“I was going to do anything to not have to go back home and say that New York kicked my ass,” he said. “Luckily, what was in my favor was I was playing four mallets. And I was playing chords. It gave me something more than just sitting there playing melodies… We’re in Brooklyn at the Coronet, which is a real gangster-like club, and here we are playing some out stuff. The crowd used to love to hear Jackie get on the microphone and announce what we were playing. Jackie would say, okay, we are now going to play ‘Frankenstein’s Mama,’ and the crowd would go crazy… We had a great time.”

A New York drug bust in 1968 led him to move back to Los Angeles, where he played with the Gerald Wilson Orchestra and forged an enduring and creatively fecund partnership with tenor saxophonist Harold Land. Before long he moved up the Bay Area, but it was a minor hit on San Francisco, his 1970 album with Land and pianist Joe Sample, that made Hutcherson a permanent resident. When he got the royalty check for the funk-driven track “Ummh” he decided to buy an acre of land on an undeveloped Montara hillside.

“When ‘Ummh’ became a hit I thought, what am I going to do with this money?” Hutcherson recalled. “I came down here bought an acre of land for $10,000 and I built this house for $30,000. I’m 20 minutes from San Francisco, and about 20 minutes to the airport. For a long time I kept saying, 'I think I made the right choice.'”

When Todd Barkan launched Keystone Korner in 1972, Hutcherson became one of the North Beach jazz club’s presiding spirits, performing regularly with masters such as trumpeters Woody Shaw and Freddie Hubbard, pianist Cedar Walton, and tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson (a fellow Bay Area resident). The latter years were well-documented on live recordings such as Hutcherson’s Farewell Keystone (Evidence), and two Keystone Bop volumes under Hubbard’s name on Milestone. Some 25 years later, Hutcherson was a founding member of the SFJAZZ Collective.

Like so many musicians, Barkan treasured Hutcherson’s music and soulful presence on the scene. “He’s been a guiding light to all of us who love and live by this music for many decades,” Barkan says. “One of the most swinging master musical storytellers of our age, Bobby’s music never fails to keep us in closer touch with the most tender and welcoming parts of our hearts. As he wrote on the wall in the Keystone Korner, 'True love asks nothing in return.'”

Interviewing Hutcherson could be a challenge. He was a gifted raconteur whose stories often swerved in unanticipated directions (much like his solos). On stage he often played the genial trickster, standing in front of his vibes seemingly lost in thought, only to look up quickly and feign wide-eyed surprise at finding himself in front of an audience. A remarkably consistent performer, Hutcherson evolved into one of jazz’s greatest balladeers. But his greatest contribution may have been as a composer of dozens of extraordinary and often harmonically mysterious tunes.

Hutcherson credits drummer Joe Chambers, a noted composer and early New York collaborator, with encouraging him to start generating his own music as a vehicle for documenting creative evolution.