In 1959, Thelonious Monk played a concert at Town Hall, a prestigious New York venue. This was a special occasion. It was the first time that the great pianist performed with an orchestra, a 10-person group led by arranger Hall Overton. Monk was already famous, of course, in the jazz world. But this concert brought him out from the underground and put his music, until then played solo or in small groups, in a whole new context.

Fifty years later, in 2009, Jason Moran, one of today’s most innovative jazz pianists, addressed the Town Hall concert with his own eight-piece band at the same venue. It was not a reenactment (which a different band did the night before) but a multimedia experiment involving narration, graphic art, video, and still photography. Moran titled it “In My Mind.’’

The show took the 1959 program but modified and interwove it with new elements. Moran improvised while listening to Monk through headphones; later, the whole band donned headphones, playing Monk while hearing him. Moran took song snippets and sounds from an archival cache of Monk rehearsal tapes and looped them into the music.

Video showed the North Carolina hamlet where Monk was raised and where his forebears worked the fields as slaves. Incidents from Monk’s life, and Moran’s own musings, put the music in historical context but made it part of a completely modern art piece.

A critical success, “In My Mind’’ was made into a documentary but has been performed just a few times since its 2009 premiere. On Thursday the project comes to Jordan Hall with a twist: alongside Moran and his rhythm section, bassist Tarus Mateen and drummer Nasheet Waits, the balance of the band are Moran’s students at the New England Conservatory.

In the last two years, the hyper-achieving Moran has received a MacArthur “genius grant’’ and been named jazz adviser to the Kennedy Center in Washington, along with a full slate leading his own bands and playing with Charles Lloyd and others. But the Monk project feels special to him.

“Just spending an evening playing Monk’s music brings things back to the root,’’ Moran says. “And this is the first time we’re playing this music with – I shouldn’t call them students, but young musicians – so they get a taste of what it is to play Monk with a contemporary edge.’’

When Moran was first invited to take on the 1959 concert, the idea of simply re-creating it flashed through his mind for a second, and was instantly dismissed.

“I wanted to share more about what I felt about Monk, rather than just play his music,’’ he says. “Because I didn’t know if that was going to be enough for me; it wasn’t going to satisfy the therapy that I needed surrounding Monk.’’

It’s not that Monk traumatized Moran; rather it’s that his presence in Moran’s mind was at once so influential and so daunting. “Monk kind of posed a wall for me as a pianist, because his music demands that you have some style beyond his style,’’ Moran says. “And it’s very difficult to play his music and separate his pianistic style from his composition.’’

An archive of images and tapes made in the loft of New York photographer W. Eugene Smith, where Monk, Overton, and the band rehearsed, gave Moran a way into his own Town Hall project. Hearing Monk direct and discuss ideas was a revelation.

“What he was saying in those tapes, how to rehearse a piece of music, what is the intention of how to play it, the ideas that come out of him listening to his own music – people don’t get to hear this!’’ Moran says. “You don’t get to hear John Coltrane rehearsing ‘A Love Supreme.’ There’s no tape of that. But here there’s tape.’’

It showed how deliberate and specific Monk was, even more than Moran imagined. “And I’m a diehard fan,’’ he says.

“Everyone has their sonic vision of Monk, how he falls into their ears and minds. How he paints silence and uses space. He has these extremely corrupt lines – corrupt because no hand should move like that except his. But he intended all these things, he spent hours in the lab figuring out these structures. He was really like a chemist.’’

Moran’s own methods have something of the chemist to them as well, of course. That’s what NEC student Cale Israel, who plays trombone in the upcoming concert, discovered working through the material with the band.

“The way Jason’s music works is cutting and pasting different sections and tweaking things you wouldn’t think to tweak,’’ Israel says. “He cuts up parts of three or four tunes, you have multiple rhythms going and you have to play with them. I had to think, what the heck do I do with this?’’

Moran says it’s important to him to share with his students Monk’s Southern musical roots, all the way to evangelical and slave songs. At the same time, he hopes the multimedia nature of the project will remind them that music is just one part of contemporary art, and most of all, encourage them to innovate in their own work.

Israel, for one, is absorbing the message. “I think the concert is going to be a commentary on a lot of things,’’ he says. “On improvising, on being ourselves, and also about the way that we listen to music. Hopefully it will be kind of a humorous concert. It’s going to be Monkish.’’

