It requires more than two Jazz festivals to take the measure of Patrice Rushen, but this week offers a good start.

A composer with a symphony under her belt and commissions from leading orchestras and chamber ensembles, the Los Angeles native is also a hit-making R&B vocalist and keyboardist with a bevy of beloved songs.

She’s a jazz pianist who was sought after by Miles Davis and is an influential educator ensconced as chair of the popular Music program at the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music. While that’s hardly a complete survey of her creative purview, Rushen shares a far wider spectrum of expression than usual when she plays the Stanford Jazz Festival  Aug. 3 and San Jose Jazz’s Summer Fest Aug. 13.

At Dinkelspiel Auditorium, she’s holding forth with an all-star cast of improvisers, including alto saxophonist Logan Richardson, Peninsula-raised trombonist Dana Leong, Cuban drum maestro Dafnis Prieto, and SFJAZZ Collective bassist Matt Brewer. She’s never worked with any of the players before and said she’s “looking forward to a situation where I can do acoustic music, addressing our commonality and exploring the challenges and joys that come from that.”

At Summer Fest, which runs in downtown San Jose at stages and venues around the Plaza de Cesar Chavez next weekend, Rushen anchors the Main Stage program Aug. 13 performing with her R&B-infused combo. She’s focusing on songs from “Remind Me: The Classic Elektra Recordings 1978-1984,” her excellent compilation reissued in 2019 by Strut Records.

The well-curated album brings together Rushen’s most influential tracks from albums like 1979’s “Pizzazz” and 1982’s “Straight From the Heart,” which featured the hit single “Forget Me Nots” (a song sampled dozens of times and repurposed for later hits like Will Smith’s “Men In Black” and George Michael’s “Fastlove”).

“At Stanford I can present some things in my left hand,” she said, speaking metaphorically, “and in San Jose my right hand. The point is that for me as an artist it gives me the opportunity to use that maturity and consciousness in full. The idea of separating expression has never been part of my consciousness.”

Rushen grew up in 1960s South L.A. amidst an explosion of creativity. A jazz and classical piano prodigy who soaked up Black popular music in her neighborhood as a teenager, she appeared half a dozen times as a dancer on Don Cornelius’s widely watched Black music showcase “Soul Train.”

She first gained notice in the Bay Area in 1972 at the Monterey Jazz Festival. The Locke High School jazz combo she led won first place in the festival’s high school competition, which earned the group a spot on Monterey’s main stage. She returned to the festival three years later for a piano summit with Bill Evans, John Lewis and Marian McPartland.

In catapulting from high school standout to keeping company with a bevy of piano legends Rushen had made an impressive statement of her own with her 1974 debut album “Prelusion.” The first of three albums she recorded for the jazz label Prestige, the project featured her original compositions while showcasing the prodigiously talented 19-year-old on vocals, acoustic piano, electric piano, ARP synthesizer, and clavinet.

Her albums for Elektra earned her an international fanbase, but she didn’t have many opportunities to put her own band together for touring. She started reconnecting with fans when bass star Christian McBride recruited her for the maiden flight of his Situation project at the 2005 Monterey Jazz Festival, which led to a decade of intermittent performances with the funk/jazz combo.

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Over the years she’s also performed widely with numerous jazz stars, and it’s only recently she’s started taking her own band out. A series of sold out shows in the U.K. made it clear there was pent up interest in Rushen’s music, a demand she’s having a blast supplying.

“I’ve been all over the world and played with a lot of different people, but that’s not the same as people coming out to hear the song that’s your jam,” she said. “They appreciate all the other things I’m about. After all these years it’s interesting to watch that demand increase. What’s so beautiful is the audience, seeing people who are 10-years-old next to people in their 60s and 70s singing the same words.”

Contact Andrew Gilbert at [email protected].

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PATRICE RUSHEN

Stanford Jazz: 8 p.m. Thursday Aug. 3 at Dinkelspiel Auditorium, Stanford University; $52-$62; stanfordjazz.org

Summer Fest: 4 p.m. Aug. 13; San Jose Jazz Summer Fest Sobrato Organization Main Stage; $40-$225, summerfest.sanjosejazz.org