POP MUSIC REVIEW : Leon Redbone Pulls Fresh, Witty Performance From His Props Bag

Toward the end of Leon Redbone’s performance Wednesday night at the Coach House, he took yet another in a series of pauses between numbers to extract yet another item from his bag of props. This one was a huge flashlight, perhaps two feet long, with a lamp the size of a De Soto headlight.

Aiming the powerful beam into the darkened room, Redbone startled one patron after another with a jolt of incandescence, greeting each matter-of-factly: “Hello . . . hello . . . hello . . .”

Then, turning to Ralph Norton, his bass saxophonist and stage partner in folly, he deadpanned, “Hmmmm. Looks like none of your friends showed up.”

For the better part of two decades, the quirky crooner with the slurred, sub-baritone vocals has followed the same artistic road, however skewed. But by presenting his potpourri of pre-jazz tunes with equal measures of reverence and lightheartedness, Redbone’s music has remained fresh.

As usual, his 80-minute set, before a full house that included snappily clad young couples side by side with white-haired ladies in floral-patterned dresses, was more a comic routine laced with musical interludes than a traditional “special evening” with an acoustic guitar player.

Sporting his signature white hat and dark shades, and seated with a black electric acoustic guitar in his lap, Redbone--backed by a brilliant ragtime trio in Norton, cornet player Scott Black and pianist Tom Roberts--presented a selection of 15 titles as if they were a few guys lazing, chatting and playing songs on the front porch.

Like a pair of Mark Twain characters, Redbone and Norton engaged in folksy--and hilarious--dialogue. They conversed about lost loves, the “lucky” guy who got two weeks in jail for killing two people (“He was lucky for two weeks,” Redbone said, “then they hanged him”) and Leon’s dog, Rover, who refuses to eat meat (“He’s got his reasons”).

But even when it was time to get down to music, spanning his work from his 1975 rendition of Fats Waller’s “Ain’t Misbehavin’ ” to his own “So Relax” from his latest release, Redbone never quite dislodged the tongue from his cheek. He raised and twisted his Groucho-like eyebrows and mustache, playfully foundered during his solo picking and, on occasion, mercilessly cracked his notes.

The crowd delighted in all of it, as apparently did Redbone and the band. As the evening wore on, the audience grew rambunctious, calling out requests for “Harvest Moon” and “Walking Stick.”

The uprising was quelled, however, as Redbone, whose wit is surpassed only by his acerbity, barked back: “Please behave yourselves! . . . How much have you had to drink, anyway?”