A P-Funk show is not a concert in the conventional sense. There is no pretense of a tight set, no clean transitions, no single performer anchoring the room while everyone else stands at their mark. What George Clinton has always sold — and what he delivered at Express Live! on February 18, 2017 — is closer to a traveling city: densely populated, governed by its own logic, with something happening on every corner at every moment.

Clinton arrived on stage the way he tends to — unhurried, already in possession of the room — dressed in his copper satin shirt and wide-brim hat, his cartoon-character pendant swinging from a chain. At 75, he moved like a man who long ago decided that the music would do the heavy lifting, and it did. He spent portions of the set seated at the edge of the stage, holding court, gesturing outward as if conducting an orchestra he'd built over five decades. That is precisely what he has done. Parliament-Funkadelic is less a band than an institution, and the Columbus show made the argument that the institution remains vital.

The scale of the ensemble was the first thing that registered. The stage was populated by a rotating cast that included guitarists Michael "Kidd Funkadelic" Hampton and DeWayne "Blackbyrd" McKnight, bassist Lige Curry, trumpeter Bennie Cowan, saxophonist Greg Thomas, and vocalists including Gary "Mudbone" Cooper, Robert "P-Nut" Johnson, Steve Boyd, Garrett Shider, and rapper Tra'zae Clinton. At any given moment, several of them were performing simultaneously and competing for your attention. The effect was not chaos — it was abundance.

Clinton's daughter Brandi Scott, known as Scottie Clinton, brought a theatrical command to her vocal turns, working the front of the stage in full costume with the confidence of someone who grew up understanding that restraint has no place in this universe. His granddaughter Tonysha Nelson was equally assured, holding her own in a lineup of seasoned performers. The family dimension wasn't incidental to the show — it was part of its meaning. P-Funk has always been a mythology, and like all mythologies, it is passed down.

That mythology arrived in full costumed form through the character of Sir Nose D'Voidoffunk, a fixture of P-Funk lore since Parliament's 1977 album Funkentelechy vs. the Placebo Syndrome. Sir Nose is the arch-nemesis of Starchild and Dr. Funkenstein — the villain who claims to be entirely devoid of funk and refuses, on principle, to dance. On stage at Express Live!, Sir Nose appeared in shaggy white fur and a Mardi Gras half-mask, doing headstands at the lip of the stage, his fur boots in the air. The irony of the character — a man who insists he cannot dance, performing acrobatic feats — is the joke, and the joke is decades old, and the crowd loved every second of it.

The Mardi Gras Madness tour framing gave the Columbus show a specific flavor: beads, purple and gold, carnival looseness. But the looseness was structural rather than sloppy. Clinton knows how to let a show breathe without letting it collapse. Songs extended and contracted around the room's energy. Horns pushed through the ensemble's low-end anchor. Guitarists traded phrases in the background while vocalists cycled through the front. The choreography of the whole thing — who came forward, who stepped back, when the groove shifted — operated by a set of internal rules that only the participants fully understood, which made watching it all the more compelling.

This is the version of a live show that most acts don't attempt and couldn't sustain if they tried. It requires an enormous amount of trust: trust in the musicians, trust in the audience, trust that the music itself will hold the structure together when the visible order dissolves. At Express Live!, that trust was warranted. Parliament-Funkadelic gave Columbus a carnival, and the carnival was entirely in control.