The Whole World Gets Into the Groove At Globalfest, Music Speaks Many Languages “Are you ready to party with us?” asked Baloji, a Congolese singer, songwriter and rapper, as he kicked his band into a sunny, danceable three-chord soukous groove during Globalfest 2014 at Webster Hall on Sunday night. The song bounded along with lyrics in Lingala. Eventually, in English, Baloji gave instructions for a dance step: “Run for cover — protect yourself, because the army is shooting on you, you, you, you and your people,” he said. “So if you want to stay alive, stay down, down, down,” he continued, cuing the audience to crouch. It was a sly reminder of language barriers, cultural expectations and the fact that musical styles come from particular places and histories. The 11th annual Globalfest — a five-hour, 12-act world-music showcase — was full of fusions both geographical and temporal: local and far-flung, old and new. What fortified nearly every performance was the sense that the music still comes from some place like home. That was true for the Como Mamas, three women from Como, Miss., singing familiar gospel songs with a cappella gusto. Each one took the lead while the other two sang responses, working the repetitions up to raspy affirmations; then one woman would preach a little while the other two caught their breath. And it was true for DakhaBrakha, which means give-take in old Ukrainian. Formed at an avant-garde theater in Kiev, DakhaBrakha brought measured drama and dynamics to each of its mournful songs. It’s a four-member group that plays cello, percussion and assorted accordions: small and large, with buttons or keyboards. Its three women wore white dresses, tall woolen hats and, like Britney Spears, headset microphones. The songs are steeped in Ukrainian folk tradition but not bounded by it; they deploy the piercing vocal harmonies of Balkan music, the drones and systematic unfolding of Minimalism and the drive of African and dance music. The songs built from lament to catharsis — and sometimes, just as meticulously, returned to lament. Noura Mint Seymali, from Mauritania, comes from an ancient family of griots, and she has a commanding, wide-open voice. She played an electrified ardine — a kora-like harp — backed by guitar, bass and drums with rhythms out of rock and funk; the pentatonic melodies of her songs had something in common with the blues. But her fusion was particular and selective. Her vocal inflections came straight from the Sahara: arabesques, quavers, ululations. And her guitarist and husband, Jeiche Ould Chighaly — also from a griot family — played his electric guitar with the staccato stutters of an African lute. She only meets American music on her own terms. Fanfare Ciocarlia, a leading Serbian brass band, pushes its tradition to extremes. Its oompah is revved up to thrash-metal speeds; bass lines from two tubas made the floor shake; its trumpets and saxophones raced through melodies like bullet trains taking hairpin turns. It was brutally exhilarating. A bouncier horn section — part mariachi, part soul band — buttressed the songs of Sergio Mendoza y la Orkesta, from Tucson, which played Mexican-style cumbias, polkas and mambos (and Fleetwood Mac’s “Tusk”) with a few twists, like guitar solos out of psychedelia and surf-rock. The singer Salvador Durán delivered them with old-fashioned romance and near-operatic vibrato. Kuenta i Tambú, a group from Amsterdam with members from the Dutch Antilles, wants the wider world to hear tambú, an African-rooted percussion-and-vocal tradition from Curaçao. Its set mingled tambu with the simpler, more familiar rhythms and pop refrains of electronic dance music, soca and hip-hop, with its lead vocalist, Diamanta von Lieshdeck, rapping in both English and the Antillean language Papiamentu. The six-beat complexity and metal percussion of tambú arrived, strategically, as peaks of momentum.

Globalfest’s other Caribbean representative was Brushy One-String, a solo performer from Jamaica who has had millions of views on YouTube. He made himself a vocal menagerie: soul belter, rapper, scat-singer, reggae crooner, dub toaster and cackling character actor. That put considerable variety into kindly songs that he accompanied, skeletally, with bass lines from a guitar with just one string. Some of Globalfest’s fusions weren’t as completely jelled. Yasmine Hamdan, a Lebanese singer based in Paris, was aiming for a blend of Arabic pop and psychedelia, but squandered her supple, enticing voice through electronic effects. Hassan Hakmoun, the Moroccan musician based in Brooklyn who plays the sintir — a lute used for propulsive riffing — introduced a new group that hasn’t yet forged its own sintir-driven jazz-rock. Bombay Royale, a merrily costumed Australian group attempting to mingle vintage Bollywood styles with surf-rock, came across as a novelty act. The Wu-Force is the latest country-and-eastern project from Abigail Washburn, a banjo virtuoso and singer who has long been drawn to Chinese music; it’s a trio with another American, Kai Welch, and the Chinese guzheng (zither) player Wu Fei, who also sang and dressed in Chinese opera style for a few songs. Its songs, like “Uighur Gaga,” came with explanations, and the plucked-string blend of guzheng and banjo was promising. But the delicacy of the music couldn’t withstand a chattering audience. Baloji was no purist, either. “This is not global; this is our music,” he declared. Working the stage with the physicality of a soul man or an African dancer, he had grooves out of Congo, Zimbabwe and Memphis. “I came to reinvent the bush blues,” he vowed in “Karibu Ya Bintou,” over stark, marchlike guitar chords. “Alternating between modern and tradition, it stays fresh as long as we catch the pattern.”