World Music Institute Expands for Next Concert Season

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The World Music Institute will bring acclaimed musicians from across the globe to New York for more than 40 performances next season. This nonprofit organization’s new programming includes mini-festivals dedicated to music from Mali and India, and from contemporary Jewish culture.

The season will kick off at Town Hall on Sept. 15 with Mahmoud Ahmed and Hailu Mergia, two renowned musicians who were pivotal in bringing Ethiopian pop to a global audience in the 1970s and ’80s. “It’s the quaver that makes the Ethiopian singer Mahmoud Ahmed’s voice so arresting,” the New York Times critic Jon Pareles wrote in a 2014 review.

Seun Kuti, the son of the Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti, will lead the kinetic and politically fervent band Egypt 80 at Brooklyn Bowl on Sept. 20. (His father founded that band more than 35 years ago.)

A Masters of Indian Music series will include the sitar player Ustad Nishat Khan on Oct. 8 at Merkin Concert Hall; a Contemporary Jewish series will feature John Zorn bringing his Masada Book 3 to Symphony Space on April 12.

The joyful Africa Now! concert, in its fifth year at the Apollo, will take place on March 3 and be headlined by Black Coffee, a South African D.J. who specializes in deep house. And Tanya Tagaq, a Canadian Inuit throat singer who has won a Juno Prize and a Polaris Music Prize, will perform on May 11 at Le Poisson Rouge.

The World Music Institute is curated by Par Neiburger, in his third year with the organization. (Last year’s season had a record 16 sellout concerts.) A full schedule can be found at worldmusicinstitute.org.

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