There was no shortage of costume changes or fan-blown hair, but Beyoncé's enthralling show at the Sommet Center last night was anything but frivolous or superficial. Backed by a large, all-"girl" band and a trio of gospel-steeped singers, the Houston native captivated her predominately female audience with a two-hour celebration of womanly uplift and solidarity.

Had it all been about Beyoncé, as her show's billing as The Beyoncé Experience reasonably would have led one to expect, things could easily have become mired in self-congratulation and grandiosity. With each member of her funky ensemble taking a turn in the spotlight, though, as well as with songs that persistently elevated her sisters in the audience, the star of the movie Dreamgirls transformed what might have been just an entertaining evening into a stirring communal event.

"Me, Myself and I," a paean to female empowerment from her 2003 solo debut Dangerously in Love, had the crowd on their feet singing along with every chorus and verse. Interpolating the salacious moaning from Donna Summer's "Love to Love You Baby," the vamping funk workout "Naughty Girl" had the women in the audience sighing for an entirely different reason.

"Check on It," a wry call-and-response, modeled ways that women can take control in the bedroom. Beyoncé dedicated her abbreviated take of Destiny's Child's "Survivor," itself a part of a medley of hits from her former trio, to those in the audience who had endured sexism and racism.

It wasn't like Beyoncé's club jams weren't a focal point of her show. If anything, the juking "Suga Mama" was even sexier and more gutbucket than on record, while on her fevered take of "Get Me Bodied," the singer whipped her audience into a libidinous lather.

The show featured more up-tempo numbers than ballads, but at least three or four of the latter proved vehicles for Beyoncé's deceptively voluptuous vocals, even if a couple of her melisma-rich, a cappella codas might have overdone things a bit. "Upgrade U," meanwhile, testified to her perhaps underutilized gifts as a rapper.

Maybe the evening's biggest surprise came when, in lieu of her beau Jay-Z's rhymes on "Dangerously in Love," Beyoncé sang Cee-Lo Green's freaky part from the chorus of Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy."

We might have done without a few of her other gestures, such as the pole-dancing during "Suga Mama" and the lip-shaped sofa she suggestively used a set piece for "Speechless," but employing an all-female band was inspired. The horn section evoked the heyday of George Clinton's Parliament-Funkadelic, the guitarist played an Eddie Hazel-meets-Eddie Van Halen interlude at one point and the bass player made like Bootsy Collins on a break that included everything from OutKast's "So Fresh, So Clean" to the schoolhouse ditty "Pop Goes the Weasel."

It's no wonder, in any event, that Beyoncé chose to run images of each of her musicians above the stage during her set-closer "Irreplaceable." They were.

By Bill Friskics-Warren,
Tennessean