Dmitri Matheny blows into Oakland

Jesse Hamlin is a Bay Area writer. E-mail: datebookletters@sfchronicle.com

Dmitri Matheny, the lyrical flugelhorn player who moved to Phoenix a few years ago but still keeps a room in San Francisco, learned a lot about music and life from the late Art Farmer, the peerless jazz flugelhorn player who mentored and promoted him.

Matheny, who played Duke Ellington's lovely "Warm Valley" at Farmer's 1999 memorial on the master's copper-bell horn, which he now owns, remembers Farmer stopping him mid-solo during lessons to ask if he knew the lyrics of the song - right at that measure - that he was improvising on.

"For Art, if you didn't know all the lyrics and chord changes, you didn't know the song," Matheny says.

Photo: Courtesy Dmitri Matheny

He's a sound-and-melody player in the tradition of Miles Davis, Chet Baker, Stan Getz and Farmer, whose spare solos dispensed with filler licks and patterns.

"That's what I aspire to, and that's why I loved him so much," says Matheny, 46, who swings into Oakland's 57th Street Gallery for a Jazz in the Gallery show Saturday night with a Bay Area quartet after a Valentine's Day gig at the Seattle Art Museum with musicians there.

Accompanied by guitarist Brad Buethe, bassist Ron Belcher and drummer Deszon X.

Claiborne, Matheny will play a mix of standards like "Blues in the Night," his arrangements of film noir themes and original tunes such as the new "Buckshot Rubaiyat," a Persian blues with a rumba beat. It's dedicated to Bruno Mooshei, the late proprietor of the Persian Aub Zam Zam Club on Haight Street, where the composer enjoyed many of Mooshei's fabled martinis.

Matheny, who moved to San Francisco from Boston in 1989 after graduating from the jazz-focused Berklee College of Music, worked as director of development at SFJazz from 1992 to 1996 while playing and recording. His first CD as a leader, "Red Reflections," came out in '95 to wide acclaim and led to his leaving his day job. He came back to serve as SFJazz's education director from 2002 to 2005.

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