POP MUSIC REVIEW : Leo Kottke Plays a Unique Guitar at Coach House

If Leo Kottke’s guitar playing was a river, it would be one that meandered the length and breadth of this country, accepting all tributary styles and churning them into his own uniquely impossible-to-categorize flow. While encompassing a variety-pack of traditional folk styles--country, blues, ragtime, the iconoclastic byways of John Fahey and, more recently, jazz and Latin music strains--it would be useless to peg Kottke’s playing with any of those labels.

More than that, there is something basic to Kottke’s performances, such as the sterling show he delivered at the Coach House on Thursday, that defies exposition. Shaping his inimitable technique on six- and 12-string acoustic guitars, there is a rare whimsy in his fingers. He’s practically a Garrison Keillor of the strings. His rambling between-song stories seem to delight as much in tumbling into the gullies of language as they do in relating an already-skewed tale.

Early in the 14-number performance, Kottke explained his narrative technique: “I always hope that when I open my mouth, words will issue forth.” There was a wry humor even to his tales of serial murderers and the death of Grand Ole Opry picker Sam McGee, who was run over three times by his own tractor, set to run in a large circle. “Can you imagine just how bad you’d feel waiting for it to come around again?” Kottke queried.

His baritone voice can be remarkably effective at conveying a mood. Moving the vocal “Everybody Lies” was a childlike, bittersweet consternation at why things are as they are in life.

His guitar playing has a way of making the convoluted seem, well . . . convoluted , but in a friendly way. His complex weaving of rhythmic leaps, moving bass lines, odd harmony voicings and dissonances and free-ranging melodic structures could give the guitarists in the audience the night sweats. But for those willing to close their eyes, his playing offered a cartoonish landscape, given that the finest cartoons treat so freely with reality and have the power to make one cry.

One could imagine crows conversing on a railroad track to the hum of his “Airproofing,” or imagine the slide-guitar-driven “June Bug” playing out of the radio of a ‘30s Plymouth flying 30 feet above a desert landscape. His finger-picking animated a more urban landscape on the aptly entitled “I Yell at Traffic.”

Kottke’s scene-setting for some songs was scarcely less playful than any such imaginings. He prefaced “What the Arm Said” with the explanation that he had written it after observing part of a heated conversation in a Chinese restaurant, that part being the one wildly gesturing arm that wasn’t blocked by a partition. One could indeed imagine the following six-string excursion as the music for a Momix-styled ballet for one arm.

While lacking the resonant harmonies of his 12-string work, Kottke’s six-string playing now seems to be his most expressive. Announcing “This song’s so filled with optimism that you’ll be angry,” Kottke wrought an irrepressibly sun-bright version of the Eddie Reeves-Alex Harvey tune “Rings.”

That was followed, in a dramatic mood shift, by “Czech Bounce,” which, despite the playful title, was a sad nocturne of hushing beauty. It was inspired, he said, by a story an Eastern European woman told him of how her father had been imprisoned when she was a child and, unbeknown to her, had spent 22 years in a building across the street, afforded scant glimpses of her growing up.

His most nimble six-string playing was on “The Great One,” a slow, reflective number--inspired, he claimed, by Jackie Gleason--in which he alternated lush jazz chordal melodies with quavering Django-esque single-note runs.

Back on 12-string, he performed “Jack Gets Up,” a surreal, “Hang On Sloopy”-chorded, pre-coffee mumble full of “snort forts” and visions of Santa Claus picking snow peas on the roof. He closed the set with a bottleneck medley of early material such as “June Bug” and “Vaseline Machine Gun.” He encored with a new song, “Jane’s Nut Bread,” and a pastoral version of Duane Allman’s “Little Martha.”