NEW YORK – The drummer Sunny Jain tells the story of a time when he auditioned before Wynton Marsalis, the great trumpeter and consummate arbiter of all things jazz in general, and particularly New Orleans.

In lieu of a bass drum, Jain had substituted a dhol – the two-sided drum from India’s Punjab region that typically hangs from a strap slung over the drummer’s shoulder, and is played with bamboo sticks.

Using the dhol, Jain beat out a series of Punjabi rhythms, the kind that are played in the region’s energetic (and increasingly exported) folk music called bhangra. Hearing this, Jain says, Marsalis felt something quite familiar.

As an up-and-coming jazz drummer with numerous awards and commissions over the past decade, Jain has had plenty of chances to swing behind the drum set. But it’s in his role as a dholi, or dhol player, that Jain swings the hardest, leading Red Baraat, the unique and highly funky hybrid of a marching band that he founded four years ago in Brooklyn.

A nine-piece outfit as diverse in ethnic origins as in musical affinities – bhangra, Bollywood, funk, go-go, and hip-hop are a few ingredients – Red Baraat has made a joyous and sweaty mess of small dance floors and prestigious stages from its New York base to big-time national and European festivals. Its Boston debut comes Wednesday at T.T. the Bear’s.

Its energy is captured on the group’s first CD, 2010’s “Chaal Baby,’’ and even better, on the live set “Bootleg Bhangra,’’ recorded at the Brooklyn club Southpaw. A take on the Punjabi hit “Hey Jamalo’’ features a passage of Spanish vocals. On “Baraat to Nowhere,’’ the MC urges the crowd to strip, “nakedness bumping on the dance floor.’’ At times the horn section sounds positively avant-garde. A honking sousaphone holds up the bottom.

The lineup expands on that of a baraat band, the brass and drum band that escorts a Punjabi groom to his wedding. But the natural US reference, if for the sheer verve alone, is indeed New Orleans and its brass bands such as the Soul Rebels, Rebirth or Hot 8.

Red Baraat has performed, in fact, at the city’s Jazz Fest and at some of its clubs. “It’s deep,’’ Jain says. “This group never was necessarily borrowing from New Orleans music. But we were welcomed instantly. There’s a kinship. It was almost like a stamp of approval.’’

Not that one was needed; but recognition is something that Jain, who was raised in upstate New York, appreciates. “Growing up playing jazz you’re already marginalized, and even more as an Indian,’’ he says. In a response to the tug of two worlds, he devoted some of his first jazz arrangements to Punjabi and Bollywood songs he heard at home.

Alongside his jazz career, Jain toured with the Broadway show “Bombay Dreams’’ and gigged with Sufi-rock group Junoon, among others. But Red Baraat has provided his most fulfilling expression thus far. The group’s success is leaving him less time for jazz, he says, and he doesn’t mind.

A big part of the pleasure, Jain says, is simply getting out from behind the drum set and playing at the front of the stage. At first, he played both roles, but now with Tomas Fujiwara on drum set and Rohin Khemani on percussion, Jain focuses on dhol and emceeing.

“After a while, I was like, I just need to be up front with the dhol,’’ he says. “And the great thing about having Tomas and Rohin is I can stop playing, and the band is still cooking. I can conduct, and cue things. It’s very liberating.’’

Red Baraat also involves more singing and rapping than at the beginning, whether by Jain, trumpeter Sonny Singh (who came up playing ska and reggae), bass trumpeter MiWi La Lupa or sousaphone player John Altieri.

“There’s more vocal stuff going on, more interaction with the crowd,’’ Jain says. “This is not a quiet band, and we’re not going to have audiences that are quiet.’’

For Fujiwara, who grew up in Cambridge and is a highly regarded jazz drummer in his own right, the presence of multiple percussionists only adds to the good vibes. “There’s space to share,’’ he says. “It’s a lot of fun for us to throw around ideas.’’

From the Indian roots of nearly half the band and much of its sound, Fujiwara says he’s picked up not just music, but also cultural references and inside jokes. “We spend a lot of time together, being friends, goofing around,’’ he says. “The jokes are both highbrow and lowbrow.’’

