Charlie Watts Performs With Boogie-Woogie Band, as Keith Richards Lends Support Keith Richards showed up at the Iridium on Monday night to see Charlie Watts, his band mate in the Rolling Stones, play a set of jump blues and boogie woogie songs. There were rumors before the 8 p.m. set that Mr. Richards, the famed guitarist for the Stones, would sit in with Mr. Watts and his band, but it became clear halfway through the set that Mr. Richards was there only to provide moral support. He gave Mr. Watts a big hug as he came off stage. Mr. Watts and his band, the ABC & D of Boogie Woogie, had just finished a four-night stand at the Iridium, a relatively small jazz room on Broadway, after playing one night at Lincoln Center's Midsummer Night Swing series. The band is led by the German pianist Alex Zwingenberger, but has a secondary pianist and vocalist, Ben Waters, a stalwart Englishman who literally lifted the piano with his legs when he got swinging to the beat. They were joined by the bassist Dave Green, who is a longtime friend of Mr. Watts, and the vocalist Lila Ammons, the granddaughter of the famed boogie-woogie player Albert Ammons. It was an oldies set. Indeed it was a set of songs that would have been considered oldies back in the 1960s when Mr. Watts and Mr. Richards were young. The songs were all hot 12-bar blues tunes with a wicked walking bassline, drawing from R&B, jump blues, swing and early rock'n"roll. Mr. Watts and the band blazed through tunes like Ray Charles's hit "What'd I Say," Charles Calhoun's "Shake, Rattle and Roll" and W.C. Handy's "St. Louis Blues." They rocked several blistering, obscure boogie-woogie tunes, and slowed down only once in a while for some lazy blues, often with a comic twist, like Mr. Waters's rendition of "Oreo Cookie Blues," which is about a man fighting his addiction to sugary snacks. Mr. Watts, silver-haired, rail thin and fit at 71, seemed content and Zen-like behind the drums at center stage, where he used brushes, mallets and sticks to beat out the shuffle rhythms and swinging triplet-based figures of the musical era that preceded his own. Though he is most famous for his work with the Stones, Mr. Watts has always done jazz side projects, going back to the 1970s when he joined the back-to-basics boogie-woogie group Rocket 88. He started performing concerts with the ABC&D of Boogie Woogie three years ago, and in 2010 he recorded the album "The Magic of Boogie Woogie" as a trio with Mr. Zwingenberger and Mr. Green.