There's a beer garden on the terrace overlooking the Fisher Green Stage, and for the last two days the stage has hosted afternoon sets that were just perfect to enjoy while sipping a beer and looking out over the lawn and the fountain, with Queen Anne up in the distance. (Although, you should really try to catch at least part of any good act from down on the lawn, as the sound will be dramatically fuller up front). Saturday was the reverent classic soul homage of Mayer Hawthorne & County, which was just ideally breezy and light. Yesterday, it was the international Benga group Extra Golden. All things Afro-beat or -pop seem to be enjoying a critical/popular resurgence right now, from the barely there inflections of it in Vampire Weekend to Dirty Projectors' more studied incorporation to countless comps of the real, often vintage African stuff coming out over the past couple years. Extra Golden begins even farther on the seriously studied side than Dirty Projectors, as founding guitarist Ian Eagleson formed the group while in Africa studying Benga for his PHD thesis, but it arrives at a unique place of genuinely cross-cultural collaboration, as Eagleson formed the band with musicians from Kenya's Orchestra Extra Solar Africa.

The band now consists of three white guys with punk/hardcore cred (guitarist Alex Minoff, who looks a bit like a young Michael Ian Black, played in Weird War, both he and Eagleson were in Golden) and two Africans with Benga cred. The band's singer, Onyango Jagwasi, was a genial frontman. Introducing one song, he said, "I'm having fun on the West Coast. I'm from the west side of my country, so any time I'm on the west coast I feel at home." Introducing another song, he said, "Now is the time when everybody has to dance, because I cannot do it alone." He then suggested, if people didn't dance, that he could come down and dance if we all came up and played music. Following another song of bouyant bass grooves and sunny, swiftly swirling guitars, he offered a caveat: "You dance at your own risk. If you try to follow my style, you might break your neck, and we're not responsible." (Between the accent and the delivery, his humor reminded me of nothing so much as Major Lazer character Prince Zimboo, only, you know, genuinely African.) A blue tarp covering some speakers kept flapping and thwaping against the speaker, pushed back and forth by pulse from the sub-woofer and the wind. Jagwasi, during the next song, exhorted the crowd with rubber-band elastic "yih yih yih." (Apparently at some point during the set, the bassist played one joking measure of the bass line from Vampire Weekend's "A Punk.") Does it mean that I'm getting old if I start digging some of the borderline "world music" at Bumbershoot? What if I'm drinking pinot grigio while doing so? In any case, Extra Golden's extended set made for a totally pleasant afternoon.