If Pam Fleming is the human crescendo, Senegalese kora player and jazz composer Sekou Keita is the human helicopter: he can stop on a dime and take off from the same place in a split second. Throughout his first set at Drom last night, he bedeviled both his bandmates and the audience with innumerable, devious false endings. The crowd would be about to burst into applause, the band ready to wind up the song, but Keita would keep going. Keita proved that like Fleming, he also can pull a crescendo out of thin air and make it seem perfectly natural.

Keita’s kora – an African harp that can also produce sounds like a piano or a zither – has a built-in wireless transmitter connected to a pedalboard, just like a rock guitarist (because he uses standard Western tuning, yes, he uses the same tuner pedal that you see out in front of the guitarist at every rock show). Occasionally, when he really wanted to kick up the energy, he’d add a blend of chorus and delay that impressively replicated the twangy sound of a sitar.

He and his quintet – rhythm section, violinist and Keita’s sister singing both lead and harmonies – began with a surprisingly, dark, pensive, smooth-grooves jazz number in 4/4. Keita’s new cd The Silimbo Passage is upbeat and frequently joyous with a dazzling display of polyrhythms, so this was quite a surprise, both thematically and rhythmically. It was also one of the best songs of the night: more smooth-grooves people should discover the acoustic approach (it worked wonders for Carlos Jimenez).

They picked up the pace, and the rhythmic complexity, after that. While Keita’s playing on the new cd doesn’t explode with the same scorching intensity as, say, Mamadou Diabate, at this gig – his New York debut – he capped a handful of solos with breathtakingly fast runs down the scale that wouldn’t be out of place at all in the Diabate songbook. The violin played mostly ambient washes, filling out the sound; the bassist frequently echoed Keita’s lines on the lower registers, and the drummer alternated between a booming bass drum and clattering, scattershot percussion on what looked like an upside-down turtleshell. For the most part, the songs  – a mix of instrumentals and vocal numbers sung in Keita’s native dialect – were happy and exuberant, but hardly shallow. Fun like this isn’t always easy to find.

One of the night’s more memorable numbers managed to take a simple doo-wop progression (leading to innumerable chicken-or-the-egg questions: was this a rock song, or could it be that the roots of doo-wop are Senegalese?) and built it to a firestorm of notes, Keita gritting his teeth as he made his way down the scale with supersonic precision. Their last song began with a relentless, percussive frenzy, everyone beating on something until there was nowhere left to climb and the kora kicked in. It was something of a shock that there were actually some empty seats: Keita is a star in his homeland, and rightfully so.