A Reminder: Mayer Is Just One of Many Highlights at Benefit

A benefit concert can be a special thing, even a fragile thing. It’s not about celebrating any single artist’s career or chart action. And that’s the tradition of the annual Gimme Shelter benefit, a dependably rousing and eclectic gathering of sophisticated pop music talent.

At the Roxy on Wednesday, the event’s usual communal atmosphere was thrown slightly off balance by the focus of too many fans on singer-songwriter John Mayer. Excited cheering is fine and usually welcome, but many of these fans were undoubtedly the same people chattering loudly during the other acts and the ones who left when Mayer’s set was over.

Mayer is a charming enough young singer-songwriter with a light jazzman’s touch on the guitar, but his music hardly dominated on a bill that included Joe Henry, Frank Black, Glen Philips and John Doe, among others.

Black was at least unfazed. Though getting off to a slow, weird start with something he called “The Shrimp Song,” he soon dived into a pair of early Pixies tunes, demonstrating just how much darker and more disturbing his cryptic lyrics can seem when accompanied by only acoustic guitar.

Many highs and few lows otherwise emerged in the 31/2-hour concert, which benefited the H.E.L.P. Group, serving children with special needs.

The music was played with a common looseness and intelligence, from the brooding ruminations of Henry to the urgent storytelling of Doe’s “This Town.”

Other memorable moments came from James Walsh of the English band Starsailor, also performing solo acoustic to match his forceful vocals in the Richard Ashcroft vein. His voice was anxious and vulnerable, with an empathy that underlined the reason they were there.