Emotional, Breathtaking Bluegrass From Alison Krauss

Bill Monroe probably has spent more hours shaving than Alison Krauss has been on the planet, but youth hasn’t stopped this former child prodigy from learning that the secret of bluegrass music is emotion so direct and unaffected that it can be breathtaking.

The Grammy-winning bluegrass sensation from Champaign, Ill., is only 20, but as she demonstrated on Saturday at McCabe’s, she’s hardly a kid anymore. As a singer, she sculpts a lyric the way Reba McEntire can, yet she’s mature enough to resist vocal showboating.

And while she spun out filigreed melodies, chipped hunks of rhythmic accompaniment and struck barn-burning solo sparks with her fiddle, Krauss never let on that her playing required any more effort than brushing a favorite cat.

Over their 21-song set, she and her artful Union Station band drew from familiar and lesser-known bluegrass and country sources. But she also proved she’s not manacled to tradition, with head-turning bluegrass treatments of the Beatles’ “I Will,” Karla Bonoff’s “Lose Again,” and, slightly less convincingly, the Foundations’ 1968 R&B; hit “Baby, Now That I’ve Found You.”

Who says youth is wasted on the young?