Harrison and his cohorts go global

A Lou Harrison craze has appeared frustratingly just around the corner ever since this poster boy for gorgeous nonconformist California music died in 2003. Friday night Jacaranda, Santa Monica's new music series, opened its new season with a half-Harrison program featuring his music for Western instruments and Javanese gamelan. In two weeks' time, the Los Angeles Master Chorale will present another half-Harrison program when it performs "La Koro Sutro" at Walt Disney Concert Hall. The corner may finally be getting closer.

Jacaranda's concert was a lively, winning occasion that also included music by two other real-McCoy mavericks with local roots: John Cage, who was born in Southern California, and Harry Partch, who died here.

The setting was Santa Monica's new Eli and Edythe Broad Stage, which got a colorful acoustic test. In Harrison's scores, mellow gongs and bells clang and peal. Cage's String Quartet in Four Parts spends considerable time on the edge of string sound and near the brink of inaudibility and unintelligibility. Partch's sassy "Castor and Pollux" was written for his homemade instruments, such as the bass marimba, which the composer designed so that its deepest pitches would vibrate through a listener's backside.

The Harrison works selected were from his hand-across-the-ocean oeuvre. Various Western instruments made for melody combine with a percussive Indonesian orchestra. A gamelan is for the eyes along with the ears. Its instruments are decorative, and the players in the CalArts Gamelan Kyai Doro Dasih (or Venerable Dream Come True) pleased in plum-colored jackets.

A gracious traveler and a generous host, Harrison asked a little more of his own kind. He let the gamelan pretty much do its thing, building structures of interlocking rhythmic patterns. The Western instruments are tuned to Javanese modes and sometimes bend pitches when that is possible. But saxophone, harp and French horn, the solo instruments in the short first three pieces on the program, kept their own sonic personalities and introduced the kind of ear-hugging melody for which Harrison had a particular gift.

The stretch proved a little too great for the soloists in "Cornish Lancaran," "In Honor of the Divine Mr. Handel" and "Main Bersama-sama." In the latter, a Western flute, rather than the Indonesian counterpart Harrison preferred, added further unease, but not so much as to make the work's hit tune uninviting.