A Whole New Hue

Deborah Harry, the erstwhile peroxide-dipped vocalist best known for her work with rock group Blondie, was a bit apprehensive in 1994 when she joined New York art-jazz band the Jazz Passengers.

“I have a lot to learn,” Harry, then 49, told a Times interviewer. “They might fire me.”

They didn’t. And now, with some 15 Passengers’ tours under Harry’s Spandex waistband, including five rounds in Europe and an album set for release early next year, her place in the band is secure.

“People who heard her then and who hear her now aren’t going to believe it,” Passengers co-founder and saxophonist Roy Nathanson said by phone from his Manhattan home ahead of a concert Thursday at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano.

“I always thought she sounded great. But when she first joined the band, she hadn’t sung our kind of stuff, which was much more specific, much more cross-genre than anything she’d done before. There were things she couldn’t handle. Now she’s really integrated into the band.”

Harry’s involvement with the Jazz Passengers began on their “In Love” album, which also featured singers Mavis Staples, Little Jimmy Scott and Bob Dorough. When she joined the subsequent tour, some suggested that her presence was just a ploy to gain more publicity for the eclectic, avant-garde musicians.

Nathanson, saying it’s stupid to deny that Harry has brought the band more attention, said her participation was his idea, not the record company’s.

“We both come from the same scene. I was involved with a lot of downtown [New York] theater like she was, and when I played in [film director-musician John Lurie’s] Lounge Lizards, we knew a lot of people in common,” he said. “I knew she had a sense of humor much like the band, and she knew who we were.

“I’d written this song--’Dog in the Sand’--that was, in some weird way, a song about loss. It was the time of AIDS, and everybody around here was feeling that loss,” he said. “So I called her and asked her to sing it, and she said yeah. It’s a hard song, with all this chromatic stuff, but she sang it with perfect pitch and the perfect attitude.”

The album due in February will find Harry taking center stage with the band.

“The record is somehow more integrated; I don’t know exactly how to explain it. I don’t think of her exactly when I write, but some of the new stuff is completely, peculiarly about her,” Nathanson said. “It’s very compositional; we’ve been looking into different ways to construct, different ways to structure the music. It really feels like it comes from a group, not just a collection of music with someone to sing it,” although he noted that Elvis Costello makes a guest appearance.

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The Passengers, with some half-dozen mostly instrumental albums out under their name, represent the cream of the New York progressive-music scene.

In addition to his work with the Lounge Lizards (“we’ve all played in the Lizards,” he said), Nathanson has recently composed and played a couple of film scores, including “Camp Stories” with Elliott Gould, and recently did a duo tour with Anthony Coleman, who included Nathanson on his “By Night” album.

Passengers co-founder Curtis Fowlkes, the trombonist who plays on the soundtrack to Robert Altman’s film “Kansas City,” recently returned from a tour with guitarist Bill Frisell and can be heard on Frisell’s album “This Land.”

Among the other members, bassist Brad Bradley Jones played on Ornette Coleman’s 1995 recording “Tone Dialing.” Vibist Bill Ware has recently been on tour with Steely Dan.

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In concert, Nathanson says, the band will cover songs from the new album, some that didn’t make the final cut and older material. The new disc will be the first release from producer Joel Dorn’s new label, 32 Records.

Dorn “did some very interesting jazz projects back in the ‘60s and ‘70s,” Nathanson said. “He’s done stuff for Rahsaan Roland Kirk; he put together the reissue set of John Coltrane on Atlantic; he’s done Hank Crawford and David Fathead Newman as well as the new Leon Parker album and stuff from Bette Midler and the Neville Brothers. Our [album] was supposed to be out in October, but they’re taking the time to do it right. It’s really going to be a beautiful album.”

* The Jazz Passengers with Deborah Harry, Vigo and Miguel play Thursday at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. 8 p.m. $18.50-$20.50. (714) 496-8930.