Burning Spear’s Faith Accompli : Pop music review: Reggae singer dazzles Galaxy crowd with his strong Rastafarian beliefs expressed with quiet conviction.

Winston Rodney is a force of nature of a different sort.

The reggae singer--whose stage name, Burning Spear, underlines the black-empowerment themes that go with his Rastafarian faith--is not the whirlwind of motion that some performers aspire to be, nor is he one to vent his passions in a voice of thunder.

Spear, who followed the Wailers, Jimmy Cliff and Toots & the Maytals as part of the 1970s wave of Jamaican performers who first spread reggae beyond the Caribbean, is more like a calmly but steadily flowing river that moves purposefully within its banks, sure of its direction.

Since his worldwide debut in 1975, Spear has been the reggae notable who has focused the most steadily on themes inspired by Rastafarian belief. Its core articles of faith include a belief in a return to Africa, and in the divinity of the late Haile Selassie, the seemingly mortal and fallible emperor of Ethiopia who was known as Ras Tafari Mekonnen before his coronation in 1930.

It was the poet William Blake who declared that “all religions are one.” In Spear, the Rastas have a representative who gives some credence to that--an ambassador who can break through the intellectual barriers most of us have toward this seemingly bizarre religion, and reach us with the radiance of his spirituality and the fundamental decency of his ideas.

Performing for about 500 delirious (and, presumably, overwhelmingly non-Rastafarian) fans Thursday night at the Galaxy Concert Theatre, Spear embodied something tremendously persuasive and appealing: a strong faith expressed with quiet conviction.

At 50, the white-bearded, robust-looking singer seemed like a Jamaican answer to Walt Whitman, but his delivery was often more self-contained than what the American bard probably would have gone for had he lived into the Microphone Age.

Much of what Spear sang registered as a flowing murmur, liquid, elemental, full-grained in texture and incantational in cadence. Spear’s arsenal also included a more piercing and insistent delivery, which he used for two climactic, show-closing homages to Marcus Garvey, the Jamaican-born father of the black nationalist movement. But in moving from gentle currents to authoritative statements, he never sounded strident.

The song that perhaps told the most about Spear’s confident, self-possessed temperament was “Identity,” which expressed his determination to resist infringement on his artistic freedom by a market-conscious “they.”

The usual pop mode in such cases is to assume the embattled-rocker stance and roar like Eddie Vedder on “Not for You,” or jab like Graham Parker on any number of his angry-at-the-record-biz sallies.

Spear, singing to his band’s skipping, lighthearted rhythms and the chuckling riffs of a three-man horn section, took the tone of an amused and tolerant adult who sees a cute tyke misbehaving. The implication was that, to a grounded, self-knowing artist such as Spear, those who might try to shape or distort his work are no more threat than a naughty child.

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The show went on for nearly two hours in the sweaty club, alternating well between those lighthearted moods and more trenchant songs founded on the slow but surging rhythms of struggle-oriented reggae.

Spear’s nine-man Burning Band was splendid, so tight that it seemed like a single organism. The horns shaped tart or humorous responses to Spear’s chanted phrases, a beaming, animated timbale and percussion player colored the rhythms deftly; the alternately sinuous and percussive keyboard lines and spiny guitar parts of traditional reggae were added by experts, and the whole enterprise rested on trenchant, bass-driven grooves that gave the band enough ballast to float an armada.

Throbbing on the packed dance floor, howling gleefully each time Spear embarked on a knee-pumping dance or called for an audience response, the audience made it clear that Spear’s “Rasta Business,” as his new album is called, was their business too, at least for this set.

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Some of the O.C. locals who have embraced Rastafarian beliefs are in the band Isouljahs, a multiethnic outfit whose 45-minute set contained melodic nuggets, but needed general, across-the-board tightening and refinement.

This is a very young band, so there’s time for that. Gino Tomasino, one of two lead singers, sang tunefully but with a punk rocker’s bluntness of tone; he needs to develop some of the more soulful inflections of his reedy-voiced, Marley-esque partner, Mikey Gamboa.

Funk from Scotland may be rarer still than Rastafarianism among Orange County youth, but the Edinburgh band Mouth Music followed the ‘70s-vintage Average White Band in establishing good groove credentials.

Singer Jackie Joyce’s thin, piercing, Diana Ross-like voice didn’t cut through well enough to make her mouthing intelligible, but they contributed to the band’s sultry, fever-dream atmosphere. Folk riffs on fiddle combined with Joyce’s diva sighs and the compulsive dance rhythms to form a new hybrid: Celtic disco music.