PERFORMING ARTS

Acoustic Africa

Showmanship is never lacking in Afropop, but the sort of elaborate staging seen at Lisner Auditorium on Sunday evening seemed unprecedented. Rather than play back-to-back sets, Mali's Habib Koite, South Africa's Vusi Mahlasela and Ivory Coast's Dobet Gnahore performed in a series of shifting lineups.

Despite this contrivance, the music never sounded forced, and the concert's highlights were rapturous. The "Acoustic Africa" showcase is not the first tour the Putumayo label has packaged to promote its line of easy-listening world music. It's just that this time the packaging was considerably more intricate. Members of Koite's Malian band and Gnahore's French one came and went along with the three featured singers, who alternately supported one another or sang in unison.

The frequent entrances and exits were a bit wearying, and the format prevented any individual singer from building much momentum. Yet the rapport of the musicians was clearly genuine, and the songs that featured all three performers sparked mass elation, with audience members singing along and dancing down the aisle and onto the stage.

Making her U.S. debut on this tour, the big-voiced Gnahore got the smallest share of the spotlight -- she was often reduced to a backup singer role, though she also demonstrated impressively gymnastic dancing. Koite, the most experienced of the three with American audiences, took a sort of avuncular role, allowing Mahlasela the grand emotional moments. The show climaxed with the South African's epic "When You Come Back," written for activists who would return after the end of apartheid. But then the first encore was one of Koite's biggest hits, "Cigarette Abana," a song whose actual and figurative electricity disregarded the "Acoustic Africa" concept.

-- Mark Jenkins

Maria Schneider Orchestra

Aperson wearing earplugs at a concert by the Maria Schneider Orchestra could easily follow the music simply by watching Schneider conduct. Sunday night in the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center's Kay Theatre, Schneider was jazz in motion: dancing to the rhythm section while leading with her arms, standing on tiptoe at climaxes, pulling a fist to punctuate a beat. Every gesture elicited some new facet of timbre, melody or rhythm, and the band's impeccable playing combined with Schneider's compositional vision made for truly transporting results.

Schneider's compositions break down traditional divisions between soloist and band, so that in "Aires de Lando," reedman Scott Robinson switched seamlessly between fluent, bewitching solos on his metal clarinet and purely orchestral playing. She also writes with an eye toward narrative; in "The Pretty Road," a depiction of Schneider's home town of Windom, Minn., Ingrid Jensen's fluegelhorn and trumpet solos created a giddy sense of anticipation before the glittering climax and denouement.

Novel, delightful tone colors constantly flickered across the orchestra, as in the "Choro Dancado" from the 2004 Grammy-winning album "Concert in the Garden," which on Sunday also benefited from a fetching Gary Versace accordion solo. And Schneider has the good sense to write with her band in mind, eliciting solos like Donny McCaslin's on "Buleria, Solea y Rumba," a burner that began in rhapsodic voice but wound itself up into a frenzy, driving a cathartic rhythmic modulation in the orchestra itself.

Yet Schneider's main goal is to move her listeners. Her simple melody (with a richly detailed chart) and an equally direct sax solo by Dave Pietro made the concert's final number, "Sky Blue," the most affecting of them all.