POP MUSIC REVIEWS : BROWNE AND COMPANY LET SONGS DO THE TALKIN’

In pop music’s current politically conscious times, a benefit concert featuring longtime activists Bonnie Raitt, Graham Nash and David Crosby, and including a surprise appearance by Jackson Browne, might simply seem like business as usual.

But Sunday night’s COMADRES benefit at the Fox International Theatre was also notable for its performers’ low-key approach to politics: Though the cause could have inspired lots of rhetoric, the performers simply played loose, entertaining acoustic sets of music and stayed away from the speechmaking that can turn benefit concerts into well-meaning bores.

Since Jackson Browne matured into one of pop’s most potent and forceful political songwriters, he has written several songs appropriate to COMADRES, a peace group made up of mothers and family members of political prisoners in El Salvador.

But when he took the stage at the end of the evening, he instead sang an exquisite version of his rarely performed 1972 ballad “Jamaica Say You Will.” Like the others on the bill, he acted as if he were there to entertain an intelligent, activist audience that already knew about the cause--and by respecting the crowd in that way, the performers made for a casual but resonant evening.

Sure, there were speeches, but the politics were played down in favor of the music. After Argentine Julio Lacarra sang a brief set of songs in Spanish, Graham Nash and David Crosby delivered a 50-minute set that included a couple of new songs, plus chestnuts like “Almost Cut My Hair” and “Long Time Gone.” As with last year’s “Bridge” concert, the ragged, off-the-cuff set was in many ways a celebration of Crosby’s return after the drug abuse that landed him in a Texas prison.

Sunday’s near-acoustic format proved an ideal showcase for Bonnie Raitt’s gusty guitar playing, the stunning warmth of her voice and her ability to mix Delta blues songs with singer-songwriter ballads.