Straying Into Old Territory : Pop music: Brian Setzer is ‘taking a bath’ on his big band, but the ‘40s-style orchestra fulfills a lifelong ambition.

Ahh, the gleaming army of blaring brass. The baggy, sharkskin zoot suits and the high-flying jitterbugs. Brian Setzer just can’t seem to get enough of that old-time music. The front man of ‘50s-style rockabilly revivalist Stray Cats is working with a 16-piece big band now, resurrecting the music of another bygone era.

“It’s a combination of swingin’ stuff and jump blues like Big Joe Turner and Wynonie Harris,” he said in a recent interview. “We’re also doing some Nat King Cole and a couple of Sinatra-type things, and I’ve rearranged some Stray Cats songs like ‘Stray Cat Strut’ and ‘Rock This Town’ for this group.”

Setzer and the band--which includes musicians who have worked with Sinatra, Buddy Rich, Maynard Ferguson and Woody Herman, among others--play the Coach House on Saturday night. It’s one of only three shows they have scheduled, and Setzer admits to “taking a bath” on all of them (the huge overhead of keeping a big band together is what, to a large extent, brought an end to the swing era in the first place).

Still, the bony, heavily tattooed 33-year-old said that a ‘40s-style big band has been a lifelong ambition, and he doesn’t discount the possibility of doing more of this sort of thing (although he said the Stray Cats, who released their fifth album earlier this year, remain his top musical priority).

The big band “started out as something to have fun with,” he said. “Now it’s snowballed into this big project. We’ve been working on this since last summer--getting 17 people in one room is a big thing by itself. I just want to see how people react to it basically. I’m having a ball with it, so we’ll just see how far these three shows go, how much people dig it. I think the way to make it work is to get a record out and cover the expenses somehow.”

Fiscal considerations aside, one wonders how well he’ll be able to pull off a project of this nature artistically. He has a high, reedy-toned voice with a growling edge, pipes well-suited for the hormone-crazed roar of rockabilly, but it’s difficult to imagine him tackling a barrel-throated, Joe Turner shouter.

As a guitarist, Setzer is lightning-fingered, tricky and quite creative, able to combine the rapid-fire picking of rockabilly with the string-bending cool of the blues. But such jump and swing guitar masters as Oscar Moore, Barney Kessell and Tiny Grimes are noted more for restraint and tasty chops than for flash and speed. Setzer, acutely in tune with musical traditions, realizes that a touch of self-control is in order if he’s to pass muster as a swing guitarist.

“I’m just kind of seeing what fits and what doesn’t,” he said. “I know I have to make concessions; I can’t go hog wild and expect it to sound good. With the Stray Cats, we play off the root of a chord and I can play whatever I want over it, but this is more structured; everything is written out and charted. I have to tailor my playing for this band. It’s still me, just a different way of playing.”

It’s fairly unusual for Setzer to be playing clubs in the United States at all anymore, either as a Stray Cat or on a side project. Since the Cats’ meteoric rise and fall some 10 years ago, the group has concentrated its efforts mostly in Europe and Japan, where it remains an arena-packing attraction.

The Stray Cats started in England, by Setzer and two other American expatriates who’d been living there since 1980, carving a niche for themselves. They recorded a pair of albums that were smash hits in Britain and became top-selling imports in the United States. When their American debut album, ‘Built for Speed,” was finally released in 1982, the band became a fixture on radio and MTV, and rockabilly became the fad of the day. But the Cats’ welcome seemed to wear out in short order, a development for which Setzer puts much of the blame on a fickle rock press.

“I think in the States, journalists and their whole attitude buried us,” he said, not without a tone of bitterness in his voice. “They tried to make (rockabilly) out to be so fad-oriented, they really turned on us and buried it, 1-2-3, and then it was unhip to like it anymore. But there were still millions of people who dug it, whether the journalists wanted to admit it or not.

“And as far as the (rockabilly) movement goes, the people were really nasty to each other too,” he added. “The Blasters hated us, everybody said they hated us. It’s a shame there was no camaraderie between the bands. It was stupid, terrible. The Blasters knocked us in the press, and so of course we had to knock them back. Stupid, catty stuff like that ruined the movement.”

The Stray Cats broke up in 1985 and stayed apart for three years. Setzer used the time to record a pair of critically acclaimed but commercially disappointing albums of his own. Using rockabilly and other roots music forms as an influence rather than a template, his “Live Nude Guitars” (1988) and particularly “The Knife Feels Like Justice” (1986) are arguably his finest musical moments.

But the tuneful, heartfelt songs he wrote during this period apparently were too pop for his rockabilly following and too earthy for the MTV generation. “Everybody tells me they really like that stuff, but when I brought it on the road, 50 people would show up. It wasn’t paying. I can’t say I won’t ever do something like that again, but for the time being, it’s not in the cards.”

And through it all, he loves rockabilly as much as ever. To him, he says, it’s always been much more than just a silly fad, or a past fancy whose heyday was some 35 years ago. “It’s important music, just as important as country music, blues or jazz,” he said. “I don’t think it’s outdated, and I definitely don’t believe it will ever die. There are still 16-year-old kids out there with Stray Cats tattoos. It’s that deep.”

* Brian Setzer and his Big Band play Saturday at 9 p.m. at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. $19.50. (714) 496-8930.