Playing to the Crowd : Drummer David Basse says his goal is to get people involved. He does so with a blend of vocal and instrumental jazz tunes backed by a swing beat.

Sitting tall behind his drum set, a light tan fedora tilted slightly back, David Basse concludes his first set at Lunaria in West Los Angeles by singing the rousing Harry (Sweets) Edison-Jon Hendricks blues “Centerpiece.”

As Basse and his colleagues--veteran pianist Mike Melvoin, ace bassist Richard Reid and solid saxman Greg Riley--deliver the piece, the crowd responds with smiles, rhythmic taps of the feet, knowing nods of the head and, ultimately, warm applause.

All performers revere the kind of reception Basse received one recent Saturday night, but they don’t all seek it as pointedly as he does.

“I consider myself an artist, and the picture I paint is a room full of happy people,” he says. “I want people to be involved. I really strive to have everyone in the room included.”

And he does, says Dennis Duke, who has booked Basse into Chadney’s in Burbank on several occasions. The drummer-singer appears there Saturday (and may also be heard Feb. 25 at Monteleone’s West in Tarzana). “He plays to the audience, gets the crowd going,” Duke says.

Basse, 42, a devoted jazz lover, builds his audience-comes-first presentation around an infectious blend of vocal and instrumental jazz tunes buttressed by an appealing swing beat. It’s the kind of music that drew him when his parents played Count Basie records on the living room stereo, when he was growing up in Norfolk, Neb.

That music, typified by Basie’s exhilarating drive and swing feeling, developed to a large degree in Kansas City, Mo., in the ‘30s and ‘40s, when bandleaders such as Basie, Jay McShann and Harlan Leonard thrived in a town that was as wide-open as Las Vegas was in the ‘50s and ‘60s.

To drink in the atmosphere, Basse moved to Kansas City in 1974. And though the town’s best musical years were behind it, there was still plenty of activity for a young drummer thirsty for a new direction.

“I really dug the sound of the music there, and I wanted to find out about it,” says Basse, who has been in Southern California for a year, and lives in the Hollywood Hills. “I was caught up in it. The music there was jazz that was danceable, and I fell head-over-heels in love with it.”

Basse likes to keep that terpsichorean feeling in his renditions. “I like to make people dance. It just makes me happy,” he says. “I don’t really like to play music that’s so wild that people can’t dance to it, even though I love jazz, and listen to people like Max Roach, who aren’t known as dance drummers. But the drummers who really drive me crazy are people like Jake Hanna. I could sit and watch him for months. One of the biggest thrills in my life was when Jake came in to Chadney’s and listened to the band.”

There’s a deep blues thrust in Basse’s show. At Lunaria he also sang “Parker’s Mood,” the classic blues by alto giant Charlie Parker, himself a Kansas City native; and he gave a bluesy twist to Duke Ellington’s “I Got It Bad (and That Ain’t Good).” Basse says his blues-singing influences are two men who gained fame in Kansas City--Joe Turner and Jimmy Rushing.

“Like them, I like to sing the blues exuberantly,” he says.

Basse started playing drums at age 11, after hearing Scottish singer Donovan Leitch’s 1966 hit, “Mellow Yellow.”

“I took one drum lesson and told my mother, ‘This is what I want to for the rest of my life,’ and I’ve stuck to it,” he says.

The musician hopes that his life in Los Angeles will blossom as it did in Kansas City. “I’m here to grasp everything,” he says. “I’m learning and developing new stuff and playing with some of my heroes. And I can go out every night and hear people.

“And it doesn’t snow, and that’s nice,” he says, laughing softly.

Where and When Who: David Basse, accompanied by Milcho Leviev (piano), Richard Reid (bass) and Greg Riley (sax). Location: Chadney’s, 3000 W. Olive St., Burbank. Hours: 9 p.m. to 1 a.m. Saturday. Price: No cover, no minimum. Call: (818) 843-5333.