These Guys Are After <i> Really</i> Golden Oldies : Early music recordings are hot and upstart L.A.-based label RCM wants a share of the pie.

When you think of the music that defines Los Angeles, gangsta rap jumps immediately to mind. Or surf, punk, banda , big-time movie scores. With the world’s most diverse population, the city is home to some of the world’s most diverse musical styles. So, what’s next?

Early music, if Keller Coker has his way. In the city where pop culture is king, this musician-producer-scholar has started a new label--RCM--to record some of the richest and strangest music composed in Europe more than 300 years ago.

The label’s debut disc, by Coker’s own group, Ensemble de’ Medici, is a collection of vocal and instrumental pieces by 17th-Century Italian composer Girolamo Frescobaldi. “Beggli Occhi Io Non Provo,” released in January, is being played on KCRW-FM, KUSC-FM and KXLU-FM and displayed prominently on the racks at Tower Records and other local classical outlets. A disc of vocal music by 15th-Century German composer Heinrich Isaac has just been released, with an Orlando di Lasso (Flemish, 16th-Century) CD to follow this fall.

While early music giant Harmonia Mundi is also based in Los Angeles, RCM is unique in its focus on local artists. Not nationally known as a center for early music, like Boston and the Bay Area, L.A. is developing its own scene, coalescing around USC, one of the country’s top music schools. As an undergrad there, Coker was a jazz composition major who was converted to the Renaissance sounds of Monteverdi, Dufay, Dowland and others by James Tyler, master lutanist and head of the university’s early music program.

“Early music is very catching once you get going,” says the 29-year-old Coker, an Oregon native and now a doctoral candidate in early music performance at USC. “You’re sort of amazed by just the sheer beauty and the quantity of the music. When you look at what’s most often performed and considered classical music, it really spans a period of, gosh, 150 years or less. But if you start heading back just a little bit in time, you find a tradition going back to at least the year 800 of music that was virtually untouched until guys like James Tyler started working with it. It’s fascinating, it draws you in, you start listening to it, and you go, ‘My God, this is beautiful, why aren’t people doing something with this?’ ”

With an eye toward making a record, Coker and his mentor Tyler began batting around the work of different composers, eventually settling on Frescobaldi because of his identifiable name and wide variety of compositions. Acknowledged as an innovative keyboard composer and organist, Frescobaldi (1583-1643) actually wrote in all the styles of his day, including vocal arias and canzonas (instrumental “songs”), most of which have gone unrecorded. Like many late Renaissance and early Baroque composers, he didn’t specify instrumentation for his pieces, allowing musicians to come up with their own arrangements, an improvisational approach that is very much part of the methodology of emerging early music groups like Ensemble de’ Medici.

For Coker, Frescobaldi looked like a golden opportunity. He brought together 10 singers and instrumentalists, including lutanist Dirk Freymuth, soprano Kris Gould and other fellow students and graduates of USC, and coaxed a small investment from family friends to experiment with recording. Through a mutual friend, Coker hooked up with audio engineer Fred Vogler, 31, whose resume includes everything from producing jazz albums to sound engineering at the Hollywood Bowl. By the end of the project, Vogler became his partner and additional Ensemble de’ Medici sessions soon followed.

“And that,” Coker says, “is when the label really began.”

“Beggli Occhi,” recorded in a large hall on the Pomona College campus, features replicas of period string, brass and woodwind instruments. “This music was the pop music of its time,” says Coker, “and ideas about pop and the way it’s approached don’t change. Fred set it up like we were mixing a pop record, so you can feel the groove in the base line. He tried to let you hear all the different layers.”

Tyler, who plays lute, viola da gamba and baroque guitar on the disc, describes the sessions as “a family affair. Keller is quite meticulous, yet he still allows room for people to improvise, which is part and parcel of Renaissance music, to be able to come up with your own embellishments. I’m quite experienced in recording [over 40 albums as director, soloist or ensemble player], and it’s refreshing to record in a new, freer manner, to not be totally bound by musicological details and the written note on the page.”

Still somewhat “alternative” in the classical music world of three-tenor extravaganzas and symphony orchestras, early music is actually exploding commercially. In a field where sales of 10,000 is considered a major hit, “Chant,” by the Benedictine monks of Santo Domingo de Silos, has passed the 2-million mark and hovered atop the Billboard classical charts for nearly a year and a half. The a cappella medieval vocal group Anonymous 4 has sold almost 400,000 copies of its three CDs. And the soundtrack to the film “Tous les Matins du Monde,” featuring meditative French baroque viola da gamba works played by international early music superstar Jordi Savall, has sold more than 500,000 copies worldwide.

Here in Los Angeles, national acts play at UCLA and the Da Camera Society’s Chamber Music in Historic Sites series. Among several thriving local groups are Musica Angelica, the L.A. Baroque Orchestra and the L.A. Mozart Orchestra. Mediawise, there are weekly specialty shows on KXLU-FM and KCRW-FM; a monthly newsletter published by the Southern California Early Music Society chronicles the scene.

Still a rookie in this league, RCM (the initials stand for the Latin Rubedo Canis Musica, or Red Dog Music--after Coker’s nickname and Vogler’s dog) has caught the eye of retailers.

“I was really excited to hear an L.A.-based early music group recording,” says Richard McFalls, Tower Records’ Los Angeles classical sales coordinator (and a KXLU deejay). “Keller’s on the right track. He already has good sound quality and some of the best musicians in the area. The fact that he’s working with a largely unexplored repertoire gives him a better chance of succeeding. He has a unique product to offer.”

The RCM chief’s goal is to gain national distribution, which he believes can be accomplished after the label has five titles in the stores. His original investors, he says, have put in enough money to allow the label a year or two to develop a catalogue and an identity. Negotiations are in the works to add other local groups to the roster.

“I would just like to create a record label that fosters good music-making and has strong ties to the artists that are involved,” Coker says. “I want to create an environment for artists who are ready to take chances and really take another look at the way classical music is recorded.”

Says Tyler, who will release a lute disc on RCM early next year: “This is nice for a lot of us who are determined to make Los Angeles a center for early music performance. It’s probably the biggest step that can be taken.”