India, meanwhile, is one place where Red Baraat has yet to perform. When they do, Jain says, it will make for an interesting experiment. Unlike, for instance, sitar or vocal classical music, brass bands and dhol do not enjoy high-culture cachet in India.

“There’s this idea that anyone can pick up a drum and just bang it,’’ Jain says. A dhol-led band, let alone one as eclectic as Red Baraat, might blow a few minds. “That’s why I want to go there,’’ Jain says, formulating a challenge to the Indian crowd: “See how you take us now!’’

NEW YORK – It happened one evening last March during an acoustic set at a Spanish tavern in Greenwich Village, one of those restaurant gigs that are the bread-and-butter for many striving Latin musicians in this town. It was one of those small moments of audience connection that make all the effort feel worthwhile.

Looking up from his guitar, Gregorio Uribe noticed a gentleman intently scribbling some kind of sketch at the bar. At the set break, the man approached Uribe and offered him the picture. He had taken a cloth napkin and produced a charming portrait of the musician, drawn in pen with carefully applied splotches of red wine.

The picture would become the cover art, and “Pluma y Vino’’ – pen and wine – the title, of Uribe’s debut album, which the Colombian singer and multi-instrumentalist was recording at the time.

Indeed, “Pluma y Vino,’’ whose release Uribe celebrates tonight in a quartet at Regattabar, displays the songwriter’s deft pen and red wine’s mellow, nocturnal feel.

But it opens up as well, revealing structure and a fair bit of spice. The opening bolero, “Una Excusa,’’ is pure romance. But soon come vivid Afro-Caribbean rhythms, strains of clarinet and accordion, the sway of cumbia. And the words, which Uribe sings with plenty of articulation and space, so that even Spanish-language beginners should readily grasp their general meaning, don’t lack for social and cultural message.

“La Toma,’’ for example, addresses a remote Afro-Colombian community who face the threat of displacement from their mineral-bearing land by mining companies and paramilitaries.

“The song says, after 300 years of slavery and 200 years of neglect, all of a sudden now you’re interested,’’ Uribe says. He composed it for a documentary that was made recently about this situation. Another song, “Los Niños del Alma,’’ was written as a hymn for a foundation with which Uribe is involved, and which makes music and art education available to low-income children in several Latin American countries.

And Uribe’s usually soothing voice surges with anger during a passage of “Diga Usted Coronel,’’ a song he wrote about a controversial trial of a military officer in Colombia, Alfonso Plazas Vega. It’s a complicated case, Uribe says, but the song is about “a person who has been judged without any hard evidence.’’

Whether waxing indignant, romantic, or endearing, as on “Mi Super Héroe’’ – my superhero – dedicated to his dad, Uribe’s personality on this record fleshes out the one he’s most known for in New York, as the leader of a 16-person Latin big band that plays well-regarded venues here, including a monthly residency at the Zinc Bar.

“The big band is like a dance band, there to have fun,’’ says Venezuelan guitarist Juancho Herrera, who plays with Uribe in both formats. “His acoustic record is much more thoughtful. It’s like a chronicle.’’

A regular on New York’s new Latin scene, where the jazz and salsa traditions have intersected with folk, rock, and electronic innovations by new arrivals from South America, Herrera has watched Uribe – who only graduated from Berklee College of Music in 2007 and arrived in the city a year later – quickly and confidently find a space for himself.

“He’s direct, sincere, and honest, and people feel that energy,’’ Herrera says.

It helps that Uribe is also highly talented: he earned summa cum laude honors at Berklee (“Hey, you gotta make the most of it,’’ he says, a little bashfully) and he plays guitar, accordion, and drums. He came to singing later, he says, and credits his progress to his friend and voice teacher, Argentine singer Sofia Rei Koutsovitis.

“Pluma y Vino’’ is something of a happy accident. At first Uribe had raised money, through an Internet campaign and fund-raiser concerts, for an album with the big band. But the cost of recording a 16-person outfit proved daunting, and with the blessing of his musicians and backers, Uribe fell back on the smaller project.

“I needed to have some music out there,’’ he says. “And everybody was very supportive and sweet, and that gave me the push.’’

Uribe says many of his funders are in the Boston area; between that and his Berklee connection, he expects this performance to have a family feel. Next is a New York release party, and soon, he hopes, a tour in Colombia, where he’s had the chance to perform a few times with local musicians but not yet to bring his own group.

