NEW YORK (AP) - Carnegie Hall was rocked alive - to keep the rainforest from dying.
Sting, Elton John, Billy Joel and James Taylor made music Thursday in tune with a seasoned audience that could pay $2.5 million in tickets - all to save more wilderness.
And Stevie Wonder appeared just in time for a final star chorus of Amen.
But this year's 10th annual Carnegie Hall event was mostly brassy and sassy, a three-hour stream of oldies steeped in Motown memories and strobes.
Gladys Knight, minus the Pips, and "The Impressions" - four fellows in yellow minus the late songwriter Curtis Mayfield - delivered some smoldering urban soul. Tom Jones belted out James Brown's '60s throwback It's a Man's, Man's, Man's World.
And there was a tip to our time: Ricky Martin, gyrating his way through Light My Fire. For once, he didn't quite set the crowd aflame; they greeted him with subdued enthusiasm.
It was a hum-along night at the classical hall, turned steamy by a capacity audience of 1,800 bodies clapping and dancing in their seats. They even whistled along, led by Joel singing Otis Redding's Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay.
Rarely do Carnegie's venerable walls shake with the music.
They did on this night - to the deep, vibrant band of some of the greatest backup artists, whose beat had the audience rising up to the occasion, quite literally.
This annual occasion goes back a dozen years, when Sting and his wife, Trudie Styler, met an indigenous chief in Brazil's Amazon region, where rainforests are being destroyed by multinational corporations.
"When the trees are bulldozed, a way of life is destroyed," Styler told an audience decked in everything from worn-out jeans and folksy tassels to drop-dead designer couture.
Fashion fun was also the order onstage. With Martin in a tux and Knight in a bare-shouldered gown, John stuck out in a white suit and shocking pink shoes. Sting whimsically introduced his fellow Englishman as "my boyfriend Elton John," who twirled a voodoo stick while turning on a gravelly echo of Screamin' Jay Hawkins for I Put a Spell on You.
At one point, bright-colored Afro-style wigs flew from a few stars' heads into arms fluttering above the $2,000 front seats.
And Styler delivered the message that goes with the money: The foundation will fund natives of Guyana to study law so they can fight their own battle to save their land.
"They want to know how to help themselves," she said.
Return to the concert information.