Fan of '60s soul brings the look and the sound

"Much as I enjoy performing for the back of everyone's cell phones, let's make this a technology-free show," the blue-eyed soul singer Mayer Hawthorne asked the crowd at Johnny Brenda's on Wednesday night. He may have just been expressing a degree of annoyance at the way audiences have turned into a sea of glowing screens (a step more performers ought to take), but the demand was of a piece with Hawthorne's desire to cram the near-capacity crowd into an economy-size WABAC machine.

Hawthorne's brand of easy, orchestrated soul is unabashedly revivalist. With its sparse, swinging beat and syncopated guitar, "Your Easy Lovin' Ain't Pleasin' Nothin' " was a barely veiled rewrite of "You Can't Hurry Love," delivered with a fan's enthusiasm, while "One Track Mind" bit huge chunks off of "Baby Love."

He didn't entirely stick to his own adage, unless the laptop at his drummer's side was for checking Twitter and not triggering loops, but the message got across anyway. The idea was to re-create the vibe of an old-school show, complete with matching suits for the three-piece band and a V-neck cardigan for the soul singer.

If it came off like an elaborate piece of performance art, that was only appropriate, since Mayer Hawthorne is an alias for Andrew Cohen, also known as DJ Haircut and a member of the rap posse Athletic Mic League. His alter ego, who looks like Tobey Maguire in the Spider-Man movies, was conceived as a joke, constructed porn-name style from his middle name and the street he grew up on. But Cohen's simulation of classic grooves caught on with an unexpected audience, drawing fans of the underground hip-hop label Stones Throw Records, whose artists opened the show with back-to-basics rhymes and classic flair.

On his debut album, A Strange Arrangement, being released Tuesday (and on which he plays most of the instruments), Hawthorne's soul simulacrum can seem a bit thin. But live he pushed things harder, straining his voice until his throat closed up. The snare drum was pushed up in the mix, bringing the songs to life and punching through the pastiche veneer. If he didn't bring things all the way back to the 1960s, Mayer Hawthorne succeeded in suspending the present, if only for a moment or two.