 7:30 p.m. Dec. 1

Where: Athenaeum Music & Arts Library, 1004 Wall St., La Jolla

Tickets: Sold out, but some tickets may be available at the door

Phone: 858-454-5872

Online: ljathenaeum.org

San Diego Symphony World Premiere: Billy Childs’ Concert for Orchestra

When: 11 a.m. Jan. 31 and 7:30 p.m. Feb. 1

Where: Jacobs Music Center, 750 B St., downtown

Tickets: $39-$120

Phone: 619-235-0804

Online: sandiegosymphony.org

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