Janet Jackson offers career-spanning journey as Together Again Tour hits Pine Knob

Traversing her four-decade catalog of hits with vivacious moves and sensuous flow, Janet Jackson injected plenty of charm and contagious energy into a nostalgic Tuesday night at Pine Knob Music Theatre.

The tightly executed, 1¾-hour show had a celebratory feel for a packed house at the Clarkston amphitheater, where an impressive number of younger fans piled in alongside Jackson’s core Gen X audience to to sing, dance and scream.

You’d be hard-pressed to find a 39-song concert that moves as briskly as this one, and even the handful of costume changes Tuesday — which put the star in everything from sparkling jumpsuits to tartan outfits — did little to slow the pace. Jackson, keeping with her time-tested onstage style, kept chatter to a minimum, offering the occasional “whatupdoe” and “I love you so much, Detroit” as she made her latest visit to a metropolitan area that figured big in her famous family’s musical rise via Motown Records.

The Pine Knob stop came as part of Jackson’s lengthy Together Again Tour, which played Little Caesars Arena more than a year ago and wound its way back to metro Detroit Tuesday with a revamped song lineup.

The set list leaned heavily on Jackson’s older stuff, pulling just a pair of songs from her last album of new material, 2015’s “Unbreakable,” including sparkling show opener “Night.”

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That meant the crowd got a generous helping of music from her career-defining records of the ’80s and ’90s: a cooing “When I Think of You,” a feisty “Nasty,” a frisky “Miss You Much,” a spiky “Control” and, of course, the wistful 1997 hit that lent the tour its name, “Together Again,” which capped the night’s encore.

And while the music she recorded in the 2000s, when she began incorporating elements of hip-hop and electropop, may not have scaled the same global chart heights, Jackson was very much invested in it Tuesday, leaning hard into material such as “Feedback,” “So Excited” and “With U,” the last of which included a risqué sequence with her dancers.

Jackson’s voice retains its weightless, soft-lit quality, though it was enhanced Tuesday night by piped-in tracks (which suffered audio glitches at least twice). Production-wise, the Together Again outing isn’t nearly at the scale of some Janet tours of yore, but the four male dancers and five-piece band accompanying her helped keep it a dynamic affair, the choreography delivered in crisp bursts.

Even at that lower bandwidth, the show still had the glossy, high-energy essentials that served as a reminder of just how much Jackson, 58, helped establish the look and feel of modern pop concerts.

As the last of the four acts that made up Jackson's main set, a “Rhythm Nation 1814”-heavy closing sequence made for a fierce finale — punctuated by a performance of 1995’s searing “Scream,” with her late brother Michael appearing as duet partner via video screen.

Contact Detroit Free Press music writer Brian McCollum: 313-223-4450 or bmccollum@freepress.com.