POP MUSIC

Corey Harris

Corey Harris, the blues-singing, guitar-picking, MacArthur-certified genius of all styles, has spent his life exploring the world's music, soaking up everything from Cameroonian makossa to Texas blues and fusing it into his own distinctive, forward-looking style. With last year's "Zion Crossroads" he headed into roots reggae, and on Sunday night at Blues Alley he proved that this latest journey was well worth the trip: There's a political current running through his music now that gives it real power.

Playing hollow-bodied electric guitar and backed up by his 5x5 band, Harris devoted most of the set to songs from "Zion," including "No Peace for the Wicked," "In the Morning" and the driving "Ark of the Covenant." Harris's reggae is nuanced, message-heavy and relatively low-key -- more Burning Spear than Bob Marley -- and despite a put-on Jamaican accent it felt edgy and authentic; Harris may be eclectic, but he's no mere imitator.

The famously warm, growling voice was in fine form, set mostly on a slow burn but occasionally exploding with passion, and Harris displayed his legendary finger-picking skills in bluesy numbers such as "Mami Wata" (dedicated to the victims of Katrina), "More Precious Than Gold" and the makossa-inflected "Sister Rose." But some of the most memorable moments of the evening came when the band (including the fierce, funky Houston Ross on bass) left the stage and Harris played half a dozen acoustic numbers by himself. Spare and haunting, they had a quiet power that showed just how deep Harris's musical currents really run.

-- Stephen Brookes

YMCK

If YMCK had done nothing more than bring an antique Nintendo game console to the Kennedy Center's Millennium Stage, the pop-tech fetishists would have been satisfied. Before the engagingly goofy Tokyo trio even entered, a video image of the 25-year-old device elicited cheers from the crowd. Fortunately for the non-cultists present, YMCK also had songs, stage business and some amusing patter.

Composer Takeshi Yokemura constructs YMCK's "chiptunes" from the limited sounds produced by the obsolete 8-bit system that animated such primordial vid-games as Super Mario Brothers. (The group's name derives from the console's four colors: yellow, magenta, cyan and black.) Stylistically, the trio is equally retro, although not especially 1980s. Singer Midori Kurihara's red-and-white carhop outfit suggested the '50s, and the synth-pop was tempered with '60s samba and '40s big-band swing. More chronologically apt were keyboardist Tomoyuki Nakamura's low-resolution videos, which invoked Tetris and other games and incorporated the logo for the Kennedy Center's "Japan! Culture and Hyperculture" festival, the occasion for YMCK's appearance.

Yokemura, who did all the talking, claimed that the early Nintendo system offered "just enough to express all kinds of music," an assertion he backed with quick, low-fi sketches of raga, tango and reggae. Actually, YMCK's music sounded thin, as did most of its songs. The performance was carried more by high spirits and good humor than 8-bit pings and bleeps.

-- Mark Jenkins