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Krauss and Plant surreal, sublime

By Walter Tunis Contributing Music Critic

Near the halfway point of their sublime and, at times, stylistically surreal performance last night, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss hoisted up the full fruits and colors of their near yearlong roots music sojourn for all 4,100 fans on hand at Rupp Arena to see.

The tune was Fortune Teller, an Allen Toussaint chestnut covered by, among many others, such Brit rock beasts as The Who and The Rolling Stones. At the center of this very controlled storm was Plant, lowering his vocals to a level of incantatory cunning while guitarist/band leader/producer/all-around Americana scholar T Bone Burnett dressed the surroundings with wicked guitar — the sort of wattage that mixed tremolo and twang into a mood as rich in its roots music economy as it was deep in its traditional pop smarts.

The resulting sound was playfully, almost riotously, spooky.

Then, just when you thought this earthy treat couldn't get any sleeker, on to the stage came Krauss to add a wordless vocal wail that gave the party something of a jungle accent — a pop-savvy Fay Wray to the Plant/Burnett King Kong rumble.

Thus we had a single, vital emotive voice forged out of what seemed, as recently as a year ago, an impossible pop alliance.

Krauss mixed the familiar delicacy of her country-saturated singing with considerable daring, as in the siren-like mystery that surrounded her vocal lead on Tom Waits' Trampled Rose and the sterling Gene Clark weeper Through the Morning, Through the Night.

Plant, in music that was light-years removed from the plaintively thunderous charge he led over 35 years ago as frontman for Led Zeppelin, reveled in the repertoire's conversational fancy. But on Townes Van Zandt's Nothin', he summoned a dark, commanding vocal charge that was very Zep-friendly in its electric delivery.

Ultimately, though, it was Burnett who set last night's program on its fascinating course. Admittedly, having an absurdly resourceful band at his disposal didn't hurt. Employing the tireless doomsday drive of drummer Jay Bellerose alongside fiddler/banjoist Stuart Duncan and bassist Dennis Crouch with Buddy Miller (arguably, next to Burnett, the most influential presence in modern Americana music) on board as a second guitarist and multi-instrumentalist revealed just how deep the band's strengths ran.

But Burnett's swampy guitar tone — unveiled immediately in a subtle shimmer on the show-opening cover of Rich Woman — became as vital a voice in last night's performance as any of the singing by the all-star headliners.

As popular as Krauss's Kentucky following has been, especially in recent years, Plant was surrounded last night by the biggest air of expectation. In his first Rupp outing since a Zep-heavy reunion performance with Jimmy Page over 13 years ago, Plant refashioned several gems from his past to suit the lean, groove-intensive fare favored by Burnett. Black Country Woman and a banjo-ignited Black Dog in particular, chugged along with a healthy dose of folkish charm and raw swing that Krauss easily tapped into, as well.

But Zeppelin fans loudly and properly rejoiced to a very faithful acoustic reading of The Battle of Evermore with Duncan playing the tune's brittle mandolin lines and Krauss neatly capturing the British folk vibe the late Fairport Convention vocalist Sandy Denny crafted on Zeppelin's 1971 studio version.

In a performance that seemed so fervently bent on sidestepping nostalgia, Evermore and Plant's concluding chants of “bring it back” embraced the Zeppelin legacy wholeheartedly without betraying the elemental turns of the Burnett-bred material. Like much of the performance, it borrowed from the old and, quite often, the very old, as it sought out a new roots music vocabulary.

Show opener Sharon Little began the evening with a set reminiscent of Rickie Lee Jones' early '80s music and Over the Rhine's more rockish meditations. But Little songs like Ooh Wee and Follow That Sound were nicely grounded in a sense of pop celebration.