Bluegrass and beyond from Krauss and Union Station

"I saw me some King Tut!" Alison Krauss told her Mann Center audience on Tuesday, recounting a two-day Philly stopover. Before you knew it, she was encouraging the crowd to imagine her guitarist, Dan Tyminski, in a loincloth with tassels. This became a theme for the evening. "We're professionals," she reminded everyone.

"Professional" isn't the word. The musicians in Krauss' long-standing group Union Station are unsurpassed - particularly the evening's marquee guest, Dobro master Jerry Douglas.

Krauss emerged years ago as a teen fiddle prodigy. Now 36, she has earned pop-singer stardom on her own terms, remaining true to her bluegrass roots.

Her two-hour show at the Mann was mainly an acoustic string-band affair, with violin, Dobro, acoustic guitar, banjo (Ron Block) and double bass (Barry Bales). The first few songs included Krauss favorites "Every Time You Say Goodbye," "Let Me Touch You for a While," and "The Lucky One."

After 30 minutes or so, pianist/organist Steve Cox and drummer Jim White joined the group. The show took a pop-country turn with "Ghost in This House," "Goodbye Is All We Have" and "Simple Love" - the last from Krauss' new Rounder collection A Hundred Miles or More.

But soon it was back to bluegrass with "Sawing on the Strings" and a high-spirited take on Fats Domino's 1957 hit "I'm Walkin'."

Krauss was in fine voice, no less as a backup singer when Tyminski and Block took the spotlight. "Man of Constant Sorrow," which Tyminski dubbed for George Clooney in O Brother, Where Art Thou?, was a delight to hear live ("that Milli Vanilli thing," Tyminski called it).

Douglas, inserting note-perfect punctuations and lightning solo breaks in every song, stepped forward at last with an unaccompanied Dobro feature. Douglas is a contemporary of Béla Fleck, Sam Bush, Tony Rice and other "newgrass" innovators; his repertoire includes jazz material by the likes of Errol Garner, Bill Frisell and Josef Zawinul. His kaleidoscopic solo involved layered sound-on-sound passages, acerbic blues licks and a smattering of Appalachian folk.