Away From All the Bells and Whistles

Dave Koz has built his considerable reputation as an industrial-strength pop saxophonist with high-wire notes and punchy rhythms, almost always heard amid a barrage of synthesizer effects and drum-machine thumps.

The approach has worked like gangbusters: Koz’s second album, “Lucky Man,” has sold more than 650,000 copies since it was released in 1993, and he toured behind the record for about two years straight. He also played at Bill Clinton’s inauguration and recently played again for the president at a fund-raiser at the Armand Hammer Museum in Westwood.

But at the end of those two years on the road, Koz--who plays tonight at the Coach House--says he was as burned out as “a piece of toast” and badly in need of a change. So he left his native Southern California (he was born in Encino, raised in Tarzana and has lived most of his adult life back in Encino) to cool out in Sausalito.

“It was really my first time away from home,” says the saxman, who graduated from UCLA in 1986 with a degree in mass communications.

Up north, he discovered painting, started hiking and riding a mountain bike, and immersed himself in a new community. He also found himself enthralled by such folk-pop artists as the Indigo Girls, Elvis Costello and Joni Mitchell.

“I loved that the music was so real,” Koz, 33, said during a recent phone conversation. “There wasn’t a gloss to it. It spoke very purely to me, something that might have been missing in my repeated listenings to my own albums.”

When he began planning his next album, the recently released “Off the Beaten Path” (on Capitol), he wanted it to reflect his new sensibilities. First, he wanted to use instruments often associated with folk-pop: acoustic guitar, mandolin, tin whistle and accordion, along with electric guitar and Hammond B-3 organ. “I wanted an organic sound, using instruments that bucked the synthesizer tradition.”

Then, he recorded almost all the tracks live in the studio with his cohorts, instead of doing sax overdubs after the basic rhythm tracks were completed, the way he had in the past. He thinks the results are some of the most honest and expressive playing of his career.

“This is a much more personal record,” he said. “On my previous albums, there was a sense of not wanting to make myself vulnerable. The sax was bathed in synthesizer pads, there were overdubs, a lot of bells and whistles, shtick. Here, I wanted to make something without the shtick, the schmaltz, to not be afraid to just put the sax out there.” The new songs will get their first live airing tonight at the Coach House gig.

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Koz isn’t pretending that this is groundbreaking music. Indeed, he said that that isn’t his intention and that while he reveres such jazzmen as Joshua Redman and Joe Lovano (“they make my jaw drop open”), he never wanted to be a “monster, art-type” saxophonist himself. “I’m just a sax player. If I can make a contribution to music and the saxophone, it’s by playing good songs and connecting with people.”

Critics have been tough on him for just that reason, citing him for an overwhelming willingness to please. But Koz says “the first record I heard and loved was Tower of Power’s ‘Back to Oakland.’ I was 10, and when I heard that horn section, I said, ‘That’s it.’ ” Starting out at weddings and bar mitzvahs with his older brother Jeff’s band, he “played what was hot on the charts. . . . I grew up playing music for people, as opposed to sitting in a room creating things for my own enjoyment.

“So playing for people is what drives me. If I’m out on stage, putting everything I have into that sax and I can see people smiling, it’s all worth it.”

* Dave Koz plays tonight at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. 7 and 9:30 p.m. $19.50-$21.50. (714) 496-8930.