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The annual GLOBALFEST is something like a whirlwind tour captained by a cosmopolitan disc jockey, hopping from Guadeloupe to Transylvania, Senegal to the Louisiana bayou, Paris to Siberia. Pragmatically it’s an audition by a dozen world-music acts during the annual convention of the Association of Performing Arts Presenters. But it’s held in a club — the three rooms of Webster Hall, with overlapping sets — with an audience that’s not just there for business.
This year’s lineup includes four United States debuts: by Alif Naaba, a guitar-picking songwriter from Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso; Nguyên Lê’s Saiyuki, playing vigorous pan-Asian jazz; Caravan Palace from France, mixing Hot Club jazz with D.J. electronics; and Namgar, from Siberia, mingling Mongolian elements with hard rock. As that sampling suggests, Globalfest is full of fusions: local music reconfigured in a wired world.
There are traditionalists too. Cara Dillon, from Ireland, is a singer steeped in Celtic music. Cedric Watson, from Lafayette, La., represents zydeco’s younger preservationists; he plays fiddle and button accordion and sings in Cajun French. La Cumbiamba eNeYé, from Colombia, plays coastal music that long ago fused African, Spanish and Andean ingredients into propulsive grooves. François Ladrezo & Alka Omeka, from Guadeloupe, play a plugged-in version of gwo-ka music, which is among the roots of the island’s smoother modern dance beat, zouk. La Excelencia, from New York City, holds on to a more recent tradition: the hard-driving salsa dura of the 1960s and ’70s.
The lineup also includes Nightlosers, a band of Romanians who love both frenetic Gypsy music and the blues; Federico Aubele, an Argentine songwriter who draws on the languorous pulse of down-tempo club music, and Meta and the Cornerstones, a Senegalese-American reggae band. Exotic enough? Sunday at 7 p.m., Webster Hall, 125 East 11th Street, East Village, (212) 545-7536; $40.
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