We've got the whole world in our bands

It may struggle for recognition in the perennial shadow cast by Blues Fest and Jazz Fest, but the city's week-long World Music Festival, which gets underway Friday 16, is arguably a more compelling, better curated and more trend-savvy showcase of both contemporary and traditional artists. The seventh annual fest is loaded with emerging and legendary talents making rare appearances in Chicago, but if you've only got time to hit a few shows, choose from the following list of 15 acts—among the best on this year's lineup. The fest takes place at multiple venues around the city, and many performances are free. For a complete schedule, plus venue and ticket information.

Celso Fonseca
Friday 16 at 12:15, 9pm
One of the leading contemporary Brazilian songwriters, Fonseca (whose first name is pronounced "SELL-so") reanimates the classic bossa nova style of the 1960s. Formerly a guitarist for Gilberto Gil, and a well-traveled stage and session pro, he has parlayed his experiences into a solo career. His second album, Rive Gauche Rio (Six Degrees), is a soulful, organic exploration of romantic themes. There's even a cover of Damien Rice's "Delicate" that shows Fonseca to be as affecting in English as Portuguese.

Lila Downs
Friday 16 at 6:30pm
Just a few years ago, Downs was one of the discoveries of the fest. Now she's a major attraction. Raised in the Mexican state of Oaxaca and educated in the Midwest, Downs transits between two worlds in her folk-based music. The daughter of an Anglo filmmaker and a Mixtec Indian mother, Downs has become a leading exponent of the Sierra Madre's unsung Indian cultures, exposing listeners to the tongues of the Maya and the Zapotec.

AMADOU & MARIAM
Friday 16 at 6pm; Saturday 17 at 9pm
World music's breakout stars for 2005, Amadou and Mariam actually have been performing together for 25 years. The couple, who are married, first met at the Institute for Young Blind People in Bamako, Mali, in the mid-1970s. And while they have been popular stars on the West African scene, where they are best known as the Blind Couple from Mali, it took the involvement of French-Spanish rock star Manu Chao to introduce them to the global stage. Chao produced their new album, Dimanche A Bamako (Nonesuch), after he was knocked out by one of their tunes, which he heard by chance on the radio. Restlessly contemporary, Amadou Bagayoko, 50, and Mariam Doumbia, 47, do not evoke only traditional West African music—Bagayoko once apprenticed in the same band as a young Salif Keita, adapting his swirling, bluesy guitar style to any number of popular genres. They're natural eclectics. The album, which has been tweaked for Western ears, employs a lot of Chao's signature touches (audible snippets of passing traffic and random chatter, discrete bits of electronica, his playfully chiming guitar). It's also rather blissfully in touch with anything from disco rhythms to Cuban dance grooves. But the charisma that radiates through the music comes directly from the singers, who fuse it with a natural and infectious goodwill.

Nomo
Friday 16 at 10pm;Saturday 17 at 3:30, 9pm
If you were among the ancient West African people of Dogon, the Nommo—amphibious super-beings dispatched from the star Sirius to bring knowledge to Earth—were your gods. Nomo, a brass-tastic supergroup, dropped an "M" and hails only from Detroit, but with their deep love of Afrobeat and related groove styles they'd fit right in with the Dogon. Not unlike New York's Antibalas, the ensemble boasts umpteen musicians on stage and serves as an unofficial Fela tribute act: Those endless, simmering polyrhythms and bold, punchy unison horn charts are a direct legacy of the Nigerian bandleader. Nomo founder Elliot Bergman, whose jazz- and soul-inflected saxophone sparks the band's creative energies, steers the music into other directions as well—but rarely, if ever, far from the dance floor.

Waldemar Bastos
Saturday 17 at 1, 8pm
This singer and acoustic guitarist's life story could inspire a novel about the wayward fates of creative individuals caught up in political turmoil and the uncertainties of exile. Bastos fled his native Angola in 1982 as the postcolonial state fell into a lengthy civil war. He hopscotched from Portugal to Berlin to Brazil, then back to Portugal, where he put down roots in Lisbon. You can hear the traces of Bastos's journeys in his fusion of African, Spanish and Brazilian rhythms—which all circle back, ultimately, to Angola.

Boubacar Traore
Saturday 17 at 9pm; Sunday 18 at 1, 9:30pm
His fellow Malian guitar legend Ali Farka Toure commands a higher profile in the West, but Traore is just as magical in his creation of serpentine melodies. "Kar Kar," as he was affectionately dubbed, might as well have been Elvis in the West Africa of the early 1960s—his hit "Mali Twist" was a kind of anthem. Remarkably, he's still touring and his recordings are as strong as ever. Traore's new album, Kongo Magni (World Village), is a sensitive and delicate evocation of the West African blues.

