The eclectic lineup was business as usual for Mr. Bragin, who, along with Walter Nick Durkacz, the club's longtime promoter, strives to present a worldwide spectrum of sounds. His quest continues on Saturday with Globalfest, an international music showcase at the Public Theater featuring 16 world music performers.

"Audiences are much more adventurous than a lot of people give them credit for," Mr. Bragin said. "People are listening to music from all over the world: from American pop, funk and techno to Asian and European hybrids of the same. This has been happening for 50 years, but lately it has accelerated."

When not cultivating world artists at Joe's Pub, Mr. Bragin can often be found bent over a CD turntable, cuing up techno-samba-break beat mixes for multiethnic hipsters at NuBlu, an East Village club where he moonlights as part of Globesonic, a New York-based D.J. collective. Along with his partners, Fabian Alsutany (a k a Sultan 32), who founded Globesonic in 2000, and Derek Beres, the managing editor of Global Rhythm magazine, Mr. Bragin is part of a loose but ardent coalition of D.J.'s, musicians and industry executives dedicated to the promotion of international folk and electronic fusion styles. Their genre-jumping tastes range from the gospel-country-blues outfit the Blind Boys of Alabama to the electro-Indian "nu jazz" of the avant-garde composer Robert Miles and the South Asian percussionist Trilok Gurtu.

"As a D.J., Bill spins music that is rooted, soulful," Mr. Beres said. "He loves the Brazilian, the percussive, the stuff that really gets inside of you and makes you move from your center point out."

The son of a professional trumpeter father and pianist mother, Mr. Bragin grew up in a Long Island household where bebop and swing alternated with Elvis Costello and the Beatles. He took his first steps as a promoter at Haverford College, presenting artists like Harry Connick Jr. and the Nigerian drummer Babatunde Olatunji. He saw how a musical program could make a cultural statement in 1990 while watching a double bill of the jazz pioneer Sun Ra and the post-punk band Sonic Youth at Central Park SummerStage.

"Having two very different artists on the same bill, and seeing those two communities come together, really affected me," Mr. Bragin recalled.

By 1994 Mr. Bragin was putting his own stamp on SummerStage as its artistic director; he has also done stints as a presenter for the JVC Jazz Festival and Symphony Space. Since coming to Joe's Pub - "a week before 9/11," he said - he has deepened the vocabulary of New York nightlife by helping to extend the Public Theater's multicultural mission into a live music site.

"What Bill has done with Joe's Pub is an intense manifestation of what I think the rest of the Public Theater is about - energy from the whole world is in that room," said George C. Wolfe, the Public's producer, who is planning to start an extension of Joe's Pub next summer at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. "Music can cross boundaries and borders before people can. It opens up the door to another kind of experience."

Mr. Bragin hopes Globalfest will "open the ears and eyes of the gatekeepers," he said, specifically the 1,500 members of the Association of Performing Arts Presenters, who are meeting in New York.

For Mr. Bragin, world music has a significance that goes far beyond catering to demographic trends. He cites the Qawwali, or Sufi trance music, made popular by the Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Kahn, as an example of music's transformative power. "There's a sensitizing that happens even if you don't understand the words," he said. "As it is with American gospel music, a lot of world music transcends the linguistic."