Deft Perception : ‘Gatemouth’ Brown Knows a Light and Nimble Touch Can Coax a Guitar to Speak Volumes

Simon & Garfunkel once pondered, with a shake of the head and a patronizing assessment, what it would be like to be old and an outsider: “How terribly strange to be 70.”

It might have come out differently had they been able to observe something like Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown’s show Wednesday night at the Coach House. At 72, the Texas-bred blues musician is celebrating his 50th year as a recording artist and proving how terribly comfortable it can be to be 70.

Brown never scored enduring, signature hits as did B.B. King or John Lee Hooker, his septuagenarian peers on the blues scene. But he has achieved a musical personality very much his own. It’s founded in the unperturbable playfulness of his nimble guitar style.

On stage at the Coach House, a relaxed Brown didn’t conjure up the fire of impressively burning ego or the winds of naked emotion that are key elements of blues greatness. But his way of fluttering with a butterfly’s natural and effortless aplomb across a broad stylistic landscape was a notable achievement in its own way.

Brown didn’t press to impress during an 80-minute set; he was just comfortably himself. That meant propping his bony frame on a chair for much of the show; casually lighting up a pipe and having a few puffs while nodding to the rhythm as his excellent band took over for a few bars; fussing politely at the sound engineer until he got the monitor mix he wanted; and wagging an incredibly long and slender index finger at some people up front as he lightly chided them for getting a bit too boisterous: “Quiet! We’ll do the entertaining tonight, not you.”

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Applying those long fingers to his guitar, Brown displayed a touch that, had it been any lighter and more dexterous, would not have been guitar-playing at all, but brain surgery. His lines and licks were attuned to the tones and cadences of conversation, full of cackles, whistles and audible winks. He gave a substantial preview of “Gate Swings,” an upcoming album recorded with a 20-piece band. But if his four-man backup unit--featuring Eric Demmer on alto sax and Joe Krown on organ and digital piano--wasn’t exactly large in number, it was big in talent, and swung the way the new album’s material demands.

Brown is one of the most swing- and jazz-influenced blues players around, and his takes on Duke Ellington (a dizzily sliding “Take the A Train”) and Count Basie (a hard-driving “One O’Clock Jump”) were ample evidence of his command. Not one for much chat or attempts at ingratiation, Brown noted early on that he would be playing “planetary music.” Pulling out his trademark fiddle during a slow R&B; ballad (how many ace guitarists besides Brown and David Lindley also play excellent violin?), he took a solo that swung through the European cafes of Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli before landing for a few bars in the heart of Cajun country. Now, that’s planetary.

“I Wonder,” a wistful R&B; ballad by Bobby Charles, was full of humorous decorations as Brown made his guitar go “boo-hoo, boo-hoo, boo-hoo” after the line “my eyes are full of tears.” But the song also revealed an appreciation for the pleasures of sentimentality as Brown sang in a husky but supple crooner’s voice and incorporated a chorus of “Georgia on My Mind” into a guitar solo.

Besides big-band swing, Cajun-accented jazz and jazz-accented Cajun music (a swinging, decidedly nontraditional fiddle workout on the Louisiana standard “Big Mamou”) he dipped into New Orleans funk and shuffling Texas blues--all of it unified by a lightness of being unbound by age restrictions.

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Second-billed Eric Sardinas, a veteran of the Orange County club and coffeehouse scene, did what any flashy, fleet-fingered slide guitarist would do if his only aim was to get a rise out of a crowd. He amped up the strutting showmanship, flailed intensely if repetitiously at his metal-plated resonator guitars, hollered rather than sang, grimaced with the effort of it all and climaxed his set by fretting his strings with a bottle of beer, the contents of which he shook to a foamy explosion.

Sardinas and his two bandmates departed to a standing ovation, and it was earned, given the instrumental heat with which he backed up his showy flash. But Sardinas left it in doubt whether he can offer subtlety, wit, depth, range and lyricism to go with all the glitz.