Conjure, Barbican, London

Funk, blues, free jazz, Latin ? and a man of mystery

It usually makes for excruciating embarrassment when literary heavyweights tangle with heavyweight beats, but novelist-poet Ishmael Reed ought to be more suited than most for such experiments. Music has always been a central theme in and model for his writing which mixes satire, fantasy and pop mythology with cultural borrowings from Africa, Haiti and Brazil. It's no surprise to learn that this pioneer of African-American postmodernism, who once dubbed his style "Neo-HooDoo", influenced the P-Funk universe of George Clinton.

In 1983, Reed's words were put to music on an LP called Conjure, under the aegis of producer Kip Hanrahan. But for this evening Reed joined forces with a new band from different disciplines – funk, blues, free jazz, Latin – and the result was a sometimes dazzling, sometimes frustrating mix of playfulness, muso indulgence and verbal gravity. Reciting his poems, Reed, grave and professorial in an unexpectedly sensible cardigan, proved slightly less commanding than the concert format called for. Only a few of his numbers made it in one piece through the muddy sound mix, notably a witty invocation of a jazz afterlife. It especially would have been good to get the full gist of his opening number, which appeared to be hot off the press, with its mocking refrain rasped by Taj Mahal in the tones of a callow Pentagon spokesman: "In a war, such things happen."

The band itself was big on charisma: versatile roots champion Taj Mahal, a genial colossus bellowing throatily from under a wide-brimmed hat; bassist (and sometimes Lou Reed associate) Fernando Saunders offering a plaintive Neville Brothers whine; and percussionist Pedro Martinez bursting into an unidentifiably weird dance routine, part breakdance, part cakewalk. Instrumentally, the night's two stars were from a left-of-centre jazz domain: violinist Billy Bang, trenchantly joyous and lyrical, and the prolific saxophone star David Murray, on especially boisterous form when he hit a shrieking R&B vein. When the playing gelled, the result could be really surprising: one number started out like calypso given the density of electric-era Miles Davis, then settled into a thunderous carnival march. But with so many different styles at their disposal, it was a shame that the band plumped much of the time for expert but routine soul-revue funk.

The night's great mystery was the role of Kip Hanrahan, artistic director and eminence grise. Hanrahan is a New York producer, composer and percussionist who makes extremely seductive, slippery and enigmatic records of his own, using highly improbable all-star casts (rather like sometime colleague Bill Laswell but nowhere near as prolific). Tonight, he restricted himself to prowling the edges of the stage, occasionally whispering in the players' ears. His role has sometimes been compared to a film director's, and he has been dubbed "the Jean-Luc Godard of contemporary music". In fact, testy, hirsute and bulky, he seems these days to have more in common with Stanley Kubrick, although Hanrahan wins hands down when it comes to being elusive.

Good fun was had by all, especially on the simpler material – one of Taj Mahal's jovial blues stomps, and a closing samba in which Reed himself bellowed the balmy joys of Bahian beach life. But all in all, given that Reed is a controversialist of some 30 years standing, it was all a little cosier than you might have hoped, and a classic case of the whole being less than the sum of the parts. Not that some of the parts weren't stunning. It was just a shame that Reed's words came off worst in the mix: time, perhaps, to go back to the now hard-to-find records of Conjure, and Reed's slightly easier-to-find novels.