Nacogdoches Waltz (1993)

I stumbled upon this album accidentally while looking for something else.  Looking for Willie Nelson albums is like panning for gold.  You never know when you’ll find some new album that hasn’t appeared on any previous discography you’ve seen.  You have to follow footnotes and sidenotes and rabbit trails and such.  This all-instrumental album with Paul Buskirk (mandola), Willie (guitar), Paul Schmidt (piano), Dean Reynolds (upright bass), and Mike Lefbevre (drums) opens with the gentle title cut, “Nacogdoches Waltz.”  Willie’s vocals often overshadow his guitar playing, so I enjoy hearing him play on an instrumental album where I can focus on his guitar work, which shines on Duke Ellington’s “Sophisticated Lady” (track 2).  “Little Rock Get-A-Way” (track 3) jumps, especially the piano.  “Intermezzo” (track 4) features some of the most delicate mandola and guitar work on the album.  ITUNES calls this album pop, but “Dardanella” (track 5) defies categorization.  Flamenco-inflected mandola jazz?  “Under Paris Skies” (track 6) could be part of the soundtrack for the Cormac McCarthy novel I’m reading now (set in Mexico), “The Crossing.”  Willie Nelson doing Bach?  Never imagined I’d hear that, although I guess he did Bach’s “Minuet in G” as a bonus track on “Red Headed Stranger.”  The rousing, driving, puckish “Joy (Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring)” (track 7) gets five stars.  “Nola” (track 8) has a pleasingly deceptive slightness and simplicity, as does “I Will Wait for You” (track 9).  Mandola virtuosity abounds even amidst these ditties.  A jazzy version of the traditional Christmas song “Greensleeves” (track 10), which manages somehow to sound fresh, rounds out the collection.  Country western baroque jazz?  Whatever it is, it’s worth owning.