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1 PM Navy Pier

Reelroad See Saturday 9/20.

2 PM Eli’s Cheesecake Festival

Moscow Nights This more-or-less traditional trio is currently based in Cleveland, not Russia, but this is hardly the first time expatriates have been more obsessed with the culture of their homeland than most of the people still living there. Moscow Nights play bouncy, accordion-and-balalaika-driven dance tunes—revved-up and rusticized classical melodies, American folk chestnuts given the Slavic treatment—as well as sentimental songs to swing your vodka bottle along to. In their lively stage show, they seem determined to present as many instruments, musical themes, and dance moves as possible from their erstwhile country—which, in case you haven’t looked lately, reaches almost halfway around the globe—and their self-released Feel Yourself Russian sounds like the work of a band slightly punch-drunk with jet lag. —MK

3 PM Preston Bradley Hall

Dya Singh Ensemble This Australian group is led by Dya Singh, a singer and harmonium player from Punjab who’s dedicated to making traditional Sikh music more contemporary and accessible. Though he may very well be reaching the wider audience he’s hoping for, I’m not part of it—his music is rooted in the hypnotizing melodies and rhythms of Punjab, but when he pauses midconcert to explain the material he makes me feel like I’m at a Deepak Chopra seminar. On “All Aboard!” the band uses tabla patterns to evoke the acceleration of a locomotive and a violin line to imitate a train whistle—hardly gestures you’d expect from an ensemble that claims to play spiritual music—and the occasional didgeridoo part or touch of country and western is at least as jarring. —PM

4 PM Navy Pier

Cordero See Saturday 9/20.

4 PM Jazz Showcase $15, 21+

Gaida Hinnawi Ensemble with Amir ElSaffar See Saturday 9/20.

5 PM Preston Bradley Hall

Sandeep N. Bharadwaj Bolingbrook violinist Sandeep N. Bharadwaj, now 13 years old, traveled to Chennai, India, last year to give a recital of Carnatic music with veteran percussionists. I’ve heard a recording Bharadwaj made when he was 12, and he’s clearly just as prodigiously talented as that accomplishment would lead you to expect—and even more impressive, he began playing just four years ago. As is common with musicians so young, he can’t quite summon the emotional content to match his technique, but once he’s got a bit more life experience to draw on he’ll be a force to be reckoned with. He’s joined by Ram Sriram on mridangam and Karthik Venkatraman on kanjira. —PM

7 PM Navy Pier

Moscow Nights See above.

7 PM Old Town School of Folk Music $15, $13 for members

Savina Yannatou & Primavera en Salonica Throughout a career spanning nearly two decades, Greek vocalist Savina Yannatou has navigated an unlikely path between traditional material—songs not just from her homeland but from countries around the Mediterranean, Middle East, and eastern Europe—and uncompromising experimentation and improvisation. She’s got an uncanny knack for making far-flung material cohere as a beautiful whole; she doesn’t force a common sound on the various styles but rather draws on their commonalities in a strikingly natural way. On her new album, Songs of an Other (ECM), she and her band, Primavera en Salonica—a flexible unit under the direction of qanun player, accordionist, and arranger Kostas Vomvolos—gently nudge the performances into improvised territory, so that a plangent, sorrowful lament might morph seamlessly into an extended exploration of texture and technique. Yannatou, who at times reminds me of a less theatrical Shelley Hirsch or Iva Bittova, has acknowledged Diamanda Galas as an influence, and you can hear it when her wordless solos erupt into high-pitched ululations, cracked cries, and disturbing trills. —PM

Rachel Unthank & the Winterset See Saturday 9/20.

7:30 PM Museum of Contemporary Art $15

Samba Mapangala & Orchestre Virunga See Saturday 9/20.

Chiwoniso See Friday 9/19.

8 PM Uncommon Ground on Devon 

Alex Cuba Born in Cuba, living in Canada, and partial to wearing flares and an Afro, singer-songwriter Alex Cuba says he feels alienated among musicians of his homeland, but he could find a huge audience in the indie scene—with his sparse and soulful style, he sometimes reminds me of a Latin Jeff Buckley. After working and recording for years as a bassist, he switched to a warm-toned hollow-body acoustic guitar when he went solo; his second album, Agua del Pozo (Caracol), won a Juno Award this spring. —MK

8 PM Jazz Showcase $15, 21+

Gaida Hinnawi Ensemble with Amir ElSaffar See Saturday 9/20.

9 PM Sonotheque $10, 21+

DJ Maga Bo I’m generally pretty skeptical of globe-trotting producers, but DJ Maga Bo blew me away with his hard-hitting debut album, Archipelagoes (Soot). Though he’s from Rio de Janeiro, little on the disc is recognizably Brazilian; using a laptop and a microphone, he’s woven the contributions of singers and MCs from Morocco, South Africa, Portugal, Tanzania, and Senegal, among other places, into a thunderous programmed-and-sampled mix of hip-hop, dancehall, drum ’n’ bass, and various traditional rhythms. When he incorporates live instruments like oud, qanun, kora, and tabla, they fit naturally, without diluting the propulsive power of his trunk-rattling beats—more evidence that he’s got some of the smartest ears in the game. He’s spinning records here, not performing live, but I’m told his DJ sets are an equally free-ranging tangle of international dance-floor killers. —PM

DJ C with MC Zulu, DJ Joe Bryl Local producer and DJ Jake Trussell, aka DJ C, is part of an international network of beat merchants who tap into global styles—British bouncement, Brazilian favela funk, Jamaican digital dub—and pump them up with devastating low end. Some of the tracks on last year’s Sonic Weapons (Wimm) don’t sound all that different from tired old drum ’n’ bass, but others tell a more exciting story. Trussell pulls off a couple trippy collaborations with theremin virtuoso Pamelia Kurstin, and two of the best cuts feature MC Zulu, a Panama-born Chicagoan with a gruff baritone and a strong grasp of dancehall and reggaeton—lately he’s been turning up on records by the likes of Ghislain Poirier and Aceyalone. Sonotheque co-owner Joe Bryl also spins. —PM

9 PM Martyrs’ $15, 21+

Vieux Farka Toure See Saturday 9/20.

Etran Finatawa On their second internationally distributed album, Desert Crossroads (Riverboat), Etran Finatawa—a group formed in 2004 with members of both Tuareg and Wodaabe descent—prove themselves excellent students of “desert blues,” a trancey, guitar-heavy style with antecedents in the music of Ali Farka Toure and Mauritanian singer Dimi Mint Abba that’s recently become fashionable thanks to bands like Tinariwen and Toumast. Etran Finatawa unfurl deeply soulful chanted melodies over a hypnotizing mesh of overlapping rhythmic cells, and though their sound isn’t as densely layered or hauntingly atmospheric as Tinariwen’s, it’s somewhat more direct: a single electric guitar unleashes coiled, snaking lines or stuttering jabs over strummed acoustic guitar and a web of hand percussion that sometimes sounds like several grooves at once. —PM

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