O.C. JAZZ REVIEW : Law’s Long Arm Stifles Concert Under the Stars : Bazooka trio played with passion and high-flying improvisation until police cited a Costa Mesa law against unauthorized live music.

Saturday evening was a fine, starry night, just cold enough to remind one that we’re alive and on a planet. Under those stars, a trio played glowing, ripping music while about 150 people, from their teens to their 50s, sat on benches made of milk crates and pine boards, drinking coffee and getting caught up in the music. It was good and just getting better; music the way it’s supposed to be.

Then the police showed up.

Forty minutes into Saturday’s concert by the Bazooka trio at Diedrich Coffee & Espresso Bar, officers representing the “City of the Arts” shut down the show, citing a law against unauthorized live music. Shut off, too, might be several other unique programs Diedrich’s had scheduled for the coming weeks.

There was no great fanfare to the bit of culture Diedrich’s has been bringing to Costa Mesa for the past month with its Saturday night “Javalounge” performances, and there certainly weren’t any government grants involved. It merely was a business putting on some shows--simple, direct and free.

The coffee cafe has created a much-needed venue for Orange County talent to be heard. Saturday was a prime example of the virtues of that, with the Bazooka trio playing some of the most engaging and fearless music to be heard on a local stage in months, until authorities pulled the plug.

But being silenced in Orange County is hardly anything new, so let’s first talk about the interesting parts of the evening.

Bazooka has fast become one of the most exciting bands this area has produced. Though solely instrumental, and drawing more from sax-great Art Pepper than from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the trio played Saturday with a fearlessness and passion that placed it right in the tradition of the best rock and roll.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I haven’t much been in the mood to sit through challenging, on-the-edge jazz-funk trios lately. Life’s tough enough as it is. But Bazooka’s saxman Tony Atherton, drummer Vince Meghrouni and bassist Bill Crawford make it easy. Instead of attitude, heavy conceptualization or obfuscatory hipness, the trio put the play back into playing.

There may be more skilled jazz players about, but none so caught up in the adventure of where the music might lead when it’s left open to chance. The group cites Cream as an influence, and like that band’s ‘60s concerts, Bazooka’s numbers served as launching pads for uncharted, free-flying improvisations. It was risky stuff, with the potential of crashing to earth at any instant if the group’s engagement or intuition flagged. But they didn’t have time to fail, instead plunging headfirst into each of their excursions.

With the exception of “Speedball” by the late trumpeter Lee Morgan, all of the seven numbers in the group’s truncated performance were originals. Those ranged from the whimsical tumble of “In Defense of Phallic Power Totems” to the keening be-bop improvs of “Turkey Tenders.”

The highlight of the set was the extended opus “Taboobi,” which opened with snaking Middle Eastern melodies played simultaneously on alto and tenor sax by Atherton. Including a wildly inventive drum solo, the piece roamed through several largely improvised movements, which at one point found drummer Meghrouni out front with Atherton and Crawford, pounding a single cymbal in a furious exchange with the other two.

It was about then that the police arrived. While similar events in Huntington Beach have been shut down with a police show of force, including arrests, the Costa Mesa officers were professional, even sympathetic, while enforcing the city’s live-music law. But the net effect was still to silence a unique, positive event.

The First Amendment is a curious thing. It protects freedom of speech up until the point that one starts to modulate the pitch of it. Then it becomes music , which, in several county burgs, is a crime to utter without special dispensation from the local officials. Inasmuch as some anthropologists believe that song predates speech as a language, one can only wonder if we would all still be grunting if the human race had originated in Orange County.

Municipalities need some instrument to control intrusive noise (the police said there had been complaints Saturday), but it’s difficult to comprehend the blanket laws prohibiting music here.

Shop owner Martin Diedrich said he might seek city approval for future performances but wasn’t optimistic about the prospects for success, noting that he’s already having problems with the city just for having outdoor cafe seating. For the present, he said, he plans to at least continue with a poetry night, dubbed Cafe of Dreams, which is held the third Monday of every month. Diedrich’s other location, at 13681 Newport Ave. in Tustin, will also continue with its weekend bookings of acoustic music acts.