Roger Troutman led the crowd last Thursday night in a virtual mirror of their performance a year earlier, when Club Benson & Hedges brought the veteran funksters to BB King's. This year's Club B&H show, at Billboard Live, had a larger stage and more room for Zapp to caper and dance around, providing a powerful, if short-lived set of songs. They did favorites like "More Bounce To the Ounce," "Heartbreaker," and "I Want To Be Your Man," finishing the crowd off with a powerful rendition of the Death Row-ish "California Love," featuring two brothers in costumes illuminated with electric lights as stand ins for the late Brother Shakur.

This show had its share of unexpected pleasures, as a large brother with curly blonde hair, a loud and ruffly yellow overcoat and a lime green suit extolled the virtues of Christ and religion, as Latino rap sensation Frost walked calmly through the crowd with a group of his homies, dressed in a white suit and matching bowler.

The tour's second week picked up at BB King's Club on the Universal Citywalk, where Roy Ayers pounded through a surprisingly up tempo, funk-laden set. Standing mid-stage behind his electronically enhanced vibraphone, Ayers looked out at the crowd over his sunglasses and nodded his head coolly to the beat when he wasn't singing enthusiastically. Favorites like "Everybody Loves The Sunshine" were given a new sense of bounce with heightened pitch and speed -- perhaps with all the young artists sampling Ayers, he decided he could "remix" his own tunes.

The week's worth of performances ended at the always over-dramatic Century Club (where dressing up like you're going to church is the only way to go). The antics of Cameo were enough to rouse even the highfalutin' Century City stock, starting with lead singers Blackmon and Tomi Jenkins coming out as a faux wedding couple (Blackmon in a wedding dress had to be seen to be believed) to the strains of "Single Life" all the way through some of Cameo's earliest material, and rounding out with more recent hits like "Skin I'm In."

This tour has proven so well that when a good time is wanted, it's best to go with names you can quickly trust. All three shows had crowds demand riotously for encores. Troutman made for an animated feature, his longhair flicking around as he gazed bug-eyed at the crowd, smiling and shimmying for their pleasure, buoyed by the number of younger brothers helping out with dancing and vocals. Then, Ayers surprised everyone with boogie and funk too much for brothers half his age. Finally, almost all of the Cameo team - from their super-serious looking trombone player to founding member Nathan Leftenant's tortured bass playing to Blackmon's almost robotic, pimpstrut groove - banged on and on and on for more than an hour and a half with an enthusiasm and showmanship that is hard to beat.

It's a shame that the current legislation affecting cigarette companies will make this the last Club Benson & Hedges tour Los Angeles will see. Of course, it is a good thing to make tobacco companies more responsible for the damage their product does to human life, but events like this tour were a boon, providing quality entertainment for a community steeped in violence and lack of talent. Then again, perhaps we needed to have this smoke cleared from our eyes to see some other things, but it is still a shame to lose slamming shows such as these, and we can only hope that some harmless company like Coca Cola picks up the baton and keeps bringing us shows like these.