Akagi Going It Alone : Jazz: Keyboardist Kei Akagi left Miles Davis early this year to forge his own path and has already landed a recording contract.

SAN DIEGO —  After adapting his sound to more than 30 recordings by other artists over the past 12 years, keyboard wiz Kei Akagi is doing his own thing.

Akagi, who plays the Horton Grand Hotel on Friday and Saturday nights with locals Bob Magnusson on bass and Holly Hofmann on flute, left trumpeter Miles Davis in January to pursue a solo career. This month, he landed a recording contract of his own.

With Davis for the past two years, the music was pulsing, electric and funky, and Akagi’s arsenal included a variety of electronic weaponry. On his own, though, he plans to head in a more straight-ahead, acoustic jazz direction, and he is encouraged by the revival the music is enjoying in the hands of Wynton Marsalis, Terence Blanchard, the Harper Brothers and other young players.

“Let’s just say I’m a jazz musician, and I want to write and perform music that responds to the roots of the African-American tradition,” said Akagi, 38, who will make his first recording for the Japanese Tokuma label next fall, with distribution in America by Mesa/Blue Moon.

“Right now, it seems like jazz is splitting into two major camps--the contemporary camp, which is electric/fusion/funk, and mainstream. There are a lot of great young players in their early 20s who are rediscovering what was going on 30 years ago. It’s a fantastic thing. At the same time, the tradition needs to be expanded, because it is 1991.”

Though not well known to the public, Akagi is revered by musicians who have played with him, a list that includes guitarist Al DiMeola, flute and sax man Joe Farrell, saxophonist Stanley Turrentine and the longtime team of percussionist Airto Moreira and vocalist Flora Purim.

“I sort of discovered Kei living in Santa Barbara,” said San Diego saxophonist Gary LeFebvre, who used Akagi on piano on two late 1970s albums. “I went to a rehearsal of a fusion band he was in, and I thought he was awesome, like McCoy Tyner all over. We started working together, and I was really inspired by him. He has endless ideas and flawless technique.”

Akagi’s career continued rising. He joined Moreira and Purim’s band in 1979 and stayed on until 1985, playing on four albums.

“The thing about being with Airto and Flora, even more than the Brazilian aspect of their music, was they really taught me what music is about, mainly substance as opposed to mere form and flashiness, the importance of trying to do something different and the fact that mistakes are perfectly permissible as long as you’re trying to do something.

“This is an idea I also heard from Miles. He would rather hear you make a lot of mistakes trying to do something interesting rather than just playing something you’re comfortable with.”

In 1985, Akagi joined Farrell’s band, which also included Tom Brechtlein on drums and Bob Harrison on bass. In fact, one of Akagi’s personal favorites among his many recordings is “Three Way Mirror,” an all-acoustic album he made that year with Farrell.

“The great thing about Joe was that he came from that New York jazz tradition that I never had a chance to go through, that older generation where the meat of the music was be-bop and modern jazz, way before crossover things started happening. Cats from that age, they had to know Charlie Parker, Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane.”

After Farrell died in 1986, Akagi continued to play with Brechtlein and Harrison, and they fill out his current trio.

Mid-1980s associations with eclectic rock guitarist Allan Holdsworth and fusion violinist Jean-Luc Ponty produced no recordings, but Akagi did make one album with DiMeola, the 1988 “Tirami Su.”

More recently, he backed his wife, singer-songwriter-guitarist Jennifer Robin, on her recording “Fish Up a Tree,” released in February.

Akagi was born in Japan, lived in Cleveland from 1957 to 1965 while his father attended graduate school, and returned to Japan for 10 more years before he moved to the United States for good.

His parents were teachers by vocation, music lovers by avocation. They both sang and played piano, and had their son taking classical piano lessons by the time he was 5.

In Cleveland, Akagi was exposed to other music as well.

“That was during the British invasion, the Beatles, and I also heard a lot of rhythm and blues. I grew up in a ghetto in Cleveland, and we were the only non-black family for miles.”

By high school, Akagi was also fooling around with a guitar, playing casually in rock bands, while he kept the classical side going in high school and college ensembles.

Akagi gave up the guitar and began leaning toward jazz at 15, after he bought his first jazz album, by legendary be-bop pianist Bud Powell.

“In the mid-1960s, Japan was going through what you’d call the second jazz boom,” he said. “ A lot of very interesting Japanese jazz musicians were emerging. The ‘60s was a time of political turmoil in Japan, and jazz was considered the music of the politically minded intelligentsia.”

After earning an undergraduate degree in philosophy in Tokyo, Akagi tried grad school at UC Santa Barbara, but dropped out after two years to pursue jazz full time.

And now, with the new record contract, his journeyman years are paying off and he will have a chance to put down some of his newest music. Fans will have to wait for the new album to hear the new material, though. For this weekend’s impromptu sets, Akagi will lean heavily toward familiar jazz standards. The music starts at 8:30 both nights.