Some of the oldest-sounding music at the seventh annual Globalfest — a dozen world-music bands performing on Sunday at Webster Hall — was thoroughly up to date.
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Cedric Watson with Bijou Creole from Louisiana.
François Ladrezo and his group, Alka Omeka, performed gwo-ka music from Guadeloupe, an Afro-Caribbean tradition for percussionists, singers and dancers. Like ritual and carnival groups around the Caribbean, the members were dressed in white. Over crackling, galloping beats from hand drums and beaded gourds, Mr. Ladrezo sang with a sustained, almost operatic voice that’s strong enough to carry through a street market (where he still performs regularly, as a political statement, although he is a celebrated musician in Guadeloupe). One song, “Bang,” deplored the quick escalation of arguments to gun battles: an old rhythm carrying a message for the community right now.
Mr. Ladrezo’s kind of traditionalism was outnumbered by fusions at Globalfest. The most daring and rewarding one was Nguyên Lê’s Saiyuki, the trio of a Vietnamese-rooted French jazz guitarist (Mr. Lê), the Japanese koto player Mieko Miyazaki and the Indian tabla player Prabhu Edouard. Reaching for what Mr. Lê called “an Asia without borders,” Saiyuki used crisp, pointillistic motifs — virtuosic ones, in odd meters — to frame and spur spellbinding improvisations: billowing koto tremolos, fully melodic drumming, sitarlike guitar runs and hovering jazz chords, in a genuinely international music.
Cedric Watson, a Texan now based in South Louisiana, reconfigures new and old Cajun music with guts and smarts. He plays fiddle and two-row button accordion and often sings in old Cajun French, like a revivalist, but his band, Bijou Creole, switches among vintage Cajun rhythms, New Orleans second-line beats and rock. It brought all three to “Zydeco Sont Pas Sale,” the song that probably gave zydeco its name.
Other fusions were more straightforward modernizations. Cara Dillon, a singer from Northern Ireland with a pristine Celtic soprano, was backed by acoustic guitars, pipes and whistles, often in songs about what she called “dodgy men,” in arrangements that stirred up vigorously unfolky crescendos.
Alif Naaba, a songwriter from Burkina Faso making his United States debut, sang earnest admonitions above briskly fingerpicked six-beat webs of guitar and percussion, a gentler but no less engrossing counterpart to music from neighboring Mali. With her band Namgar, the singer Namgar Lhasaranova, born in Russian Siberia to a family of Buryat Mongolian shamans, sang old songs backed by a Mongolian cello (morin khuur) and a hard-rock band that at times suggested a Russian Jethro Tull. Her voice could be delicate or steely and penetrating; it sounded best when the band played least.
Not every fusion was well advised. Caravan Palace, from Paris, played what might be called electroflapper music: Hot Club-style gypsy jazz laden with the dull thud of a disco beat, an idea whose time has come and gone (in 1982, when Taco released “Puttin’ on the Ritz”). Nightlosers, from Romania, add token Eastern European flourishes to American blues and country, like flipping “Six Days on the Road” between bar-band country and a brisk oompah beat, sounding like a bad world-music joke. Federico Aubele, an Argentine songwriter who has allied himself with chill-out lounge electronica, sang moody, minor-key songs about romance in his calm baritone for tunes so suavely languid that they verged on catatonia.
Globalfest’s contingent of bands based in New York pushed people toward the dance floor. Meta and the Cornerstones, led by the Senegalese singer Meta Dia, played competent Bob Marley-style reggae. La Excelencia, formed in 2005, reclaims the salsa dura (hard salsa) of the 1970s, and it’s still unstoppable dance music that merges hectic percussion, screaming horns and impassioned singers — who also revive salsa dura’s political consciousness, singing about immigration and Latin unity.
Multiple styles of Colombian cumbia — porro with wooden flutes, brassy big-band cumbia — have been happily transplanted to New York City by La Cumbiamba eNeYé, whose traditionalism extended to having its singers join a long, circling line dance with the crowd. But in New York City, cultures quickly mingle, and the band let a Congolese guitar line go curling through one cumbia beat. At Globalfest, a small world grows ever more tangled.