SOUNDS AROUND TOWN : Little Bit Country : Locals hold their own against big names from Nashville and elsewhere at first Ojai Bowlful festival.

The threat of seismic activity last Sunday may have hung in the air like a grim cloud, triggering that old lingering California fear: “Is the Big One on its way?” But, for the ample crowd of about 1,300 at the Ojai Bowlful of Country, quake phobia didn’t dampen the spirit of the day.

Country music, in its many stylistic variants at this first country festival in Ojai, is nothing if not a bold, reassuring voice in the wind. The chords are simple, the melodies delivered straight to the heart and the rhythms have the regularity of a train bound for all-American glory.

This country hoedown came from parts other than Nashville, Tenn. Big Sandy and the Fly-Rite Boys lit up a roaring rockabilly fire, highlighted by hot guitar and steel guitar licks. Los Rock Angels served up Tex-Mex and zydeco, and our beloved Acousticats basked in their own brand of acoustic alchemy.

One of the musical questions raised by the festival’s program was: Is Ojai a hotbed and/or haven for country musicians of note?

Headlining the list of home-grown talent was the ever-popular country act the Desert Rose Band, featuring Ojai resident Chris Hillman. The group was seen here in its full-band incarnation as opposed to the stripped-down version that played at the Solvang Country Festival two months back.

Earlier in the day, Ojai singer/songwriter Peter Howard teamed up with Milton Kelley for a set of songs, spurring the sedate audience into an ovation quenchable only by an encore.

But one of the clear highlights of the day came around dinner time, when longstanding local legend Alan Thornhill played a set of his fine songs with a sterling 10-piece backup band. That all of these players hail from the area speaks mighty well for the music scene here.

Although he has often been heard in solo settings with an acoustic guitar and a James Taylor-esque folk flair, Thornhill put on his finest Stetson hat, figuratively speaking, for the Bowlful show. On tunes such as “Breaking In a Broken Heart” and ‘Sweet Romance,” Thornhill showed his natural country colors, without affecting any borrowed twang for the occasion.

Maybe now, with the new country music boom well under way, Thornhill will at last find his rightful place in the industry.

The only real drawback in the set was a nagging feedback problem that sometimes added uninvited harmonies to the rich mix of sounds. “Sorry about the feedback,” Thornhill said between tunes. “You get this many people together in a small space and something’s bound to start vibrating.”

He got that one right. The forces in question included guitarist Jim Monahan and pedal steel player Al Flaa, who had played earlier in Caught Red-Handed. Acousticat Phil Salazar fiddled, Bill Flores manned a dobro and Dan Wilson a mandolin, while Rain Perry and Pat Buley sang backup.

Also on hand were sometime-R & B Bombers Jim Christie on drums, bassist Steve Nelson and keyboardist Ken Stange, a Ventura-boy-gone- south who was celebrating and mourning his 40th birthday.

A band like that, and a festival like this, can cure your quake phobia real quick.

CHORAL BEAT: In a different idiomatic corner altogether, another new Ojai music institution was inaugurated earlier in June.

The Ojai Camerata, directed by Charles McDermott, gave its first two concerts, at the Ojai Presbyterian Church and the Trinity Episcopal Church in Santa Barbara--two elegant, acoustically amiable spaces in which to hear music.

The program had its built-in touches of drama, starting with McDermott’s loftily delivered verbal program notes and following with the opening piece--Hugo Distler’s “Volspruch”--being sung from a side room, giving the effect of an far-off image coming into focus.

Opening a concert with Bach--in this case, a cantata penned by the already profound 19-year old composer--can be dangerous, a hard act to follow. Subsequent works by Rossini and Ralph Vaughan Williams paled in comparison.

But the performance aspect was, for the most part, firmly in check. The instrumental ranks unraveled a bit at times, but there was a seamless weave within the chorus, where it counts.

The Ojai Camerata, whose next concerts are Nov. 28 and 29, is a welcome addition to the county’s classical musical scene.

Meanwhile, the relatively venerable Ventura County Masterchorale has begun its second decade by going on the road--across the Atlantic, to be specific. In late June, the ensemble, led by Burns Taft, performed several concerts in Poland as representatives of the New World Festival, which had been postponed for a year because of the Gulf War.

On June 19, before departing, the Masterchorale offered a free farewell concert in the marbled lobby of the old Ventura City Hall. What the capacity crowd heard that night was less an official concert, designed with the group’s typically cohesive programming logic, than a Whitman’s Sampler of the sublime and the frivolous.

At best, the ensemble filled the lobby with its rich, beauteous sound. At worst, splinter vocal groups indulged some pop shtick. Everybody’s entitled to dabble in kitsch, but it tends to take the wind out of weightier pieces on the program.

The chorus capped the show with Samuel Ward’s blustery variation on “America the Beautiful” that would probably go over better in Poland than here. Patriotic themes, by now, may be too loaded with political/historical associations to make sense in the purely musical context of the concert hall.

The evening’s finest moment came with Charles Ives’ polytonal “Sixty-Seventh Psalm.” With its big lustrous suspended chords, it can be heard as a modern religious experience, built on the tension of intellectual versus spiritual qualities.

Whatever the problems of balance in that send-off concert, the Masterchorale attended to the business of music-making with customary gusto and precision, qualities the county should be proud to export.

The Masterchorale’s 11th season has been announced, and includes performances at various points in the county, including a March concert at the San Buenaventura Mission and a performance of Haydn’s “The Creation” at Ojai’s Libbey Bowl in May.