Landmasses of the Madison World Music Festival: Africa

In a mere four days, this year's Madison World Music Festival (Sept. 16-19) will attempt to give Madison a free, flesh-and-blood hookup to four continents. To help Madison listeners prepare for this abrupt and all-too-brief global transport, The A.V. Club will examine how the festival lineup represents several vast chunks of ground that could devour Wisconsin like an after-dinner mint. In our first installment, we find that three World Music Festival acts should at least hint at the stunning diversity of Africa's music.

Size: 11,608,000 square miles, or huge enough that the sounds change significantly from one corner of the continent to another.

Chief World Music Festival exports: Festive dances; mystic group vocals; badass hats and loose, flowing garments.

Tips for visitors: Watch out for the clumsily flailing limbs and hips of fellow tour-group members. All riled up by public-radio programs like World Café, they may well go crazy for at least two of the following artists.

Traditions: The WMF's encounters with the Dark Continent begin late on Thursday night as Ghana's Kusun Ensemble attempts to set the Terrace a-clatter with harmonized chants and joyfully messy heaps of native hand percussion. While they've also attempted to work in contemporary influences such as modern jazz, the main appeal for an American audience seems to be how Kusun's performances project a world where people are more in touch with communal, celebratory rituals—including dances that feature backflips and perhaps the occasional wild leap into the crowd.

Get that grass-skirt-shakin' out of your system Thursday, because on Friday it'll be time to move north for a somber and entrancing sit-down with Orchestre De Tetouan. This Moroccan group offers a more overtly complex musical picture of Africa: Its strain of Andalusian music reflects the cultural smear that resulted from centuries of Africans, Arabs, and Europeans gathering around and traversing the Mediterranean Sea. Hence, their stately, resonant vocal melodies, fiddles, and percussion might recall touches of flamenco as much as they build on twisty Middle Eastern scales. In other cultural insights, the way these guys pull of that group-fez look will remind us all that Shriners were the original suburban gangsters.

Brushes with the 21st century: Much like her island-nation home, Cape Verde, Maria De Barros is a bit of an outlier. Not only does her music reflect the mix of African, European, and Caribbean influences in the former Portuguese colony (and slave-trade outpost), it embraces a more polished production style than that of a lot of WMF artists. But like many world-music artists who've earned crossover success in America, she's able to pull off an accessible finish without skimping on the music's welcoming and expressive pulse.