Hill spreads her funky word

Truth be told, it was hot enough out to approximate at least the outer circles of Hades, with gusts of warm wind making it feel as if you were standing in front of a giant hair dryer.

Still, Lauryn Hill was all bundled up, sporting shades and a ballcap, looking as if she were trying to go incognito on this stuffy Saturday night.

Taking the stage an hour past the show’s scheduled 9 p.m. start time because of technical difficulties, Hill set her purse down, wound herself up, and then rhymed and proselytized as if she were being chased by demons.

She didn’t sing so much as testify, at least at first, bellowing into the microphone as if the crowded Sandbar lacked a public address system and it was solely up to her to ensure that everyone could hear over the splash of concertgoers cooling their toes in the pools surrounding the stage.

Abetted by a 10-piece band and a clutch of backup singers, Hill and company pounded out determined, full-bodied funk with martial, insistent grooves that favored bombast over brevity.

Hill mostly sang of God, love and revolution, of piety and self-determination, joining concepts that are sometimes at odds with one another.

Hill long has embodied this friction, a sultry singer with a streetwise gruffness, a Bob Marley-indebted Bohemian with a penchant for balling up her fists, jutting out her chest and approximating the machismo that’s come to define much of modern-day hip-hop.

Live, she’s all these things, all at once, a kinetic, off-kilter bundle of tuneful contradictions.

Hill mostly has been out of the public eye since the release of her 1998 solo debut, "The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill," and she has developed a reputation for being mercurial and flighty; she didn’t even bother to show up for her last gig in town at Prince’s 3121 club in February.

But she was in energized form at the Sandbar, kicking her knees high up into the air, windmilling her arms about like a softball pitcher and bounding across the stage with such vigor that she fell down at one point.

"I didn’t lose my hat," she announced proudly as she picked herself up from the spill.

Initially, Hill’s exuberance threatened to swallow her tunes whole, as she overpowered some numbers by practically shouting through them.

But she eventually found her footing, gliding through such standards as Roberta Flack’s "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" with satin replacing the steel in her voice.

She revisited some classics from the group that initially made her famous, the heady hip-hop trio the Fugees, growling out "Ready Or Not" and "Fugee La La," bobbing and weaving over the beat like a shadow boxer.

Throughout the night, Hill further elaborated upon that group’s Caribbean leanings by flushing her songs out with massive percussion, wah-wah bass lines and ska guitar.

But just when the crowd began to grow restless, Hill encored with all the hits, purring through Flack’s tempestuous torch song "Killing Me Softly" and her signature hits "Everything Is Everything" and "That Thing" as throngs of revelers danced with their shoes off.

"How many mics do we rip?" Hill had asked in song earlier on in the night, and the crowd answered for her: Many, many, many, many, many.