Van Morrison Gets Playful

If hearing skiffle music--the shabby ‘50s British interpretations of American folk and blues songs--doesn’t put a smile on your face, you must be one grumpy cuss.

Even notoriously dour Van Morrison cracked a broad grin Tuesday at the Wiltern Theatre when in the middle of his show he brought out skiffle hero Lonnie Donegan to do a few songs in the toe-tapping style that inspired a generation of British teens, including John Lennon, whose first band, the Quarry Men, played skiffle.

Marking the release of “The Skiffle Sessions,” an album documenting a full concert he did with Donegan in Belfast last summer, Morrison has brought “the godfather of skiffle” along for a short U.S. tour.

This is the latest in a series of Morrison’s glances back over his shoulder to the past. Frankly, he’s seemed like an old man looking back on his youth ever since his first solo single, the nostalgic 1967 hit “Brown Eyed Girl,” when he was just 22. But this trip, more than jaunts with such blues greats as John Lee Hooker or other personal heroes, brought out a lot of the boy in Van the Man.

The skiffle segment, with Donegan playing an ebullient Frick to Morrison’s crusty Frack, only lasted three songs--”Midnight Special,” “I Wanna to Go Home” (a.k.a. “Sloop John B”) and “Frankie and Johnny.” But the mood it sparked was there throughout. Even before Donegan’s appearance, Morrison was much more personable than usual. A performer who rarely acknowledges the audience, let alone banters with it, he let his guard down regularly in this show and at times was downright frisky.

The spirit also was reflected in his presentation of his trademark jazzy blues and meditative ballads. The set list was hardly challenging--the overly familiar touchstones “Moondance” and “Tupelo Honey” surrounded by more recent variations on his formula.

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And his performance trademarks--idiosyncratic punctuations of poetic scat and guttural interjections to highlight lyrics both sensual and spiritual--were all in place, accompanied as always by a superb, disciplined band equally adept at sprightly swing and mellow mysticism. Still, though he’d as usual turn his back to the audience when not singing (and sometimes while singing), he seemed much less distant than we’ve become accustomed to.

Don’t get the wrong idea. It’s not like there were a lot of surprises Tuesday, the first of two Wiltern nights.

But when Morrison replied to a female fan’s shout of “I love you, Van” by saying, bemusedly, “You don’t even know me,” it seemed that even after all these years there still might be some larger truth to that.