Nobody is suggesting that Michael Moriarty, the actor, quit his day job.
Moriarty, the actor, has returned for the second season of NBC's Tuesday night hourlong drama "Law & Order." Moriarty, the musician, is a respected pianist in the jazz clubs of New York City who's just finished his third album."I'm going to do one a year," says Moriarty, the overachiever, who spent his Fulbright scholarship studying acting at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts. He spent a decade in regional and off-Broadway theater.
Then, in 1973, he starred with Robert De Niro in "Bang the Drum Slowly," won his first of two Emmys as the Gentleman Caller in "The Glass Menagerie" and won a Tony for his work on Broadway in "Find Your Way Home."
And yet there's this business with jazz albums . . .
"One a year," he said, grinning, letting a "shucks, Ma" mock earnestness into his voice. "I'm going to make sure that before I leave this earth, I've said what I've got to say. When that old Fulbright-gone-bad retires to that Big Piano in the Sky."
He also has written three plays, which have been produced professionally. He's a published poet. And, since 1985, he's composed music for chamber orchestra, string quartet, piano and solo violin.
This spring, the Michael Mor-iarty Jazz Trio - with jazz great Ron Carter on bass and Terry Clarke on percussion - headlined at Fat Tuesday's jazz club, laying down tracks for the new album.
The New York Times has gone so far as to call him "a jazz player of considerable skill, an oddball singer with more than one vocal personality and a writer of eccentric, jivey jazz songs."
Moriarty beamed when a listener cited his "funky-punky" vocals.
"I love jazz singing. It's a part of my nature. I must pay tribute to it. I must honor it or it will beat me around the head," he said.
"Basically, I get up and do this because I have to," he said, slipping into a squinting hipster's hoarse, be-bop drawl. "I am in the grips of a funky muse. She will not let me off the 88s. `Thou must commit down and dirty things.' "
The Times also praised Moriar-ty's "supportive" sidemen, but Moriarty gets downright effusive:
Carter, he said, is "a sequoia" among bassists. "He is such a gentleman. There is a plethora of genius in this country, but character is a rare thing. And when you put character and genius together, you have Ron Carter."
Clarke is the most underrated drummer in jazz, he said. "He's got an immense sensitivity not only for large, big band situations. He works as well with brushes and softly as he does with the really uptempo, cooking tune."
There's not the slightest danger, Moriarty insisted, that he'll quit his day job for the rewards of his musicianship.
"I earn a living as an actor, a fine living," he said. "I only have to play when I want to play. I grow at my own tempo and my own rate.
"There was a reason I didn't go into it as a profession: because it is a tough profession, many times crueler than the acting profession. This way, I have kept it my first love."
"I will never have to do a gig that I don't want to go to. I'll never be forced to get up there and honk something out because of someone's request or because of any other rule but my own."
Furthermore, his role as prosecutor Ben Stone on "Law & Order" is Moriarty's first regular series gig, and he's having a good time doing it.
"I have discovered, in my 50th year, that I love working on a television series," he said. "Movies are like love affairs or mistresses. You can walk away from them. Series are marriages. They demand all the commitment, with all the joys and tribulations of a marriage. And I'm a very domestic guy."