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Willie Nelson and Family, Rosa Hart Theatre, Lake Charles Civic Center, March 2, 2016 King Alexander’ Review of the Concert… Nostalgia prompted me to buy tickets to the Willie Nelson and Family concert in Lake Charles. A cherished family photograph of ours shows the elder of my two sons less than a year old and in diapers, with Willie Nelson. That was in 1982. The Alexander Brothers Band road act was playing to an empty lounge in a Rodeway Inn in Columbus, Ohio when a man came in and said “Willie Nelson is playing to about forty people in the Sheraton lounge across the street.” We didn’t ask our food and beverage manager’s permission. We just put down our axes and went over there. It was true. Outside in the parking lot was Willie’s elaborately airbrushed touring bus. Inside was another dead lounge with a shell-shocked organist on the stage, joined by Willie Nelson sitting on its edge, exercising his voice singing one cover after another to an audience largely made up of his own bandand road crew. He had a secretary on the road with him, and it was she who honed in on the baby and swept him up onto the stage for that souvenir shot. This was at the height of Willie’s fame, two years after he had appeared in the Hollywood film Honeysuckle Rose with Dyan Cannon and Amy Irving, with soundtrack album featuring “On the Road Again,” and the same year he released the Pancho and Lefty duet album with Merle Haggard. So I had seen Willie Nelson perform live, but it wasn’t an actual Willie Nelson concert as such. What I feared in 2016 was that a Willie Nelson concert at this point, as he approached the age of eighty-three, would be a legend-in-decline show like the last years B. B. King, wherein one goes expecting to pay a well-deserved homage but not expecting to see the artist in the height of his powers, but rather a seated celebrity propped up by his band among other things. Well this was not that. It was anything but that, and if I had not been thoroughly impressed withNelson’s performance I would not be writing this review. He was not feeble at all. He stood upright, wearing cowboy boots, before his band the whole time. He kicked off every song himself before the applause could die down from the last one. There was no musical director but him. There was no lead guitarist, indeed no other guitarist at all, but him, no lead vocalist but him. He brought impeccable strength, confidence, and mastery to each of these roles. It is really pretty astounding. One wag, hearing of this, said, “Hmm, I wonder what kind of herbal supplement Willie Nelson could be using to keep him in such good health during old age?” The Rosa Hart Theatre is a venue where one might go to hear the symphony, or summer pops, or a ballet. The acoustics there are superb. At times Willie Nelson’s appreciative crowd was louder than the public address system, but only at appropriate times. The audience was respectful. This included its patience with Alyssa, a country and western vocalistperforming a mix of original and cover material cheerfully and well. She was joined by two male sidemen, one who supplied vocal harmonies while playing a single-cutaway flat top guitar, and a hand percussionist who sat playing a narrow, hollow wooden box for a variety of sounds. For several songs Alyssa played second acoustic guitar. She and her trio were good and deserving of a tour with Willie Nelson. The only criticism heard was that her set might have been a little shorter so that fewer people would have felt the need to leave before Willie Nelson’s show was over. When Willie Nelson and Family began, starting traditionally with “Whiskey River,” the first impression was that the set did not look typical for a top-flight country artist in concert. There were instrument and gear cases on the set as if setup had not been completed, or the usual professional rule of getting cases off the stage was not observed. There were a smattering of tube amplifiers, in front of which was arectangle of reddish carpet. There was a single backdrop hanging, a huge Texas lone star flag. The overall visual effect was like a middling-sized roadhouse stage, where the decades had imparted a patina of cigarette smoke and beer residue to the leatherette coverings on the speaker boxes. There was no drum set. There was no pedal steel, no fiddles. On stage left was the theatre’s concert grand piano with the top open and acoustic microphones pointed at the harp within. At that piano sat Willie’s eighty-five-year-old sister and longtime pianist Bobbie Lee, whose style is authentic and well-executed Wild West saloon, if vintage Hollywood movies are accurate examples of that. At the back of the extra folding stage and behind black rectangular gear cases sat the band’s two percussionists, brothers Paul English and Billy English. One played solely a 12″ X 5″ snare drum using brushes. The other played a variety of hand traps such as egg shaker, tinkle chimes, and maybe a cow bell. There wasno kick drum to be seen or heard, and no hi-hat or cymbals. Bassist Kevin Smith, replacing Bee Spears who passed away in 2011, played the first five or six songs on a Fender electric bass, after which he switched to a vintage-looking half-scale acoustic upright bass, setting its end pin atop a twenty-four inch stool to bring it up to a comfortable playing height. Rounding out the group was MIckey Raphael who stood to Willie’s left playing harmonicas, doing tasty work on diatonic and chromatic harps, plus double-row Alpine or Hohner Echo-Harp giving an accordion-like effect to the jazz numbers. Did I say jazz? Yes. Willie Nelson is not all beer-throwing music. He favors a Martin N-20 parlor-sized (25.4″ scale) classical guitar, meaning it has a rosewood body, flat spruce top, flat fingerboard, open pegs, and gut or nylon strings. His, dubbed Trigger like Roy Rogers’ horse, is the one he got in 1969, the year the N-20 entered production. When he wants to be, Nelson is a writer of complexsongs, for instance “Crazy” which was a Billboard No. 2 Country hit for Patsy Cline in 1962. Reportedly she hated the demo because of the way Nelson sang before and after the beat, i.e. jazz timing, and she didn’t record it until her producer arranged it straightforwardly. Nelson’s vocal jazz timing was in evidence throughout his performance in Lake Charles as he eschewed the standard rule of singing the melody strait the first time through before improvising and syncopating. His chording on the guitar also showed very respectable jazz chops, as well as his single-note leads employing diminished runs and unusual intervals with never an error. Over all, his reported desire to approach the sound of Django Reinhardt is no joke. Willie’s lead guitar work was nothing short of impressive, and it became quite apparent why he didn’t feel the need to have any other guitarist in the band after Jody Payne retired in 2008. Willie gave his audience a few selections from his 1978 Stardust album, thetitle song having been penned in 1927 by Hoagy Carmichael. One of those was “Georgia On My Mind,” another Carmichael song written with Stuart Gorrell in 1930. Nelson was born in Abbott, Texas on April 29, 1933, and grew up with music from an early age, working also as a disc jockey during the time of Bix Beiderbecke and Bob Wills and in a place where jazz and western music fused unabashedly. Nelson carries on that tradition. The show arched over Willie’s career and did not disappoint fans who came to hear the familiar songs. There were no gaps and no patter. He encouraged the audience to supply hook lines to some best-loved songs like “You Were Always On My Mind,” and he took the time to throw three or four of his trademark red bandanas into the audience, but whatever else happened, the music kept rocking along. Near the end, Willie sang a medley of Carter Family classics, and when he finally strode alone off the stage, exiting through the back curtain at upstage center, the bandsegued from a spirited version of “I Saw the Light” into an instrumental of the fine traditional piece “Columbus Stockade Blues.” It was a superb evening, and no one in the sold-out crowd was disappointed. More likely they were surprised at what the legendary octogenarian delivered.