Strait Offers a Straight-Shooting Set

Garth Brooks reinvented the model of the male country singer, concocting a formula since adopted by Tim McGraw, Kenny Chesney and others that’s equal parts rock star and aerobics instructor.

As if to prove that Aesop’s fable about the hare and the tortoise applies to country music as much as any other part of life, along ambles George Strait to remind us that there’s still room for a guy who just stands there and sings.

Where Garth and his disciples race, bound and swing about the stage like so many Tennessee Tarzans, Strait exhibited his Zen-like dedication to the fine art of moseying throughout his 95-minute set Saturday at the Forum in Inglewood.

He was outfitted as usual in a starched white shirt and denim jeans that looked straight out of the box. But even after singing more than two dozen songs spanning his two-decade-plus career, Strait could have put that wardrobe straight back into the box and sent it back to the store and nobody’d be the wiser.

That this Texan of few words can get through an entire concert without breaking a sweat testifies to the faith he puts in the songs he chooses, and he’s proved adept over the years at selecting material that’s consistently catchy, occasionally moving.

The set list Saturday included several from his latest album, “The Road Less Traveled,” among them songs from such esteemed writers as Rodney Crowell and Merle Haggard. He’s not a singer like Emmylou Harris who consistently bowls you over with the musical gems he unearths or with his interpretative prowess. Yet Strait injects even his more conventional material, which never insults the listener’s intelligence, with a no-frills honesty that has kept him as one of the few pre-Garth-era stars who still has any kind of a presence in mainstream country.

Massachusetts-reared singer Jo Dee Messina got a generous opening slot of nearly an hour, a chunk of which she wasted demonstrating her love for the ‘70s and ‘80s arena rock she grew up with. But when she sang her own hits, she showed off her appealingly soulful, steely voice in the Tammy Wynette tradition.