The Honest Jon’s Revue started with more than two dozen musicians walking on stage. This made a good minute of theater: there were musicians from Mali, sitting down to ancient and modern instruments, from a one-stringed fiddle to an electric guitar. There were Americans too: among them a brass band, a folk singer and a soul singer. There were a few British hipsters too.
But more to the point, they all stayed there, through the whole of Saturday night’s concert. The standard strategy for a polystylistic, multicultural concert in New York City — the kind of thing that flourishes in the summer’s high-minded festivals — is that one act clears out before another appears. It’s assumed that the audience can take only one or two cultures at a time. But this was the opposite, a planned ruckus.
The concert taught without being pedantic and unspooled different kinds of grooves, mostly Nigerian and Malian but some American. You saw musicians wading into one another’s musical languages. But you also saw musicians smile, get bored, relax, chat, make sidelong glances and suddenly, spontaneously dance. Considering that this was Avery Fisher Hall — the concert was part of this summer’s Lincoln Center Festival — the stage had some street energy.
The connecting thread was the Honest Jon’s record label, and the ringleader was the English pop star Damon Albarn, a member of Blur and the Gorillaz, who helped found it in 2001. Named after and partnered with the great London record store, the label started with “Mali Music,” Mr. Albarn’s album of collaborations with Malian musicians. Those sessions included the guitarists Afel Bocoum and Lobi Traoré and the ngoni (Malian harp) player Kokanko Sata, three of this touring show’s stars. (Over the course of a week the Honest Jon’s Revue had also performed in London and Lyon, France.)
Since then the label has branched out into other enthusiasms: the ’70s Southern soul of Candi Staton, the art-brut acoustic Americana of the singer-songwriters Victoria Williams and Simone White. Mr. Albarn brought them as well into the revue, or the “chop-up,” as he called it — a Nigerian term for a feast. And since he was linking African grooves and Western pop, he enlisted another one of his connections: Tony Allen, the great drummer of Afrobeat, which was the Nigerian analogue to James Brown’s late-’60s funk.
You could accuse Mr. Albarn of a typical record-fiend trait. He seems drawn above all to the authentic and eccentric. (One of his ideas for the evening was a brass-band arrangement of “Rabbit Hop” by Moondog, the New York composer and outsider artist; likewise Ms. Williams’s bizarre, floppy twang is an acquired taste, and Ms. White deals in quiet whimsy.)
You could also get frustrated with the brevity of the concert’s best parts: Mr. Allen playing with the Hypnotics Brass Ensemble; the groove of Mr. Traoré’s band and his spiraling guitar lines; the rustle and cry of Ms. Sata’s voice over the driving rhythms she played on the ngoni; and Ms. Staton belting “Who’s Hurting Now,” an ominous new song with two chords and no bridge, with Mr. Allen on drums and the guitarist Simon Tong playing dry, echoey chords.
But that would miss the accomplishment of staging a complicated show in two hours and preserving an element of mischief. Musically Mr. Albarn, on harmonium, melodica and synthesizer, mostly created backgrounds. (He only came out front to sing one song, his “Sunset Coming On.”) But he kept the mood high, dancing, yelling encouragement, cracking up at sticky moments. Regional styles deserve individual respect, but all music is play, in the sense of having fun. With Mr. Albarn moving things along, grinning manically and never stooping to lecture, the musicians could merge their grooves.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: July 29, 2008
A music review on July 14 about Damon Albarn & The Honest Jon’s Revue, at Avery Fisher Hall, misstated the given name of a guitarist who performed. He is Simon Tong, not Peter Tong.
Posted By: Maria Monica Rocha
Tuesday, August 5th 2008 at 2:00PM
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