Like Caetano Veloso, our friend from last week, Congolese singer/songwriter Sam Mangwana has mellowed a bit with the years. Last night at the Smithsonian's Baird Auditorium, Mangwana played a pleasant concert of selections largely drawn from his 1998 compilation, "Galo Negro."

Mangwana fronted eight other musicians, including an accordion player. A musical polyglot, Mangwana blends sounds from various African regions and adds a Caribbean inflection for a style he calls "Congolese rumba." There is a nice percussive mix behind his yearning vocals, but the whole sound is basically low-key and wouldn't be out of place as background music at a coffee house, although his lyrics are (reportedly) often political in content.

One of the most effective numbers, in fact, was a song about Angola that Mangwana and his two backup singers sang over just a couple of guitars. One of the guitars was acoustic and played by Papa Noel Nedule Montswet, whose pluckings of single-note lines were fresh, like mint in the middle of a heavy meal. Mangwana gave the stage over to Papa Noel to close the first set, in an apparently unplanned act of homage to his sideman's skills.

After intermission, Mangwana decided that the proceedings had gotten just a little too mellow, and so he stepped up the tempo and played a batch of rhythm-heavy numbers that had many in the crowd up on their feet, imitating the way the backup singers ran and sashayed in place. But I don't want you to think that I have been neglecting American music during these recent surveys of the world pop scene. Yesterday just outside of Sperryville, Virginia, where the Blue Ridge Mountains give way to souvenir stores selling apples and old baskets, the Page County Ramblers were holding a roadside seminar in bluegrass music. They played just outside of Cooter's, a roadside attraction run by Ben Jones that features more "Dukes of Hazzard" memorabilia than you might have thought strictly necessary. In between autographing jars of peach butter, Jones joined the Ramblers in singing tunes such as "Jambalaya" and the ecumenical "You Go to Your Church and I'll Go to Mine." So, there is life after Congress. The band, incidentally, is an excellent string-heavy ensemble -- they do a mean "Rocky Top" and can be found playing all around that section of Virginia that yet lies just outside the orbit of Greater D.C. sprawl, including next Sunday from 1 to 4 pm at Cooter's.