POP MUSIC REVIEW : Jann Browne Takes Crowd Around a Country Block

Playing a milestone show for her home-county fans, Jann Browne gave them a tour through her real neighborhood--the precincts of traditional country music--with the assurance of someone who knows her way around every corner on the block.

Browne’s two shows Monday night at the Crazy Horse Steak House marked the opening of her first national tour as a headliner in her own right (the Laguna Hills singer did two years of road work with Asleep at the Wheel in the early 1980s). The occasion also marked a rite of passage of sorts: Browne’s first time headlining in one of the weekly slots that Orange County’s highest-profile honky-tonk reserves for touring attractions.

With her debut album, “Tell Me Why,” having spent more than two months on the country charts (two singles have hit the Top 20), Browne has finally gone national after more than a decade of dues-paying on the Southern California scene. From the intensity of the cheers, a good many fans at the upscale Crazy Horse show were longtime partisans who had seen her in grass-roots bars like the Swallows Inn in San Juan Capistrano.

Browne wasn’t about to let the evening drift away on a wave of graduation-night sentimentality, though. Instead, she played a direct, unpretentious show (Browne’s lone frill was a fancy, tight-fitting black velvet stage suit), thanking the home fans for giving her a foundation, but correctly reasoning that she could reward them best with songs instead of extensive reminiscing.

Browne’s material and performing style don’t, at this point, herald a singer able to put a thoroughly individual stamp on traditional country music. Even performers who relish tradition need to have a healthy willingness to turn it on its head once in a while, or to make old traditions serve new themes and tales. But Browne’s 70-minute early show established that she is a rounded, seasoned, confident talent with first-rate ability. She was like a well-trained, superbly conditioned Olympic diver or gymnast who can handle each compulsory maneuver with aplomb. The set ranged through just about every classic subgenre in the country tradition, showing a knowing way with each of them.

There were aching ballads, made vivid with a controlled, ever-so-slight crack in the voice and a keening climactic cry. There was wry honky-tonk, where lyrics about heartbreaks bounce along over jaunty rhythms as if to say all those sad affairs are just a part of the human comedy. There were clattering train-rhythms, chunky rocking country, a prettily sighing country-Mex combination and a strong, quick-stepping bluegrass tune.

In each setting, Browne’s backup group was a sharp, interlocking unit. The key soloists were guitarist Rick MacDonald and jack-of-all-strings Dennis Caplinger, who wove lovely fiddle, mandolin and lap-slide guitar accents into the music, and plunked a bit of banjo to boot. Rhythm guitarist Lonnie Allen’s clear, chiming tone also played a prominent part in the mix. Drummer Rhys Clark, a transplanted New Zealander living in Huntington Beach, gave every song sure definition, while bassist Don Whaley shaded Browne’s singing with good harmony vocals.

Aside from her material’s too-close adherence to traditional conventions, there was little to quarrel with in Browne’s performance. One might argue with the emotional cast she gave “Louisville,” an original song in which a woman travels two-thirds of the way across the country to make a new life with a lover, only to be stood up and left stranded and broke. Browne sang it with plaintive, hurt restraint, when the situation seems to call for the most outraged, withering kiss-off a singer could muster.

She finished her set hot and strong with a new song, “Blue Heart in Memphis.” It rocked authoritatively as Browne’s voice conveyed the sense of risk and abandon with which people follow their dreams in a music mecca--even after their initial hopes have foundered.

But that was only a warm-up for the encore rendition of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” Browne and her band made the hoary bluegrass-gospel warhorse sound coltish again. The band goosed it with rockabilly rhythms, then veered into gleeful Western swing. Browne, meanwhile, swung right along, wailing in a black soul-gospel voice as playful and irreverent as a moonshine party in the church basement. It ended the show with a big exclamation point and hinted at what Browne might be able to do if she will try to twist and contort country traditions once in a while instead of retracing the music’s classic outlines.