THE first time I saw Andy Park he was bossing people about as captain

of a celebrity five-a-side football team in a charity tournament at the

Kelvin Hall. Ostensibly the team's goalkeeper, his orchestration of both

attack and defence actually led him to cover as much ground as any of

his outfield charges. I swear that night he even managed to out-talk

another celebrity goalkeeper, Bertie Auld.

At that time, in the seventies, Park's non-footy job was as Radio

Clyde's head honcho. The next time I saw him, in 1985, he was behind a

BBC Scotland desk, having returned north from bossing Channel 4 about.

His job as Beeb music and arts mogul was to boss me about during the

creation of Apollo: Countdown to a Legend, a programme about the rockin'

life and times of Glasgow's Apollo Theatre.

I was meant to be providing the screenplay; he certainly provided a

lot of bossing about. The resulting programme was, it was agreed, a

searing and insightful benchmark in narrative television fiction. Sadly,

it was meant to be a documentary.

The next anyone saw of Andy Park was his name as producer on the

credits of John Byrne's Tutti Frutti. While his name will shortly roll

across the small screen again on William McIlvanney's Dreaming and

Antony Sher's Changing Step, at the end of the month he will be doing in

public what he does best (apart from bossing people about). For the

first time since he kick-started his radio and TV career by doing what

he loves best (apart from bossing people about), he will be playing

irreverent hot jazz with his own combo. Take a bow, the Andy Park Octet.

It all began in 1960 in Glasgow, with the Andy Park Tentet and steamy

all-night jazz in a seedy club behind what is now Cafe India and in

steamy basement dives in Woodlands Road and Berkeley Street and the

Papingo coffee bar in University Avenue: it hadn't quite begun two years

earlier when Park had locked himself in his bedroom at his parents' home

in Dalmellington and taught himself to play the piano.

''I wanted to copy the Blue Note sound, and I couldn't. It was never

right. And it was my fault. I had the chords wrong, and the rhythm.''

His resolve to attain authentic excellence strengthened, Park moved to

the big city and fell in with players of the calibre of Sir Bobby

Wishart, Jimmy Mullen, and Jack Bruce. Maggie Bell and Alex Harvey were

in and out of the band; the Average White Band's nascent horn section

were regularly shoo'ed away for being wee laddies. The Tentet opened on

tours by US big-timers such as Woody Herman and the Modern Jazz Quartet.

Park's Tentet played on TV. Some of his music crossed the Atlantic,

vouchsafed by visiting American players. But working all day as an art

teacher in Cumbernauld and jazzing at night was not a proposition,

marriage-wise. So the band went, sporadically resurfacing as a smaller

ensemble. Park became a full-time TV person.

Yet he never ceased writing music. ''There are enormous brown

envelopes all over the house, with scores for non-existent 23-piece

orchestras. In 1990 I felt I had to show my face again. I want to do

something big for the 1990 Jazz Festival.''

What he is starting with is something fair-to-middling sized to

handsel the Scottish Jazz Network, the promotional body replacing the

Platform organisation. The Andy Park Octet is a mix of the mature and

fully-formed (Sir Bobby Wishart) and the young and promising (trumpeter

Kevin Ferris is one of Wishart's Strathclyde Youth Jazz Orchestra

prodigies).

As it is, with Park still to meet two members of the band, they will

be performing a mixture of classics and tried-and-trusted Park

creations. Not that the octet will be treading an easy path.

When they assemble next week for a first rehearsal, a ferociously

difficult Thelonius Monk tune will be thrown their way, while Park has

also used his many and varied musical interests and influences in the

full programme's arrangements. There will be strange echoes of Talking

Heads and Pat Boone, odd hints of driving r & b, quick tips of the

titfer to Latin-American gospel, Martian delta blues, disco samba, and

computerised New York bebop.

And above all there will be ''that dangerous bastard Wishart . . .

I'll be trying to get the band going one way and Wishart, knowing my

intentions, will be leading them off in a charge for the door or up the

bell tower.''

Be led a merry dance by the Andy Park Octet in Edinburgh (Merlin

Lounge) on January 29; at Cumbernauld Theatre, January 30; in Dundee

(Tay Hotel), January 31; and in Glasgow (Henry Wood Hall), February 1.

Aside from the music, part of the fun is sure to consist of watching an

inveterate boss being bossed.