H.O.R.D.E.

In the mathematics of live rock, do four hours of good stuff, minus two hours of preliminary filler and 90 minutes of directionless jam-band dithering from the headliner add up to good tidings on the summer touring festival circuit?

In the case of the H.O.R.D.E. festival, probably not. That patience-taxing jam-rock crew Thursday at Irvine Meadows was Blues Traveler, the New York City band that launched H.O.R.D.E. (Horizons of Rock Developing Everywhere) seven years ago and seems to be its indispensable mainstay.

If continuing H.O.R.D.E., which played to about two-thirds capacity at Irvine, means having to sit through Blues Traveler every year, maybe it’s time to give it a rest--even though this year’s lineup deserves high marks for exposing worthy young veterans (Ben Harper, Barenaked Ladies, Fastball) and two new arrivals, Bran Van 3000 and Robert Bradley’s Blackwater Surprise, who turned in striking, delightful performances on the second stage.

Blues Traveler’s chief problem was that it really didn’t know how to give it a rest--as in those squiggly marks on a musical staff telling the players to hold off for a bit and give the music room to breathe.

Breath and musical open space were in short supply as front-man John Popper sang in a thin, winded-sounding voice and played his harmonica with tireless, tedious profusion. With its distinctive, merrily whistling harmonica tone, philosophical lyrics and occasionally hooky tunes, Blues Traveler showed promise when H.O.R.D.E. first hit Southern California in 1994. Commercially, the band has paid off on its promise, with a series of successful albums, including its 1994 breakthrough, “Four,” which has sold 3.7 million copies, according to the Soundscan monitoring service.

But as a concert band Thursday, Blues Traveler went nowhere fast. Each player sped through winding jams in which everybody was in such a rush to get in enough notes that nobody bothered to provide the rhythmic, centering ballast needed to give the music form, coherence and a sense of purpose. Chad Kinchla’s guitar playing was as flighty and shapeless as Popper’s harmonica; it took a guest turn by Marc Ford, the former Black Crowes member, to muster a guitar sound with clarity, bite and clean articulation of notes.

Blues Traveler began well enough with “Hook,” a hit anthem from “Four,” and a second number in which the speeding pace seemed like a good way to rev up a concert early on. But it veered from there and never found the group cohesiveness that powered this season’s Irvine Meadows show by the Dave Matthews Band, now the most successful H.O.R.D.E. alumnus.

Song after song just whirled ahead like a child’s top, which apparently was just fine with the neo-Deadhead dancers filling the aisles, whose fondest fantasy might be to let the music helicopter them away in body as well as mind. It’s too bad that Blues Traveler puts so much emphasis on fast travel and so little on the earthy, firm rhythmic basis of the blues.

That’s where Ben Harper came in, with lean, emphatic numbers firmly rooted in blues traditionalism, but sparked by a rocker’s fire. Harper, one of the few ‘90s arrivals who consistently grapples with big questions of spirituality and social justice, along with romantic troubles, challenged the audience by opening alone with an acoustic guitar, singing in the gentle, meditative voice that carries some of his most emotionally telling songs.

It was a gamble in an amphitheater, and the chatter during Harper’s introspective moments suggested that he’d failed; but at least he didn’t shy from representing his full musical self.

Harper could afford to take risks, since he had plenty of crowd-pleasing cards to play, including gritty lap-slide guitar workouts and rumbling funk passages adroitly powered by bassist Juan Nelson and a drums-percussion duo. The set went adrift on the Caribbean rhythms of “Breakin’ Down,” as Popper sat in with a poorly mixed harmonica sound. But while his own jams with his backing trio occasionally went on too long, Harper found a way to navigate between his folk-style inwardness and his blues-rocker’s fire; a closing cover of Jimi Hendrix’s “Voodoo Chile,” with the riff of Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” interpolated, signaled his large-scale rock ambitions.

A deserved breakthrough hit might give Harper the license to be as quiet as he wants to be for stretches of a big-venue show; otherwise this laconic sort is going to have to learn the experienced folkie’s art of setting up songs and drawing an audience in with effective introductions.

Barenaked Ladies, an object of fanatical devotion in Orange County thanks to a series of winning club gigs over the years, is reaping the success of its first U.S. top 10 album, “Stunt.” Long a big-venue act Canada, its home country, BNL effortlessly translated its blend of crafted, sometimes wistful pop and humorous antics to the large stage. Maybe a little too effortlessly: The band was sweatier and more kinetic in its club days here, when it still had a lot to prove.

Nevertheless, main singer Steven Page and his harmony sidekick, Ed Robertson, managed that arena-rock rarity--a feeling of spontaneity--with antics such as a humorous freestyle rap about the band’s stay the night before at a fancy Los Angeles hotel.

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The unexpectedness of BNL’s rise was the running theme for wry but celebratory humor during an hourlong, late-afternoon set. But it’s not that surprising given the band’s crowd-pleasing entertainers’ ethic, and its all-around musical virtues in which Page’s clear, sturdy, vibrato-powered voice (think of Morrissey on some very effective antidepressants) was supported by fine all-around playing and singing.

For a while, at least, BNL gets to be the new Squeeze, with less depth and firepower, perhaps, but with a similar tunefulness and skill to make a show fun.

Fellow Canadians Bran Van 3000 also had a main agenda of fun but didn’t forget to register emotionally. The nine-member ensemble played wittily (but also with obvious respect) with hip-hop conventions, mixing funk with pop-rock, techno, punk and what-have-you in half an hour of engaging pastiche.

The effervescence of the Tom Tom Club or B-52’s came through, but so did a streak of full-on feeling whenever Stephane Moraille stepped forward to front the group with heated soul singing (she did her best Tina Turner while fronting the band for a cover of the Who’s “Baba O’Riley”). Moraille combined with the airier pop tandem of Sara Johnston and Jayne Hill to give Bran Van a diverse, potent troika out front.

Fastball, enjoying million-selling success thanks to a modern-rock hit, “The Way,” came off like Wilco with a fatter bank account. The Austin, Texas, band cranked with authority on Stones-style rockers with occasional country tinges, akin to what the creatively marvelous but commercially feeble Wilco embraces. Fastball’s singers, Miles Zuniga and Tony Scalzo, don’t have the presence of Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, but their set gave strong evidence of the infallibility of tuneful, straight-ahead rock played with skill, grit and spirit.

Robert Bradley, a blind, snowy-haired former street singer from Detroit, was a ragged glory with his raw, gruff, feeling-filled soul-man’s voice. The peak moments of his half-hour set captured the unbridled release of desire connecting with its love-object, but also what it’s like to live in the shadows of hard times and neglect.

In those moments, Bradley seemed to embody what the young Joe Cocker had in mind, writhing and bending his slender frame with the flow of his simple, incantatory lyrics and the kick of his sympathetic yet hard-kicking backup foursome.

Among the opening acts, two unsigned local bands, Calico and the Underdogs, were not immediately striking, and Box Set, from San Francisco, offered pastel roots-pop, as if it was bucking to become the new Pure Prairie League.

Main stage opener Alana Davis bears watching. With echoes of a drawling Bonnie Raitt or a languid Maria Muldaur, she has some proven influences. Her songs weren’t as intense or memorable as they need to be, but with the backing of a solid trio, she had a bit more clout than on her too-smooth debut album.