You got the feeling Wednesday night that Natalie Cole couldn’t have been happier to be pulling into the Hollywood Bowl nearly two months late for her gig.

“I never thought I’d be standing here healthy, whole and 100% again,” the 59-year-old singer told the crowd, which cheered her return to the concert stage following a kidney transplant in May that prompted the postponement of her scheduled July 15 concert.

Her recovery -- guest gospel singer Kurt Carr called her “a walking miracle” when his 10-member choir joined her near the show’s end -- made for a warmly emotional backdrop to a performance dominated by music drawn from the Great American Songbook. She tapped that trove anew last fall in “Still Unforgettable,” the successor to her multiple-Grammy-winning 1991 collection, “Unforgettable With Love.”

Backed by a big band plus the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, conducted with snap by “Still Unforgettable” co-producer Gail Deadrick, Cole, looking dazzling in a strapless purple gown, reclaimed her birthright in tastefully arranged, masterfully sung pop standards such as “The Man That Got Away,” “Come Rain or Come Shine,” “Walkin’ My Baby Back Home” and “Smile.”

“Dawg! When you hit that high note -- 'That’s the the way that love’s sup-POSE-ed to be' -- THAT was the Faith we’ve come to know and love throughout this competition. That was hot -- you ARE the next American Idol!!”

Oh, that’s right -- Faith Hill got the jump on "American Idol" long ago. Yet it was tough Friday not to keep watching from the wings during the opening of her two-night stand at the Hollywood Bowl expecting Randy Jackson or Paula Abdul to pop out and give her a standing ovation.

She’s everything “AI” contestants strive to be: outwardly humble, vocally unrestrained, temperamentally not too hot, not too cold. Hill’s the diva for people who don’t like divas, so even-keeled there’s never a hint of the kind of distracting quirk that can come with a Whitney, Celine, Madonna or even a Kelly.

On Friday, that meant despite the added forces of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra behind her six-piece band and three backup singers, there was a striking shortage of musical electricity during the 65 minutes she was onstage.

Not a shortage of volume or sonic density given close to 100 musicians were there with her. But Hill’s music studiously avoids any sort of dynamic tension or thematic ambiguity that might give listeners a second thought. Or at times even a first one.

The band gives L.A. fans a taste of all of its sounds: loud, soft, funky, spacey, inspired and not-so-much.

Some rock bands are of two minds (or more), struggling with competing impulses and uneven results, sometimes loud, soft, inspired or not. Incubus is like that, a cosmic jam band ready for either an endless funk-metal groove or a sudden eruption of melody and forward momentum.

When the pieces come together, Incubus is explosive and inspired, matching the melodic gifts of singer Brandon Boyd with the focused riffs and beats of the band. It's helped them build an impressive number of radio hits (collected on the just-released "Monuments and Melodies"), but also has fallen curiously short elsewhere.

At the band's 100-minute hometown performance at the Hollywood Bowl on Monday, fans heard all of it: the soaring pop hooks, the churning guitar of Mike Einziger, the stuttering DJ effects, the weakness for plodding funk and the growing distance between the band's best and least satisfying work. The new, two-disc best-of collection makes a strong enough case for the Incubus sound, gathering hits and rarities originally influenced by the heavy funk of Primus and Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Initially aligned with the '90s "new metal" movement, Incubus was always less rage-fueled than peace-loving. Lyrics of inner struggle outnumbered any on anger management, far less about the nookie than the hippie dream. There were no grand mission social statements on the level of Pearl Jam, but at the Bowl, Boyd wore a T-shirt reading "Make believe, not war" as the images of street protests, riot police, mushroom clouds and a winged Adolf Hitler flashed behind him during a stirring "Megalomaniac."

Even within that single song, the band's competing musical impulses formed an uneasy balance, seeming to drift amid static and effects only to explode with immediate clarity through the shouted hooks of Boyd: "You're not Jesus / Yeah, you're no . . . Elvis / Special, as you know yourself, maniac / Step down!"

Incubus is dependent on those soaring vocals. Without them, the SoCal band can slip into swirls of sound without focus. That was evident in the night's opening song, a shapeless working of "Privilege," a song from 1999 that doesn't appear on the new retrospective, but got the concert to a sludgy, puzzling start. Soon, Incubus returned to its strengths, as the brooding, existential "Nice to Know You" rode along several satisfying vocal highs and lows, from a warm Daryl Hall-like croon to the roar of a vocal melody across some of Einziger's toughest riffs.

David Campbell had a unique vantage point for observing the first sprouting of the musical vision of a certain modern rock hero: his son, Beck.

“When he was first starting to get interested in music, I think he was around 11 or 12,” said Campbell, who’ll be conducting the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra on Sunday behind Ray LaMontagne at the Hollywood Bowl, one of four concerts for which he’s created the orchestral arrangements to accompany a variety of pop and rock performers.

“Earlier than that he was mainly writing -- stories and poems -- so I thought he was going to be a writer,” said Campbell, who was busy at that time in the early ‘80s scoring string, horn and full orchestra arrangements for a wide array of recording artists. “He was hanging around the studio a little bit at the time, and one day I thought I’d take some time and show him some stuff about what I was doing.

“Somewhere about five minutes into it, he stopped and says, ‘That’s really cool -- but what if you did it this way?’ I forget what it was, but he said something really cool and it took me by surprise, and I had the thought, ‘Wow,  I should shut up and just ask him what he thinks.’

“That’s kind of set the pattern for our collaborations ever since, because he has such a unique perspective on creating anything, really: music, drawings, conceptual stuff,” said Campbell, who has contributed musically to nearly all of Beck’s albums.

“So that’s basically how it rolls. When we work together, the first thing I want to know is, What does he think? And then I fill in.”

Related: Death Cab, Fogerty and the Phil? David Campbell gets it.

--Randy Lewis

Photo: Stefano Paltera / For The Times

*Update: An earlier version of this story said Campbell would be conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic on Sunday with Ray Lamontagne.

Press release just in from the Hollywood Bowl:

It was a chocolate and champagne sort of night at the Hollywood Bowl.

The festive mood at Friday's season-opening concert proved extra-conducive for enjoying those consumables from one's picnic basket, while, in a more fanciful sense, those flavors wafted on the air as cocoa-voiced Josh Groban and effervescent soprano Kiri Te Kanawa performed separate sets as new inductees into the Hollywood Bowl Hall of Fame.

The venue calls it 'creative packaging,' pairing acts like Death Cab for Cutie and the L.A. Phil; Adele and Etta James; and Grace Jones, Of Montreal and Dengue Fever.