For D.C.’s Caribbean community this is THE weekend—the loud, brash Saturday parade featuring participants in Technicolor costumes plus countless concerts and parties with sound systems turned up to 11.   But if you don’t like reggae and soca, this weekend offers numerous other international and roots music choices.  Around this time every year, I run into Fugazi drummer Brendan Canty and numerous Glen Echo dancers at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival.  While my editor wants me to acknowledge that some consider the event a “tourist trap,” the aforementioned people and I know better.  See some of the highlights of these events and more below, including Tinariwen, Pitbull, the Magnolia Sisters, and the Eat, Drink, and Be Merry panel discussion:

Fri. June 25 –

Nguyen Dinh Nghia (a Vietnamese-American flautist), the Korean American Cultural Arts Foundation, the Nepal Dance School, and two Laotian American groups, LAWA and the Swan Dance Group,  plus from Mexico Chinelos de Atlatlahucan,  Son de Madera Trío and more between 11 a.m. and 5:30 p.m. for free at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival on the National Mall.  Skipping out from work to see Chinelos from 2 to 3 p.m. is recommended—they are a  carnivalesque dance troupe with boisterous horns and percussion who are often costumed in velvet gowns and tall head dresses meant to mock  Spanish colonizers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

An evening Filipino concert will feature FIL-AM Dance Ensemble and Northern Virginia Rondalla from 6 to 8 pm at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival.

An evening Mexican concert will feature Mariachi Tradicional Los Tíos (from El Manguito, a remote community in the Sierra Madre Occidental mountains), Hamac Caziim (artsy offbeat Native American/Mexican rock), and Grupo de Fandango de Artesa Los Quilamos (Mexican music from the southern coastal region of Oaxaca that combines indigenous, African, and Spanish elements) from 6:30 to 9 pm at the Smithsonian Folklife Fest.

Tinariwen w/ Miles Seaton (Akron/Family), and Geologist (Animal Collective) doing a dj set at the 930 Club.  Tinariwen,  Tuaregs from the Malian portion of the Saharan desert, offer mesmerizing droning guitar.