Street Energy in a Festive Ruckus of African Grooves and Western Pop

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 Traor 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.)