Recap Brother Ali at Barrymore Theatre

As opening MC Toki Wright started prodding the crowd to get ready for Brother Ali's set Thursday night at the Barrymore Theatre, DJ BK-One gave the audience a taste of crackling, soul-based beats full of warm bass and brass samples. At this point, Brother Ali could get away with simply lording his righteous outlook and rhyme skills over his fans, but this was a sign that his set would only make the room a friendlier, more joyful place. (The only thing weird about this customary live-rap hype fanfare was when Murs—not on the bill—popped out for a second to throw some CDs into the audience, then disappeared backstage for the rest of the night.) Ali came out to start his set with "The Preacher," from the awesome new album Us (which made this writer's best-of-music ballot for 2009, by the way), bouncing over the beat's punchy horn samples with a clear and unbeatably confident flow that ended up lasting through his entire set.

For a guy at the end of a 50-show tour, he couldn't have brought Madison (his birthplace) a tighter performance or a more generous mix of angry muscle and kindly healing. "Y'all motherfuckers have a party no matter what," Ali told the crowd as BK-One (a true workhorse who manned turntables, sampler, and laptop through Ali's set as well as Wright's and fellow opener Evidence of Dilated Peoples) fired up the beat for "Truth Is," from 2007's The Undisputed Truth. He actually made the song less heavy-handed than it is on the album, cutting out the chorus shout of "I want more, godammit!" as the word "MORE" flashed on a video screen above the stage.

"I don't compare myself to dead rappers," Ali boasted on "Best@It." Indeed, the whole set proved he can mostly go without the usual self-aggrandizing horseshit MCs often pull to pander to a crowd's base emotions, and still keep hundreds of hands in the air. Instead of yakking about his classic-rap influences or asking where his "real hip-hop heads is at," he told people to go out and buy Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker records to fight off the blues. Even on the infamous political rap "Uncle Sam Goddamn" and Us' "Bad Mufucker Pt. II," Ali mostly just made it fun, calmly teasing the power out of lines like "My nuts done swung / all around the planet, where the fuck y'all from?" After letting BK-One spin a track from his recent solo album Rádio Do Canibal, Ali went a cappella into "Us," raising his voice from a conversational cool to a barely contained rumble.

The set came to its close as the downright jolly triple-blast of "Forest Whitiker," "Take Me Home," and "Fresh Air" filled the room like fresh R&B helium, finding that elusive emotional place where the heavy reconciles with the light. "I got red eyes and one of 'em's lazy / And they both squint when the sun shines, so I look crazy," he said on "Forest," a hymn to imperfection; on the screen behind him, a montage of people held up self-deprecating signs that proclaimed their flaws (sample: "I'm hideous"). As an encore, Toki Wright and Evidence joined Ali onstage for a group rap, and in fact Evidence's verse on this tune might have been his best moment of the night (nothing against his solid opening set, though). This was the second-to-last stop on the crew's "Fresh Air" tour, but The A.V. Club hopes just about anyone who wants to put on rap shows came out for it. No hype guys or crum-bum side guys, no crowd-baiting gimmicks, just three MCs and one DJ busting ass and actually doing justice to their songs onstage: This should be the standard for live hip-hop.