Michael Scott’s ”April Fool Tour 2006” is neither a tour proper nor for fools. Scott, 60, is a veteran Bend musician who, in recent years, has begun to focus on crafting his own songs.

On Saturday at 2nd Street Theater, the April Fool Tour brings him to 2nd Street Theater, along with friends Michelle and Dave Van Handel and Clay Smith of SoundSmith Studios.

Scott’s resume began auspiciously. In January 1964, at age 19, he moved to Greenwich Village at the tail end of its famed folk era.

”I was singin’ folk music, and playing in the little coffeehouses, meeting people who became famous,” he said. He lived there six years.

Among those he met, and played with, was none other than Stephen Stills, who went on to fame in Buffalo Springfield, and was later bookended by Crosby and Nash. Richie Furay, who played in Buffalo Springfield and later Poco, was also in the group.

”We traveled in Canada, and that’s where he met Neil Young,” Scott said. ”When we finished that tour … that’s when Richie and Stephen decided to go out West.”

They didn’t forget their friend and bandmate. They asked if he wanted to play bass in Buffalo Springfield, but, Scott said, ”I was playing acoustic bass and into folk music, and they were in their fringey leather and playing rock ‘n’ roll.”

He jammed with the group, but it was clear by then that Buffalo Springfield was going to use producer Jim Messina.

Last week, over a muffin at The Village Baker in Bend, he talked about the decisions he made that have led to where he is now.

”It’s amazing,” Scott said, ”how every step along the way, you make these decisions that just alter your path remarkably.”

Years later, Scott was interviewed for the book ”For What It’s Worth: The Story of Buffalo Springfield.”

Later on, reading the finished product, he had a revelation: ”What I (hadn’t known) was that it was a really good thing that I didn’t go with them. Because it was the end, and they were having nothing but hassles. And I wouldn’t be in Bend and have a lovely wife and lovely children.”

His years of touring took him, among other places, to Nevada casinos.

”Tahoe was one of the places I discovered; it was the most beautiful place I’d seen. And so I moved to Lake Tahoe, and that’s where I met Barbara,” his wife.

”She got me focused on our future together.” They moved to Sacramento, where he studied to become a music teacher. ”There were jobs in some place called Bend, Oregon, and we ended up here in 1978.”

More recently in his career, Scott has played in Bend’s own Jazz Guys, which broke up early in the decade, then Blue Vista, which included Steven Tate, Bill Hayes and Michelle Van Handel. Van Handel will lend her vocal and piano talents to the proceedings Saturday, and it’s safe to say that if you liked Blue Vista and its jazz-meets-pop adult contemporary sound, you’ll enjoy Scott’s music.

As for Blue Vista’s decision to break up after releasing an album in 2004, Scott feels that ”artistically, we were land-locked. I think in order to do more than we had done, required us to be able to play a little more, at least once a month. For what we accomplished, it took so much time. It was very hard to maintain that energy.”

With Jazz Guys and Blue Vista having run their respective courses, Scott found himself with a batch of songs, ”some of which I’d never learned to perform,” he said. ”So I spent a long time in the spare bedroom vacated by my child in college, learning to play my own songs, learning what my voice is as a singer.”

Performing live for audiences, Scott said ”I’m very conscientious, since they have given me the gift of their presence, that they get something back for that. The other part of me is sure that there will be something that they come away with: a story or something to laugh about.

”I don’t know what this is … that I have to stick my neck out, but I really believe I have something to share with people.”

Ostensibly, Scott is retired from 25 years of teaching music, most recently at Lava Ridge and Highlands elementary schools.

But ”music teachers, when they retire, don’t stop being musicians,” he said. It’s no surprise, then, that he still teaches violin, cello, bass and guitar in the studios at the now-closed Central Oregon Music. He also conducts the adult string orchestra, Desert Sage Strings Orchestra, for Cascade Community School of Music.

Scott is in the ongoing process of recording a CD of his songs at SoundSmith Studios. Many of his tunes are written for kids, who in a way launched his songwriting career about 12 years ago.

”I started writing for children because I was teaching children,” he said. ”I just had a feeling for how to write songs for children that would engross them, make them laugh, make them respond rhythmically. All those things that teachers and people who love children think about. That sparked my creativity.”

Those songs include ”Oh, How I Wish it Would Snow,” ”Papa Chicken” and ”Let Meow’t.”

He also finds inspiration in everyday observation, listening and watching, something that he can accomplish more easily as an anonymous guy having a muffin in a crowded local eatery than if he’d become a Buffalo Springfield member.

”Just riding over here, I was thinking … everybody in the cars (you pass), you look at the person inside, and they’ve got a life just as complicated as you, just as happy as you, or just as sad as you,” Scott said.

”It’s not that you want to hear everybody’s story, but it just puts it in perspective. It’s not about me.”

If You Go

What: April Fool Tour 2006 featuring Michael Scott with guests Michelle Van Handel, Dave Van Handel and Clay Smith

When: 7:30 p.m. Saturday

Where: 2nd Street Theater, 220 NE Lafayette Ave., Bend

Cost: $15 in advance or at the door

Contact: 312-9626