By Mike Edison

Tigers and elephants look great in the zoo, and who doesn’t love a polar bear sunning himself at the pool? But animals are always best viewed in their natural environment. When I get the jones to see a zebra, I’ll be on the next plane to Serengeti.

The same can be said for a lot of music, specifically when it comes to what the patched-elbows and liberal Birkenstock-wearers at the World Music Institute still call “world music,” a nomenclature that has been loudly razzed as disdainful and anti-Western since the early ‘80s when some marketing director made it up to help sell African artists to American and European smarty-pants, save-the-world types and hippies. (Just because an artist is white and from London or New York or plays psychedelic noise in Tokyo doesn’t make him part of the “world”?)

When the WMI and the generally humorless culture wonks at the National Endowment for the Arts get together to throw down a jamboree you can never tell if their intention is to entertain or to educate. At the Blind Boys of Alabama gig the other week at the New York City Center (also home to the New York Ballet), one never got the feeling of complete gospel abandon, the absolute frenzy and holy power that black church music can achieve under the best circumstances. Even driven by the very real spirit of the musicians, the whole thing veered closely to the experience of watching a diorama in an African-American history music.

The Blind Boys did indeed finish their set with everyone out of their seats and the absolutely dazzling singer Jimmy Carter pouring it on (Clarence Fountain, the octogenarian leader of the group, has been gigging only sporadically due to health problems), belting it out, and praising the Lord. But it was only a suggestion of how inspirational the Blind Boys can be in a church, at JazzFest, or even in a nightclub filled with rock ’n’ roll fans ready to testify, rather than a roomful of PBS-watching erstwhile John Kerry supporters, who seemed to make up the majority of the audience.

The Blind Boys were the final act of a four act “caravan,” which winded in vaguely chronological order as a brief history of African-American music, from slave songs with the Mackintosh County Stompers (dressed in period clothing); to the Dixie Hummingbirds, one of the finest of all the close-harmony gospel acts born in the 1940s; to Bob Campbell, a sacred-steel guitar player who would have benefited from a full-length set; and then to the Blind Boys, who ditto, would have been devastating if they only had more time. They were ostensibly promoting their new album Down in New Orleans, another winning entry into their late-career discography, but the Blind Boys’ music is timeless, their message — beautiful, strong, and rocking — unchanged in seventy years of singing.

Next week the WMI is putting on some sort of Cajun music concert, another stab at bringing indigenous country folk to the big city so that the educated tote-bag carriers here in Gotham can feel down-home. The show is at Symphony Space. I love Cajun music, but I am gonna wait for the crawfish boil. Or at least a gig in a bar.

[Photo Credit: Shannon Brinkman]