Rich Sugg, Associated Press Bonnie Raitt, shown during a concert earlier this month, mixed in some old favorites during her show here Saturday night. Click photo for larger image.

Bonnie Raitt's music just seems to get better and better.

The more she sings, the more you want to hear her sing.

After spending Saturday afternoon visiting the Carnegie Museum and other sites around town, the 55-year-old singer/songwriter/guitarist and her four-piece band spent the evening captivating a capacity crowd at the Benedum with songs of love, loss and redemption.

A large part of the 90-minute concert focused on music from "Souls Alike," her latest recording.

The affable Raitt opened the evening with "Unnecessarily Mercenary," a tune written by pianist Jon Cleary. She then launched into "God Was in the Water," an engaging ballad that Raitt said had a new meaning in light of the recent hurricanes. After an emotional "I Will Not Be Broken," singer/songerwriter and multi-instrumentalist Maia Sharp, whose band opened the evening, joined Raitt on songs including "I Don't Want Anything to Change."

Raitt then performed some of her more enduring songs -- "Love Sneak-in' Up on You," "Something to Talk About," "Nick of Time" and a superb rendition of " I Can't Make You Love Me" -- before the group went back into the archives and pulled out Sippy Wallace's "Mighty Tight Woman."

-- By Nate Guidry,
Post-Gazette jazz critic

Aussie is awesome on solo guitar

Imagine your not-so-typical guitar virtuoso. Add impeccable songcraft, and finish with a cooly confident but heat-generating presence onstage. Then you've conjured up an inkling of what it's like to experience Tommy Emmanuel live.

The Australian solo fingerstyle guitarist performed for the first time in Pittsburgh Saturday night at the Carnegie Lecture Hall in a concert presented by Calliope. His jumping-off point was the chick-boom thumb-pick style of Chet Atkins, but his destination encompassed musicians as diverse as Django Reinhardt, Michael Hedges and James Taylor.

Emmanuel started with an original tribute to Atkins, "The Man With the Green Thumb." He worked his way through material ranging from Nat King Cole's "Mona Lisa" to the Beatles' "Michelle" (with out-of-this world cascading harmonics) to gorgeous songs-without-words written for his two daughters, "Drivetime" and "Angelina." An Aboriginal-inspired piece called "Initiation" was built upon digital delay, feedback and Emmanuel's complex drumming on his powerfully miked guitar -- it reminded the crowd that "acoustic" in the 21st century is a relative term.

Besides delivering beautiful melodies and spectacular chops, this immaculately tailored road warrior joked, jumped around and prowled the stage as easily as if he had been born in the wings somewhere, which is almost the case -- now 50, he's been in show business since he was a kid performing with his siblings in a band called The Midget Surfaries.

Pittsburgh singer-songwriter Carol Lee Espy led off with a short set of good country-tinged folk originals, backed by pedal steel player Pete Freeman and percussionist Jim DiSpirito.

-- By Peter B. King,
Post-Gazette staff writer