“I want to create a bridge between the two places,’’ Uribe says. And he promises the next record will feature the big band and showcase innovations being made in the Big Apple to cumbia and other Colombian styles.

“There’s a bigger umbrella here,’’ he says. “Even Europeans and Americans are doing it. The second album will represent that New York cumbia.’

If you came for the severed pig’s head, you’re too late.

Ditto, possibly, for the blood-stained butcher’s apron — though Teri Gender Bender, the leader and frontwoman of the punk-inspired band Le Butcherettes, has not yet removed that trademark prop from her performance wardrobe. She may still, when she feels so moved, urinate onstage. Certainly, her rants and random pronouncements in Spanish and English and her daredevil dives into the crowd seem destined to carry on.

But by her own reckoning, a transformation is afoot for Teri Gender Bender, née Teresa Suarez. At 22, her music has (dare we say) matured and her creative personality fleshed out, having absorbed more than a little upheaval in the five hectic years since 2007, when she launched Le Butcherettes as a pissed-off teenager who was reading Simone de Beauvoir and feeling trapped by the stereotypical expectations placed on a young woman in Guadalajara, Mexico.

Along the way she’s overseen four total overhauls of the band’s line-up; released a brash, angry 2009 EP, Kiss & Kill; made the big move from Guadalajara to Los Angeles; and put out a stunning 2011 album, the still-raw but more melodic Sin Sin Sin, produced by the protean Omar Rodríguez-López, of The Mars Volta, At The Drive In, and countless other ventures.

EXCERPTED. READ THE WHOLE STORY AT MTVIGGY.COM

This week’s year-in-review special continues with Siddhartha Mitter, a music journalist who contributes to the Boston Globe, MTV Iggy, MTV Desi and other outlets.

Siddhartha Mitter’s list:

Three Great Songs:

• Frank Ocean, “Novacane”
• Musiq Soulchild, “Yes”
• SBTRKT featuring Sampha, “Hold On”

World Music that Isn’t “World Music”:

• Chamber Music (album) – Ballake Sissoko & Vincent Segal
• Tirtha (album) – Vijay Iyer, Prasanna, Nitin Mitta
• Zuciya Daya (song) – Bez
• Karibu Ya Bintou (song) – Baloji

Music for Upheaval:

• Rayes Le Bled (song) – El Général
• Into the Fire (song) – The Bant Singh Project
• Obama Nation Pt 2 (song) – Lowkey ft. Lupe Fiasco, M-1, Black the Ripper

Rest in Peace:

• Pandit Bhimsen Joshi
• Cesaria Evora
• Gil Scott-Heron

1. SUSANA BACA

“Afrodiaspora’’ Soulful pedagogy from the sublime-voiced Baca, who this year was named Peru’s culture minister, and here leads a grand tour of Africa-rooted music from Latin America and the Caribbean, including New Orleans, with her customary grace and serene mastery.

2. MAMANI KEITA

“Gagner l’argent français’’ A shimmering, just-right set from a Malian woman singer who deserves broader recognition. Also very much a producer’s album, as French arranger Nicolas Repac develops intricate layers of rock and electronic elements, but it’s Keita’s voice that does the transporting.

3. BEZ

“Super Sun’’ A superb alternative-soul singer who happens to come from Nigeria – and a male counterpart to that country’s new songstresses such as Asa, Nneka and Ayo. Watch for Bez to emerge in the United States in 2012, starting with a visit to SXSW in March.

4. BALLAKÉ SISSOKO + VINCENT SEGAL

“Chamber Music’’ Recorded deep in the night in Bamako, this exceptional Franco-Malian meeting of cello and kora, mostly duets with a few occasional guests, is austere yet never forbidding; rather, quietly joyous and entirely unexpected.

5. BLITZ THE AMBASSADOR

“Native Sun’’ Ghana-born, Brooklyn, N.Y.-based MC Blitz Bazawule had his breakout year behind this feisty album of socially-minded trans-Atlantic hip-hop, roaming across the funk, Afrobeat and highlife distilled by his excellent working band.

6. BALOJI

“Kinshasa Succursale’’ Gruff and full of fire, Congolese MC Baloji, who is based in Brussels and raps in French and local languages, returned to Kinshasa to record with Konono No. 1, soukous guitarists and other local luminaries. Urban and urgent.

