Transcendent moment with Morrison

Van Morrison’s current tour consists of just six shows, two of which were at the Wiltern LG over the weekend. The brevity could be read as a marginal commitment to his new “Pay the Devil” country album, in which he takes on a dozen songs from the golden age of honky-tonk and adds three stylistically complementary originals.

The album has sporadic rewards, chiefly his song selection -- Leon Payne’s “There Stands the Glass” (a 1953 hit for Webb Pierce), Bill Anderson’s “Once a Day” (Connie Smith’s 1964 No. 1 single) and Payne’s paean to self-pity, “Things Have Gone to Pieces” (George Jones, 1965).

It’s one more exercise in recent years for Morrison to immerse himself in a genre that inspired him, apparently as a way to come back to his own R&B-folk-rock-country-gospel; amalgam with renewed energy, and that’s exactly what happened Saturday at the Wiltern.

Such were the stylistic shifts that he had essentially two bands with him that traded off in alternating configurations to emphasize the fiddle/steel-guitar framings of the country numbers, then the horn/organ/piano-centered tunes.

It culminated in a transcendent reading of the pop standard “It’s All in the Game.” Transcendence is what Morrison’s music has consistently aimed for, and, as the sold-out crowd observed, sometimes achieves magnificently.