World music performers often present themselves as emissaries from a single exotic country. But at the fourth annual Globalfest, a world-music showcase with a dozen acts at Webster Hall on Sunday night, many of the musicians cited dual origins: Cape Verde and Lisbon for Sara Tavares, Colombia and New York City for Lucia Pulido, Cambodia and Los Angeles for the band Dengue Fever, Mexico and Minneapolis for Lila Downs. These are not traditional musicians; they are individualists who happily blend and straddle cultures.
As Ms. Tavares explained, living in Lisbon puts her in contact not only with Cape Verdeans but also with musicians from Angola, Mozambique, Brazil and Lisbon itself. That adds up to finely drawn but elegantly propulsive rhythms, plucked on acoustic guitar, behind vocal lines that can be light and girlish or sweetly imploring: imported ideas sharing an urbane grace.
Ms. Pulido sang new and old Colombian songs with a band that mixed the rustic — clattering rhythms played with sticks on the sides of drums — with complex touches of jazz harmony and odd meters. Often they used both at once in smart proportions. But her voice stayed raw and tearful, true to the sentiments of love songs announcing a wounded heart.
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There were a few traditionalists at Globalfest. The Carolina Chocolate Drops are young African-American musicians reclaiming the brisk fiddle and banjo tunes of the Piedmont region’s string-band tradition; they performed vigorously with endearing shtick, although their versions of the tunes grew repetitive.
Le Trio Joubran — three Palestinian brothers, all playing oud — reach back to Arab classical style for their modal melodies. But a trio of ouds is not a traditional configuration, and in their own compositions they volleyed quick lines with the concentration of heavy-metal guitarists shredding away. Their heads swiveled as if to watch the notes zooming across the stage.
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The music shuttled across the Atlantic: breezing along with a beat akin to calypso and rumba, then bearing down with unmistakably West African drumming. The Garifuna were repeatedly forced into exile, and Mr. Palacio introduced one song by summing up its lyrics: “Here is the land that used to be our home,” he said. “Today it is inhabited by killers.” Not all cross-cultural encounters are as benign as world music.