You can tell when a folk musician’s getting up in years, and it’s painfully obvious when a rock band is well past their prime, but there’s something about certain soul and funk musicians that seems to defy the laws of age and time. They can prompt us to look at their faces, but the years are hardly showing. Enter Aaron Neville at the Venue in the Horseshoe Casino this past Thursday: the man looks the same and the man sounds the same. One is almost led to believe that the man feels exactly the same as he did in 1966, when he released his biggest hit, a Number One single on the Billboard R&B charts, Tell It Like It Is.

Aaron Neville’s quintet, featuring big brother and saxophonist Charles Neville of the Neville Brothers, started out the night amidst a border of done-up Christmas trees and lighted presents on either side of the stage. This was clearly going to be a serious holiday celebration. After the drummer and backup vocalist introduced the quintet, Mr. Aaron Neville himself ran onto the stage and started into “It’s All Right,” written by Curtis Mayfield and made famous by The Impressions. With five stellar musicians backing him up, the real star of the song and the rest of the night was Aaron’s bizarre, saintly, unlike-anything-else-you’ve-ever-heard vocal cords. They’re just one more reason to make you think that this man doesn’t age, and they’re still strong enough to stand up alone or lead a Tabernacle Choir.

Musicians with one or two hits (and sometimes more) on the oldies stations almost always feel compelled to cover other peoples’ songs from the same era, and to some this is expected and encouraged, while to others it’s inexcusable. I fall somewhere in the middle of these two groups, because it’s always songs that I like which are covered, and I like a little bit of cheese on my sandwich, but I respect musicians for their own contributions to musical evolution and would have preferred to hear some of the more obscure New Orleans funk that Mr. Neville is also loved for. That said, the next song of the night was “Don’t Know Much”, from 1989 – which hit the Adult Contemporary charts and not any soul or funk charts, but it was an original all the same, and it tasted good. The band played music from several genres during the set, from doo wop to country, and all that seemed to tie them together was that they were having so much fun on stage and that these were obviously the songs that gave them the most pleasure to perform. Around the middle of the set, Aaron sang a touching version of “A Change Is Gonna Come,” a song a lot of people have very high standards for. It’s a difficult song to live up to, and after setting the original and untouchable version by Sam Cooke aside, for me nothing reaches the heights of the Otis Redding and Baby Huey versions. Aaron’s live version did, however, move me and the rest of the audience with its conviction, and really showcased his voice and the emotional heights it’s capable of reaching.

As the decorated stage and name of the tour made clear, this was a holiday show, but Aaron only played a handful of Christmas songs over the course of the two hour set, including “Bells will be Ringing” and “Merry Christmas Baby”, most famously covered by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. As someone who’s never fully understood what is so great about Christmas music, I found myself enjoying most of the Christmas songs, partly because the classics were so pretty with Aaron singing lead, and partly because the rest of the songs borrowed a little more heavily from R&B and funk influences. It was, strangely enough, a Christmas song that brought my attention to just how musically capable Aaron’s quintet was. For a drummer to be able to drive Christmas songs with such a funky groove is quite impressive. Aaron joked that the backup vocals of his drummer and bassist were his own personal Tabernacle Choir, and he wasn’t too far off. When they weren’t doo-wopping and goofing around on stage, they provided clean and clear harmonies as a bottom layer for Aaron’s voice to soar octaves above. His brother, Charles Neville, led a few songs on sax while Aaron took short breaks off the stage, and his lung power made him seem not a day older than his more famous younger sibling.

Shortly before the encore, the band finally broke into “Tell It Like It Is”, which prompted several members of the audience to stand up and start dancing. Everyone had wanted to do this all along, but had felt too hindered in the somewhat stodgy venue of the casino to leave their seats. The old hit even moved one woman to find her way up to the stage and throw her hands up towards Aaron with a drunken fever in her eyes before being politely moved out of the way by a security guard. This woman couldn’t help it, though. She understood what this night was all about: It was a funky holiday celebration, and it was just a little bit sensitive, too. She did just what we all wanted to do – she touched that music, and she opened those shiny presents under the tree.