7. KIRAN AHLUWALIA

“Aam Zameen’’ Ahluwalia’s far-reaching, cosmopolitan innovations on Indian ghazal and Punjabi folk songs keep getting better. On her fifth album she’s joined by Touareg superstars Tinariwen and Terakaft (both of which had fine new records this year as well, by the way).

8. AURELIO

“Laru Beya’’ Very much the anointed successor to the late Andy Palacio, who revived Garifuna music from Central America’s Caribbean coast, Aurelio delivers with a far-reaching set that folds in local pop and looks back across the ocean to Senegal, with Youssou N’Dour and others contributing.

9. KARSH KALE

“Cinema’’ The Bay Area producer has been scoring films in India lately, but his South Asian-infused electronic sound has always felt cinematic. Here he’s at his seamless best, melding contributions from Indian classical musicians and American rockers with no trace of any fusion awkwardness.

10. DJ JAMJAM

“Oyinbo Swagga Vol. 2’’ (mixtape, available online) Nigeria is a rich new frontier for hip-hop and R&B, plenty of it hyper-commercial; many current top stars (P-Square, M.I., Wizkid, Tiwa Savage, and more) appear on this chock-full mix by a London DJ. Not all the music is great, but the crash-course immersion is frenetic and vital.

BIGGEST SURPRISE

EL GÉNÉRAL

“Rayes Le Bled’’ The year’s big surprise in world events was the Arab Spring. Local hip-hop played a part, expressing popular discontent and documenting the uprisings, beginning with this protest song by El General, from Tunisia, where it all began. Be sure to watch the video as well.

It shouldn’t be this way, but it’s still the case that when a jazz group forms in which all the players are women, that fact attracts at least as much notice as the music they perform. It’s unavoidable: all-women groups remain rare in a jazz world where most performers, listeners, and critics are male. It’s also annoying, not least for female artists who have worked their way to the music’s heights only to find their work with one another treated as a novelty.

That is why it is tempting to see the trio of drummer Terri Lyne Carrington, pianist Geri Allen, and bassist Esperanza Spalding, who appear at Scullers tonight through Sunday, as simply a dynamite combination of virtuosos with amazing combined breadth and experience, gathered together in a piano trio, one of the music’s classic formats.

But that would be leaving out part of the story. That’s because Carrington, who initiated this trio (although it’s the buzzed-about Spalding, Grammy winner and featured performer at the White House, who gets the attention in the club’s listing), recently set aside her deep reluctance to highlight gender in her music. And to spectacular effect: “The Mosaic Project,” her new record featuring 21 top women in jazz (with a dash of soul and funk) is a grand celebration, as well as one of this year’s most appealing releases.

With a strong vocal component (including Dianne Reeves, Cassandra Wilson, Gretchen Parlato, Nona Hendryx, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Carmen Lundy) it has received a Grammy nomination for best jazz vocal recording. But with trumpeter Ingrid Jensen, saxophonist Tineke Postma, clarinetist Anat Cohen, guitarist Linda Taylor, and more, including Sheila E. on percussion and Patrice Rushen on keyboards, it sparkles as much for its instrumental range as for its lyrics of love, politics, yearning, and transformation.

And with Carrington on every track and Allen and Spalding on many, this weekend’s trio represents the backbone of the larger project. It is also, Carrington says, the group that inspired her to develop the Mosaic Project in the first place.

“I thought it’s really time to do a female-driven record,” Carrington says. Three years ago, the three and Postma played as a quartet at the Red Sea Jazz Festival in Israel. Last year, the trio made its debut at Bowdoin College in Maine. A seed was planted, Carrington says: “When I started thinking about a project that would be recorded, immediately my thoughts expanded.”

The result is a recording that is all-women, not by accident, but also not as its sole raison d’etre. It is as much, Carrington says, a chance to bring together friends.

“People look at it like an all-female record, I understand that, and the point was to celebrate women’s artistry,” Carrington says. “But it’s really a documentation of where I am in my life. I have been playing with these musicians on and off for 20 years.”

Or longer: Carrington, 46, was a teenager when she first met Allen. Spalding, 27, is a newer acquaintance, but the two were brought together as colleagues on the faculty of the Berklee College of Music. (Carrington, a Medford native, returned from the West Coast six years ago and lives in the Boston area.)

