It’s dangerous to speculate which program of the two-day Playboy Jazz Festival will be the better one just by glancing at the lineup. Most of the time, you will be wrong. Someone might be having an off-day, one act doesn’t flow comfortably into the next, an overlooked veteran or a newcomer will suddenly get hot, the partying crowd might be distracted or drunk or obsessed with the Lakers game. Case in point: the Saturday concert outpointed Sunday’s in musical interest and energy level. Yet when the sun vanished behind the trees at the Hollywood Bowl, Sunday’s program was suddenly jolted to life by a man from Mali –  and the wave he generated rolled through the rest of the night.It was the great band of Salif Keita — the albino Malian superstar making his Playboy Festival debut — that launched the roll with one monster groove after another, accomplished with pithy, perfectly placed notes on Western electric guitars and thundering African percussion.

Keita, 60, mostly stood stock still, radiating dignity amid the turbocharged grooves, his voice maybe not as spectacularly keening as it once was, but now often almost conversational in character.