He who best controls the rhythm controls the dancing hippies at the SnoCore Icicle Ball. Monday night at Bogart's, that was Karl Denson.

        The saxophone-playing leader of Karl Denson's Tiny Universe headlined the soul/hip-hop-flavored four-way tour, and he and his band's set was by far the crowd's favorite 90 minutes of the five-hour show.

        Rounding out the bill were poet-bandleader Saul Williams, hip-hop crew Blackalicious, and R&B diva-in-training Nikka Costa, whose return to town follows a December concert at Bogart's that generated a fair amount of buzz.

        Unfortunately for her, this time around wasn't as strong a performance. In December, Ms. Costa and her terrific band had all night to build the show's momentum, mixing some well-chosen covers and instrumental jams with the best material from her album Everybody Got Their Something. In the confines of the package tour Monday, she sputtered through an awkwardly paced 40 minutes.

        Her band is still a monster, and the album's title track was again the highlight. But the song didn't come until the very end, and not until after an ill-conceived speech about the perils of being a white girl singing the blues. The rap worked in December, because she was the headliner, people paid to see her, and she earned the right to preach after rocking the room. But Monday, it was a Tiny Universe crowd that she never quite won over, and the speech basically fell upon uninterested ears.

        Mr. Denson had no such problems; he barely uttered a word, instead leading the eight-piece combo in head-long jazz-funk numbers crafted for the wants and needs of the dancing hippies. The approach differed with his show-opening set last August at the So Many Roads hippie package tour stop at Riverbend, when he chose to play more straight jazz than funk. That show was less crowd-pandering and more listener-challenging, but headliners don't have the luxury to be so daring.

        Blackalicious was the low-key hit of the night, as they illustrated gangsta-free hip-hop isn't just for wimps, while Mr. Williams proved a man with an impressive vocal flow fronting a band with a less than impressive beat.

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