Nouvelle Vague
Saturday 17 at 10pm;Sunday 18 at 9pm
It's a joke that somehow works. This studio confection pairs a savvy production team with a collection of alluring French female vocalists to recast 1980s "new wave" favorites as bossa nova tunes. If breezy, breathy renditions of Dead Kennedys and Joy Division songs delivered in accented English by coy sexpots works your mojo, don't miss it.

Nachito Herrera & Bembe Band
Sunday 18 at 1pm; Monday 19 at 11am, 9pm; Tuesday 20 at noon
American sanctions against Cuba make it difficult to hear some of that island's greatest contemporary musicians. So here's your shot. Pianist Herrera was a child classical prodigy who embraced Latin jazz as the musical director of legendary band Cubanismo. Rolling solo with his Bembe Band, he can be expected to make hips shake and ears resound in a Club Tropicana of the mind.

Baka Beyond
Monday 19 at 1:30, 8pm
U.K. producers Martin Cradick and Su Hart have spent more than a decade collaborating with the Baka people of Cameroon's rainforest, cultivating a hybrid music of sunny rhythms, Celtic accents and village ritual. Such crossover efforts often come off awkwardly, but this one is surprisingly successful. The music is rooted in a particular place, but it sponges up sounds from neighboring West African countries, such as Sierra Leone and Senegal—home to kora master Seckou Keita, a standout on Baka's new album, Rhythm Tree (March Hare).

Rajan and Sajan Mishra
Tuesday 20 at 12:30, 7:30pm
The brothers, celebrated in India, are the rare masters of a duet performance style known as jugalbandi. Their adherence to the form comes from childhood training in their home, in the holy city of Benares, where music was the family tradition. Expect to hear ragas that aspire to an air of sublimity, guided by the brothers' devotion to Saraswati, the Hindu goddess of music.

DOMENICO + 2
Tuesday 20 at 12:30, 7:30pm
Straight out of Rio, this trio has developed a fresh, edgy style patterned on the romantic themes that have guided Brazilian pop for decades—but infused with all kinds of wiggy invention. Domenico is percussionist Domenico Lancelotti. The "pluses" are Moreno Veloso, who sings and composes, and producer Alexandre Kassin. Veloso is the son of Caetano Veloso, Brazil's most iconic pop genius and the cofounder of the 1960s tropicalia movement. The young Veloso lives up to his legacy in this combo, which layers multiple forms and oddball touches—jazzy chords on top of earthy African polyrhythms, vocals piped through something like a bullhorn—to create an exciting composite. The band's new album, Sincerely Hot, on David Byrne's Luaka Bop label, lures samba into the electro future. The musicians also perform as part of Orquestra Imperial, a 20-piece supergroup that has become a phenomenon in the past two years, packing Rio theaters with its weekly engagements.

ANA MOURA
Wednesday 21 at 8pm; September 22 at 10pm
Portugal is the home of fado, a vocal tradition imbued with a deep sense of longing and poetic melancholy. It's the coastal nation's equivalent of the blues, usually performed in small cafés with spare accompaniment, where the voice can be heard in its most natural form. Moura is the new star of this old sound, a 25-year-old with striking, pop-star good looks whose singing has captured the enchanted, rainy-day soul of fado. Though she grew up singing it as casually as American kids might learn a campfire tune, Moura first performed in rock bands. The turning point came a few years ago when she got up to sing during a visit to one of the fado houses that are a staple of Lisbon nightlife. Something unexpected fell into place, and soon Maura was hooked. An invitation to perform for the fado diva Maria de Fe christened her new career. The rising fadista's album Guarda me a vida na mao ("Keep My Life in Your Hand") both honors fado's past and contemporizes its focus.

Alkinoos Ioannidis
Wednesday 21 at 11am, 8pm
Trained in classical guitar, the Cypriot singer—an Athens resident since age 20—has become one of the leading performers of contemporary Greek music. He frequently works in orchestral settings, drawing on studies of traditional Greek and Cypriot musics. More often, he accompanies himself on guitar, fusing those elements with rock dynamics.

Badi Assad
Wednesday 21 at 6pm; Thursday 22 at 11am, 7pm
Guitar-playing supersmoothie Assad has popularized Brazilian traditional and pop forms in her one-woman show. She sings. She plucks the strings with a virtuosity steeped in classical and jazz training. And she busts out with lots of percussive tricks, using her own body as a rhythmic source. She came up in the shadow of her globetrotting guitar duo brothers—Sergio and Odair Assad—but has won an almost poplike stardom. As if to signify that, her new CD, Verde, features songs by U2 and Björk.

The World Music Festival launches into orbit Friday 16.

The World Music Festival launches into orbit Friday 16.