O.C. POP MUSIC REVIEW : Lindley Explores Mideast for Gems

Imagine, if you will, that Elmore James is drafted and sent to the Persian Gulf. Soon as he arrives, the slide-guitar master gets a hankering to play some blues, but the only stringed instrument within reach is a Turkish draftee’s saz , which looks something like an Italian mandolin that wasn’t stunted at birth. James grabs it, asks for somebody to give him a backbeat, and a Syrian soldier comes to the rescue by drumming his fingers in odd meters on the animal-skin head of his handy tombek .

That gives you a hint, though still a vague one, of the music David Lindley is making these days. Of course, to get the full picture, envision Elmore’s head under a wet-mop that’s been used in the clean-up of Kuwait’s oil fields. Then dress him in a polyester shirt designed by Mondrian, make him inhale a balloon full of helium and snap a clothespin on his nose while he’s singing and you get a little better approximation of the scene Friday at the opening of Lindley’s two-night stand at the Coach House.

In place of Lindley’s longtime cohorts of the El-Rayo X band, Jordanian-American hand-drum wizard Hani Naser provided the only accompaniment. While the impish Lindley focused on stroking and plucking a plethora of the guitar’s distant cousins, Naser kept himself in a trance-like rhythmic nirvana, bobbing his head as he diddled, thumbed and thwacked a troika of hand drums through the 100-minute set.

While Lindley’s music never has been less than exhilarating, it’s been years since it held the degree of wonder and discovery he tapped Friday by plumbing Middle-Eastern sources.

So little did he seem concerned about accomplishments past that his complement of a half-dozen instruments on stage included not one conventional guitar. He alternated between three 1920s-vintage Hawaiian acoustic lap models, his one-of-a-kind electric oud and a pair of saz . Or is it sazzes ?

He discussed traveling through various Soviet republics recently, during which he admitted that, in addition to exploring the regional folk music, he gulped much cognac. That may explain the forces, musical and otherwise, behind his rendition of the Cajun standard “Les Bon Temps Rouler” that sounded like a Muslim muezzin after a month’s vacation on Kauai.

Lindley was so caught up in the hypnotic combination of the four-string saz and Naser’s innertube-in-a-hailstorm drumming that even though he was singing in English, the only remotely discernible line in one song sounded like “You can’t make a living selling okra at the mill.”

Yet, as with the best cross-cultural experiments, Lindley wasn’t in it just for the novelty. “Leave Home Girl,” a song about the temptation of greener pastures of romance, struck that much deeper when Naser’s finger-drumming and Lindley’s steely slides on the Hawaiian guitar became the musical embodiment of the lyric about daring to “taste of the forbidden fruit.”

In fact, much of the material he chose edged toward the dark side of human experience, from Stephen Foster’s timeless plea for compassion, “Hard Times Come Again No More,” to Warren Zevon’s mordant “Play It All Night Long.”

In a perfect world, all concerts would be like Lindley’s (minus a group of noisy nimrods who apparently believe that a concert club is a place to hold a boisterous conversation with a soundtrack). The ideal musician is as gifted as he is inquisitive, absorbs a vast array of distinct styles and funnels it through his own talent and experience to produce a thoroughly unique sound. That’s the real American melting-pot concept--not, as most music-industry experts seem to prefer, a vessel in which all ingredients are fused into a consistent, bland mush.

Guitarist Bill Lynch, who often appears locally with mouth harpist and singer John (Juke) Logan, opened for Lindley on a night when, he told the crowd, he originally had been booked to perform at the (canceled-without-explanation) Julia Roberts-Kiefer Sutherland nuptials. Ah, the vagaries of Hollywood romance.

Instead, he wound up at the Coach House, assisted by harmonica player Jimmy Powers, playing a half-hour set of white-boy blues. Lynch has an attractively smoky voice that sings stripped-down electric Chicago blues by way of Detroit, or maybe Asbury Park. His guitar work consisted mostly of rock-solid rhythmic accompaniment, but he stretched out for one bit of lead work that demonstrated facile finger work and some imaginative chording.

Powers, however, seems a devotee of the Mickey Raphael busy-B-harp school, and too-often favored the ear-curdling upper end of his instrument. As a bluesman, Powers can’t touch such local veterans as James Harman and Rod Piazza, or even a younger upstart like Robert Lucas. On the other hand, he would be great for safely ridding homes of pesky insects without dangerous chemicals.