POP MUSIC REVIEW : ‘Chamber Blues’: That Other Longhair Music : Composer Corky Siegel on harmonica, piano teams up with string quartet, adding barrelhouse roughness to the dignified sound.

Corky Siegel’s “Chamber Blues” is a genuine hybrid. As heard Wednesday at the Irvine Barclay Theatre on the UC Irvine campus, the program of ambitious, opus-numbered compositions and humorous songs offered more than blues licks played by a string quartet, or classical figures blown from a harmonica.

The longtime co-leader of the Chicago-based Siegel-Schwall Band has been dabbling in that other form of longhair music since 1966 when Seiji Ozawa asked him if he would like to jam. A number of collaborations with Ozawa and former Stan Kenton arranger William Russo resulted including “Symphonic Blues,” recorded with the San Francisco Symphony in 1971.

The four movements of the “Chamber Blues Suite” played here are the first such pieces that Siegel has written on his own.

The orchestration of Siegel’s keyboard and harmonica with the Consortium String Quartet (Florentine Ramniceanu and Lisa Wurman, violins; Daniel Strba, viola and Felix Wurman, cello) was surprisingly complementary, if not always crisp. The quartet moved easily between the complex and the more direct, backbeat rhythms that mingle in Siegel’s clever compositions, adding percussive plucks or moments of improvisational flash while working in slippery smears and bent tones that Paul Butterfield would have admired.

Siegel’s greatest contribution was as composer. He often was content to sit and watch the quartet work through his music and would add minimal effects on the mouth harp (after several of the numbers, Siegel had the harp take a “bow” from the palm of his hand). But at other times, he blew strong, ringing chordal whines and long single-tone constructions that slid across the instrument’s limited range. His piano work added a barrelhouse roughness to the dignified sound of the strings.

A section entitled “Slow Blues” opened with a strolling, unaccompanied passage from the cello that, with the violins, became a stately figure that sounded like something out of Vivaldi. Siegel, on harmonica, added spare, bent-note accents and chicken clucks to highlight the blues changes in the quirkily rhythmic piece. The third movement of the suite opened with a sprightly keyboard dance from Siegel that held baroque as well as boogie-woogie suggestions.

The only number not written by Siegel, Cliff Colnot’s “3772,” was decidedly the most contemporary with its anxious feel and edgy dissonance. A strange, psychedelic film by Ed Emshwiller projected behind the musicians added to the effect. The evening’s most ambitious piece, “Koulangatta,” a collaboration between Siegel and Chicago composer Phillip Bimstein (who was in attendance), featured warm string passages and a melody winsomely echoed by the harmonica.

Intertwined with the more serious pieces were short, blues-based numbers (“Sugar Bee,” “No One’s Got Them Like I Do”) with comedic lyrics that Siegel sang in a conversational style reminiscent of Mose Allison. The quartet added their voices on the chorus of “Insecurity,” a witty discourse on confidence and indecision.

In deference to the day’s events, Siegel closed with his own “The Sky Will Fall,” a hopeful paean to peace and brotherhood.

Siegel and the string quartet play Saturday at the Wadsworth Theatre in West Los Angeles. Information: (213) 825-2953.