Bazooka Blows Away Jazz-Sax-Trio Preconceptions : Music: The unorthodox instrumental band, comprising former members of Orange County’s El Grupo Sexo, plays Saturday in Costa Mesa.

They wear suits. They’re a handy little trio of sax, bass and drums. But they don’t play “Satin Doll.”

“Our worst gig by far,” said Bazooka saxophonist Tony Atherton, “was being booked to play a baby shower by someone who didn’t understand what we were about. The whole time people were asking us if we could turn it down and play some standards.”

Bazooka’s Atherton, drummer Vince Meghrouni and, briefly, bassist Bill Crawford had been members of the now legendary monster of the active mid-’80s Orange County original music scene, El Grupo Sexo. Sexo had loomed over that scene, as fearless, loopy and dangerous as a thunder lizard on acid. With killer dance-funk grooves being force-fit to TV themes, metal overload and wild jazz honks, the group’s songs viciously satirized everything from the political status quo to whatever trendy British critics’ darlings they might be sharing the bill with.

Bazooka is a far remove from that band’s froth, but it also isn’t your standard jazz sax trio. Instead, Meghrouni said, the band draws its chief influence from the improvised live excursions of ‘60s supergroup Cream.

“Yeah,” Crawford deadpanned. “This band is kind of like if Cream had fired their square guitarist and hired some blind Muslim to play saxophone.”

The band does indeed bear some similarities to Cream, in that it often departs from a theme to fly into three-part improvisations, but those excursions also bear touches of Roland Kirk, Art Pepper and even, the band says, the Minutemen and the Germs. Working through snakily rhythmed be-bop/funk instrumentals with such titles as “In Defense of Phallic Power Totems” and, indeed, an adaptation of the Cream arrangement of “Crossroads,” the trio plays with an urgency and deftness that has found fans among both skaters and jazz fans.

The group performs Saturday at Diedrich Coffee & Espresso Bar in Costa Mesa. The musicians discussed their craft Tuesday night over a dinner of camerones a la diabla and ceviche tostadas at Anaheim’s El Nopal No. 2.

Being a non-vocal group doesn’t leave much room for political commentary, though the group doesn’t feel there’s any less need for such scrutiny in these troubled days.

“How can you not worry,” Meghrouni commented, “when all the information about this war is coming from the same read-my-lips people who said they weren’t selling arms to Iran and weren’t flying arms to the Contras and who said there were only 200 civilian casualties in Panama?”

Though they don’t address such topics lyrically, Meghrouni said the three feel that “our politics still extend out in our music because, rather than being real specific, our whole political idea was always ‘Avoid the status quo. Avoid the assumptions everyone makes based on the barrage of PR you get from every direction--corporate, government and conformist.’ And what we’re doing now musically doesn’t conform to anything. I would say our music is our way to try to get to some honesty.

“In a way, we’re setting ourselves up for failure, because we’re an instrumental band and we don’t fit into a preset style. But we have faith in the ability of our audiences to enjoy something even though it’s not in a package they’re used to receiving. We just think the truth in it will win out, and people will recognize it.”

With music that leaves as much to chance as theirs does, Crawford said, “it’s risky to play. We could fall flat on our face at any instant.”

And having no vocalist makes it more demanding on audiences, Crawford continued, with more than a touch of sarcasm, “because there’s no pale youth in front of us easing the audience through a safe passage of their fantasies of adolescent rebellion.”

Amid a gush of laughter from the trio, Meghrouni added, “There’s no wispy cipher at the helm to help them project their feelings outward.”

If the band members can laugh at their dim prospects for commercial success, perhaps it comes from their developing in a musical climate where disappointment seems to be a fact of life. The promising O.C. original music scene in which El Grupo Sexo had thrived all but dried up in 1986 when local officials closed the few venues where the scene was based.

“During that time, original music was proliferating, and it looked like there was some hope for Orange County,” Meghrouni said. “You didn’t have to go to L.A. to see something original. Before that, there was a Foreigner on every block--I mean the band. Then all of a sudden, there was Safari Sam’s and Spatz (night clubs), and there was some hope. Here in that funky-cool community of Huntington Beach, there was an original scene and original music, with all kinds of heartfelt stuff going on.

“What is really chilling is the powers-that-be managed to crush all that, and now Huntington Beach is looking like Newport Beach, or, as Tony calls it, that ‘gulag-by-the-sea.’ It’s sad when you see something that’s really positive and creative proliferating and then you see it get crushed. And I think the country is going that way too. There have been some hopeful moments, but I think that the repressive, dark, bogus forces are actually prevailing.”

All O.C. natives, Atherton still lives in Garden Grove, while Meghrouni and Crawford moved to Los Angeles in the last couple of years. “It’s kind of like when James Joyce moved away from Ireland: He felt he couldn’t discipline his craft enough in a place he loved so much,” Meghrouni said, with tongue lodged firmly in cheek.

Bazooka’s unlikely sax-bass-drums lineup didn’t begin intentionally but as a fallout from the breakup of Boneshake, the band Atherton and Meghrouni formed after Sexo’s demise.

“The three of us started practicing, just trying to keep something together and work on tunes so that when we got other members we’d have something to play,” Atherton said. “But then it seemed like we tapped into something greater with just the three of us. It had a full, complete sound.”

Said Meghrouni: “I think we realized we had something the second or third time we played, when we tried this Art Pepper tune called ‘Red Car.’ It’s a hard tune for us--though jazz guys would probably laugh at that. It had a lot of different chord changes, which were hard to get across without a chord instrument, and we had to keep the groove going, which wasn’t a standard rock groove. We’d butchered it a couple of times, and then this one practice, we started to be able to do it. That made us realize we could do a lot of things.”

Making Bazooka’s rhythmically complex romps all the more impressive is the fact that drums aren’t Meghrouni’s chief instrument. He played sax in Sexo and Boneshake, and his drumming experience in recent years was limited to sitting in at his band-mates’ sets occasionally. He only began practicing in earnest two months before Bazooka made its live debut in November of 1989.

“Our motto is ‘Pearls before swine since ‘89,’ ” Meghrouni quipped, though the band actually has been getting a positive audience response at most gigs.

Managed by former Safari Sam’s owner Sam Lanni, the group has an album in the can that they are shopping to labels. They are counting on a discerning audience rather than airplay for whatever success the record might find.

“One local label heard the tape and said, ‘If we had any guts, we’d sign you,’ ” Meghrouni said, “and I don’t think the album will find a whole lot of radio space. We’re not going to get played on KROQ, and not on KLON either. But there are people out there who like all kinds of music, who get excited about hearing something new and who search it out.”

If Bazooka’s members have their way, their product will at least stand out in the album bins and maybe even pick up a few sales to heavy-metal fans. One of the fanciful covers they’re contemplating, Meghrouni said, would feature “a pot roast with a lamb’s head on top, and its arms and legs would be king-crab legs. It’d be called ‘Worship This!’ ”

Bazooka plays Saturday at 9 p.m. at Diedrich Coffee & Espresso Bar, 474 E. 17th St., Costa Mesa. Admission: free. Information: (714) 646-0323.