Perry Farrell, Cibo Matto Lead a Jubilee

Wearing multicolored robes, a sparkling red turban and a blissful smile while surrounded by tribal-hippie dancers gyrating to electronic beats on Monday at the House of Blues, Perry Farrell looked as if he’d finally found the role he was born to play.

And in Jubilee 2000, the campaign to get the world’s richest nations to forgive the massive debt of Third World countries, the frontman of Jane’s Addiction and Porno for Pyros and the creator of Lollapalooza has found the perfect vehicle in which to channel his idealism.

He clearly reveled in his capacity as headliner and host of Monday’s benefit for the drive, which also featured Cibo Matto and very promising L.A. act Medusa.

Part mystic guru (he connects Jubilee to his studies of ancient Jewish traditions) and part living legacy of his mentor Timothy Leary, the singer presided over an event that in Leary’s heyday would have been called a happening.

Farrell’s new music is well-suited to the scene, balancing his vocal keening of Hebraic-derived melodies in one song and the reggae inflections of another with a high-tech pulse and global-village melange.

Cibo Matto is itself a global village, as New York art-scene veterans Yuko Honda and Miho Hatori lead a tour through a spectrum of contemporary sounds.

In their six songs Monday, they ranged from sinewy R&B; to organ-drenched prog-metal to hard-hitting hip-hop, all run through the Japanese-born pair’s cultural and linguistic prism.

With Sean Lennon now on bass, the group (which plays tonight at the Palace) has coalesced nicely as a live unit, but it seemed to be just warming up when the short set came to an end.

Opener Medusa and her nine-member band impressed the crowd with a confident, well-honed blend of hip-hop funk and earthy presence not unlike that of Lauryn Hill.