The Big Brass of Classical Appeal : Music: The five-member Canadian Brass has found the right mix for producing gold.

SAN DIEGO —  The Canadian Brass is traveling proof that classical music can lure the masses.

The five-piece ensemble, which plays the Civic Theatre in downtown San Diego at 8 p.m. Wednesday, has struck gold with its mix of classical, New Orleans jazz and pop songs. From the sale of its nearly 30 albums, 100 or more annual concert appearances and other sources, the group grosses more than $2 million a year.

Behind the success is a rollicking live act designed to help the band gain and keep the attention of diverse audiences.

A typical evening with the group ranges from an adagio by Samuel Barber to jazz tunes by Fats Waller or Jelly Roll Morton--reworked for brass--and, this time of year, a handful of Christmas favorites.

Shows begin with the group’s slow procession from the rear of a concert hall to the stage as it plays a New Orleans funeral march. After that, band members don’t just sit there as they play. They have been known to pirouette while delivering ballet music, or dance their own version of the Russian Dance from “The Nutcracker.”

Yet, unlike pop performers who lip-sync to recorded tracks as they go through choreographed moves, the Canadian Brass plays it all live and uniformly receives excellent reviews.

“We must be careful not to let the antics get in the way of the real message here,” said French horn player David Ohanian. “We’re really not comedians. Without the music, we have no show at all. People may find it hysterical that we sometimes do our tribute to ballet or a mini-opera on stage in costume. But we’ve found that audiences who have been to see a string quartet, or chamber music audiences, find our approach refreshing.”

Although band members are all classically trained, their shows include several jazz numbers. Serious jazz fans may find the group’s versions of songs such as W. C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues” and “Beale Street Blues” a bit sanitary contrasted with renditions by pure jazz bands.

The musicianship is faultless, but spontaneity and swing are in short supply. Ohanian acknowledges that the group makes no attempt to improvise on jazz numbers, sticking to charts prepared for the band by Luther Henderson, who has also arranged period jazz for Broadway musicals.

“You can’t improvise in this music,” Ohanian said. “You’re replicating, just as when we do a Handel organ concerto. Luther’s intent is to create a written record of the classic Dixieland sound, with the classic licks and harmonies.

“The trombone is very important--and the trumpet and the clarinet, which we impersonate with a muted piccolo trumpet. The licks Luther uses are indigenous to Dixieland players. The trombone has a sliding sound, the trumpet has that growling sound. He has coached us so we can emulate the sounds.”

The band’s recorded jazz has done extremely well. The group’s 1987 “Basin Street” album stayed on Billboard’s Crossover chart (for pop-oriented music by classical players) for 42 weeks and sold more than 120,000 copies.

One reason for this success is the jazz renaissance in America.

“It’s coming back,” Ohanian said. “During the 1970s, it almost went underground when rock came to the forefront, but jazz is really enjoying a resurgence. It’s always stayed big in Europe, but in the United States, we kind of let it wane. I see much more evidence of jazz in record stores and on classical music stations. In Canada, there’s quite a bit more jazz on the radio than in the States. It seems like everywhere but where it was invented, it’s been really hot.”

Not that classical music is any slouch for the Canadian Brass. “Art of the Fugue,” for example--an album of Bach’s music for organ, rearranged for brass--sold more than 40,000 copies.

Classical music purists may question the group’s adaptations of classical organ pieces, since the compositions were never intended for brass.

“We’re brass players, not organists, but we want to play the music,” Ohanian said. “If you believe in the music, try to make it yours, share that enthusiasm with the audience, the audience seems to pick up on it.

“When offered the criticism of, ‘Hey, you’re brass, leave the organ alone’--well, there isn’t a lot of repertoire for brass from the earlier periods of music, because the instruments really weren’t perfected like they are today. The technique of the players was not as advanced either. So this is a really modern phenomenon, a brass quintet that fills a 3,000-seat auditorium without amplification.”

Popularity and the ability to fill large venues didn’t come overnight. The group has diligently built a following during 20 years together.

Tuba player Charles Daellenbach and trombonist Eugene Watts met in Toronto in the late 1960s while Daellenbach was teaching music at the University of Toronto and Watts was principal trombonist in the Toronto Symphony. They founded the Canadian Brass in 1970, and are the only remaining original members.

Trumpeters Fred Mills and Ronald Romm, who played with the Houston Symphony Orchestra and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, have been in the band since the early 1970s.

Ohanian, an 11-year veteran of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the band’s newest member, joined in 1986, moving over from the Empire Brass.

Besides touring and recording, the group is attempting to appeal to the MTV generation. It has released four videos during the past five years: three of concerts plus an instructional tape for music students.

“And we just got back from London, where Philips (the group’s recording label) produced the Canadian Brass on Laserdisc. This will be our first release in the high-definition television format, next fall.”

The new video project weaves the group’s music through a fictional tale about their boyhoods, with young actors playing the musicians as youngsters.

“This really is quite a litmus test for the brass,” Ohanian said. “We’ll see if we can organize and tape classical music in an interesting, attention-grabbing way that can be sold commercially to a general audience. If so, that bodes very well for other groups of our kind.”