POP MUSIC REVIEW : Adventurous, Wide-Ranging Set From Black 47 at the Roxy

Black 47 leader Larry Kirwan seemed an unlikely rock-star candidate fronting his band at the Roxy on Monday. The Irish-born New York resident is small and pale, frail and bookish, with a voice to match.

But he’s wiry--and so are his vibrant story-songs and the six-men-and-a-beat-box band’s joyous sounds. Funk, reggae, hip-hop, circus jazz, metal blues and who-knows-what-else all get reeled and jigged as if the Emerald Isle is the source of all music.

The way Kirwan writes and performs, he might actually be able to get you to believe that it is. If the band leaves no musical stone unturned, Kirwan leaves no Blarney Stone unkissed in his tall tales and spurious adventures. In that regard, he came off Monday as almost an Irish equivalent of the young Bruce Springsteen.

“Funky Ceili”--the story of how he fled Dublin for America--is nothing if not an Irish “Rosalita,” and the raucous chumminess of Kirwan and the rest of the group recalls that of the early E Street Band.

At times the sound, with blaring horns and Kirwan’s screaming guitar duking it out with Irish pipes and tin whistles, veered toward gimmickry. But most of the time the blend was so imaginative and life-filled it was hard to argue.

And a furious encore of Van Morrison’s “Gloria” served to remind that maybe all music--not the least of all rock ‘n’ roll-- did come from Ireland.