King Sunny Adé is the kind of man that you want to shower with wads of cash. Last night, in the Calderwood Courtyard of the Museum of Fine Arts, the crowd did just that.

It started when King Sunny Adé and his African Beats were locking in to their eighth number, an unusually chromatic nugget with a shuffling but insistent dance beat. A small crowd, which had spent the majority of the show dancing in isolation in the wings, lined up in front of the stage with hands full of dollar bills. They filed past the band, one at a time, each dropping his or her allotment of cash at Sunny Adé's feet.

Their offering initially set the crowd at ill ease. But the gesture seemed to receive a seal of approval when an older man, dressed head to toe in traditional Nigerian attire, penetrated the stage's meager defenses and made it rain dollar bills over Sunny Adé's head. That opened the floodgates, and the cash started rolling in.

"Thank you for the money giving," Sunny Adé told the crowd. "It reminds me of [being] in Africa."

If the feeling wasn't exactly mutual—the Calderwood Courtyard has the ineffaceable stateliness of Boston wealth—it echoed a sentiment that wafted through the cool twilight air. Friendliness and joy. "Are you feeling alright?" Sunny Adé asked. We were. "Feels so good up here, too," he replied.

King Sunny Adé and his African beats play juju music, a fusion of Nigerian Yoruba drumming, highlife, and about a dozen other genres. Last night's band featured five percussionists and three singers, which you'll need when your music includes both unadorned polyrhythms and a cappella call and response harmonies. It's dance music, so it has to have a solid anchor, and the hardest job of the night was probably sitting behind the drum kit. It can't be easy to marshall the rhythms of a band that mostly consists of other drums.

Since juju is a polyglot gumbo, an imaginative ear could hear all kinds of things last night. Disco, certainly, if only by way of "Soul Makossa," but also, weirdly, Chicago house. The keyboardist had a way of running through chord changes with one hand on his Korg's pitch shifter. There was even a moment, after the band had sped up to a breakneck tempo, when everybody slowed the beat to a slow and slurred standstill. Band members lurched across the stage like they were drunk—a joke—but the music they played sounded just like the postrock act Tortoise.

By the end of the evening, not a body remained in the folding chairs and picnic blankets spread across the courtyard. Everybody was dancing and clapping along with the music. (One advantage of polyrhythms? When a crowd starts clapping arrhythmically, there's a greater chance that any given member will be on beat.) Sunny Adé felt the crowd's energy and gave us some instructions.

"Men, ladies, things," he said, "let's bring the roof down." He looked up into the empty sky and changed his mind. "Don't bring the sky down. That would be bad for everybody."