Pop Music Review : String Fever : When Cooder and Lindley--and Their Kids--Get Together, It’s Hot

“I’d like to say, most emphatically, we’re realglad to be here, but this is the first time we’ve performed this anywhere, period,” said a jittery Ry Cooder when he came onstage Sunday night at the Coach House.

It was the debut of the Cooder-Lindley Family, composed of Cooder and his longtime musical accomplice David Lindley--who both play the bejesus out of practically any instrument with strings--and Cooder’s son Joachim on drums and Lindley’s daughter Rosanne on vocals.

Though Joachim backed his dad and Lindley on a tour a few years ago, and Rosanne has performed with her dad, the appearance marked the first time all four had worked together. It was also a rare night out for Cooder, who rarely tours. So the anticipatory buzz in the packed house met with a bit of nervousness onstage.

That took nearly all of two songs to dissipate, before the music caught hold of the players and refused to stop soaring for the next 2 1/2 hours.

Even those who haven’t heard of Cooder and Lindley have most likely heard them, either through their years of session work or, notably, their playing on Cooder’s numerous film scores. Hearing them Sunday, one had to wonder: Who needs to spend $25-million-plus making a movie when you can put these guys and a brace of stringed instruments onstage and get as much drama, depth, action, color and adventure as any screen could hold?

And for all the cinematic sweep of their music, having their offspring along gave the show the warmth and intimacy of a living-room get-together.

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Granted, it’s a strange living room, with the elder musicians applying bouzoukis to a Madagascan instrumental “Afindrafindrao,” a Turlough O’Carolan harp tune and Merle Haggard’s “I’m a Lonesome Fugitive.” And where would one file a version of the Depression-themed standard “How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live,” sung by Rosanne in a torchy style, backed by amplified bouzouki and electric guitar played in the Hawaiian slack-key tradition, backed expressively by Joachim on an inventive mix of dumbek , other Middle Eastern hand drums and standard drum-kit bits?

There were perhaps 140 strings divided among an armada of instruments brought by the two elder players, which did make for rather a lot of tuning and instrument changing. But whether playing dueling electric ouds (similar to a lute) on the tractor-mishap tune “Poor Dirt Farmer” or Hawaiian lap guitar and Turkish saz on Warren Zevon’s “Play It All Night Long,” there was never a hint of novelty for novelty’s sake in their culture-bounding musical choices. Rather, it expressed a common humanity, tied by emotion and invention.

In a section devoted to their soundtracks, they ranged through the dusty dignity of several tunes from “The Long Riders”--in which a few awry but all right fiddle notes from Lindley had the pair cracking up--and the massively atmospheric hovering slide guitar sonorities Cooder originated for “Paris, Texas,” underpinned by Lindley sawing with a fiddle bow on a 12-string electric. They carried that ominous mood over into Woody Guthrie’s “Vigilante Man,” creating a stark landscape for the Dust Bowl song’s tale of inhumanity, sung achingly by Cooder.

The 24-song set didn’t exactly abound with lyrical cheer. Most of the songs were about hard times, broken relationships and problem hair. Despite the lilting melody and lush three-part harmonies on Cooder’s Little Village offering “Do You Want My Job,” it is a horrifyingly sad song about Pacific islanders who have turned their paradise into a nuclear dump so they can buy Adidas for their kids.

One of the more upbeat numbers was “The Girls From Texas,” in which the narrator gets a bullet between the eyes in the last verse. The ebullient Tex-Mex tune had featured accordion great Flaco Jimenez in Cooder’s original recording.

“Flaco sends his regrets,” Cooder announced. “At least he would if he knew we were going to do this tune.”

He then proceeded to tackle the button accordion part himself--and didn’t do poorly at all, despite the accordion bellows almost escaping his grasp a time or two.

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As is usually the case when he teams up with Cooder, Lindley assumed a supporting role, leaving much of the song selection and vocals to Cooder. It doesn’t much matter who’s driving, since, like any great road trip, it’s the front-seat conversations that are memorable. With Cooder and Lindley, the musical conversations flying between their instruments were continually sparking the other with wit and depth.

The set included a couple of Lindley staples, such as a cruising-speed version of his cover of West Coast bluesman K.C. Douglas’ “Mercury Blues.” It was also Lindley who brought the Madagascan tune to the show (from the splendid series of “A World Out of Time” albums made with Henry Kaiser and Malagasy musicians). It’s a beautiful, complex instrumental, during the intricacies of which Cooder could be heard playfully emitting small cries of “help” from his pursed lips.

Rosanne is a distinctive singer, with a voice that couldn’t quite be called big, but it is definitely brassy, approaching a lyric with an assured verve and with fluttering arms putting a lot of body English on it. If her voice isn’t yet quite equal to the singers whose songs she does, it is only because she’s drawing from such lofty precincts as Ann Peebles, whose hit “(I Feel Like) Breaking Up Somebody’s Home” was one of her selections.

Cooder did a father-son duet with Joachim on “Hold That Snake Til I Make It.” It showed the 19-year-old to have an impressive mastery of his craft. Like Cooder’s frequent recording partner Jim Keltner, Joachim drove the numbers with a groove, while goosing the songs with accents in the most unexpected places. Though flying between a wild array of drums cymbals and percussion tools, his playing was never busy and always supported the other musicians.