Allen says it makes sense that Carrington assembled this project. “She has a wonderful way of bringing people together,” Allen says. “It represents her being kind of a visionary. She has a good sense of timing in a lot of different ways.”

Allen, 54, has a long discography ranging from avant-garde work in the tradition of Ornette Coleman and John and Alice Coltrane to sacred music (her Christmas album, “A Child Is Born,” came out recently). But she says Carrington, an avid hip-hop and rock listener, pushes her to new places, whether in the open, accessible funk that characterizes much of Mosaic, or in their work together with Angelique Kidjo and Lizz Wright on the “Sing the Truth” project.

“She kind of throws me in a lot of different fun, organic challenging experiences,” Allen says of Carrington.

Carrington cautions that the trio will differ from Mosaic’s lush, produced texture, even if they revisit a few of its songs. She says Spalding, who has become known not just for her bass playing but also as a vocalist, “might sing a little” as she does on “Mosaic.” Each woman will contribute new compositions. But the emphasis will be on standards, in arrangements that allow the three to stretch out and improvise.

In that respect, this gathering is as classic as jazz gets. It echoes important trios past and present: Carrington cites those led by Keith Jarrett and Brad Mehldau, for example, and even Medeski Martin & Wood. “I’ve always loved great jazz trios,” she says. “It’s cool to figure out how much you can do in that setting.”

Allen concurs: “I’m really just looking forward to the opportunity to find what our place is in that history,” she says. And in a further nod to the tradition, Carrington says the trio -which she hopes will turn into a long-term venture -will appear next month at New York’s hallowed Village Vanguard.

All this makes the trio and the larger Mosaic Project significant both because they are all-female and for reasons that have nothing to do with that fact. That’s why Carrington isn’t wrong when she says, “I don’t deal with gender at all” – even though Mosaic plainly does.

“When I play with great musicians, I play with great musicians,” Carrington says. “All great musicians listen. They are sensitive and compassionate. You can’t go in with an agenda. When you’re open is when the magic happens.”

His American breakout moment came earlier this year when he tore up the 2011 Coachella festival, in a high-intensity electronic set backed by a full live rock band and a visual show that had breathless bloggers and reviewers proclaiming it the festival’s high point. But in Europe Anders Trentemøller has been a figure to contend with on the club scene for quite some time.

Some know him for deep, hard house remixes of the likes of Royksopp’s What Else Is There or his takes on Franz Ferdinand, Moby, Modeselektor and more—sometimes spare and fidgety, sometimes opulent and intense—that have made him one of the continent’s prime remixers. Some know him for his own moody, sparse 2006 album The Last Resort.

Many had their minds blown—whether the 50,000 people in the crowd or many more who’ve watched the video online—by the ultra-high energy and lavish staging, complete with ghostly choreographed armies, wild curtains and glowing parasols, of his “Silver Surfer Ghost Rider Go!” at the 2009 Roskilde festival in his native Denmark.

In Copenhagen, where Trentemøller has been a mover and shaker on the local music scene for well over a decade, he’s also known as a rock and roll guy who played in a bunch of bands before “going electronic,” and still likes to relax spinning a casual rock set at one of his favorite local bars.

With his latest album, last year’s Into the Great White Yonder, Trentemøller has cemented his place at a fertile crossroads of rock and club music. It even found a place in the fervid imagination of Spanish director Pedro Almodovar, who used “Shades of Marble” in both the trailer and film for his latest, The Skin I Live In. 

But Trentemøller’s also got a brand-new collection, Reworked/Remixed, of not only remixes he’s made but also versions of his original songs remixed by others. And despite a crazy worldwide tour schedule in the past couple of years, he’s also made time to try his hand at producing, starting with Copenhagen protegées Darkness Falls.

So who is Trentemøller, anyway? In a long telephone conversation a couple of weeks ago, MTV Iggy’s Siddhartha Mitter discovered an open and thoughtful musician, refreshing himself in the quiet comfort of his Copenhagen base, recovering from his travels and taking a breather before launching into his next album project.

You’ve just ended a huge tour in the United States. Although it seems you’re constantly on tour somewhere.

Yeah, I think we’ve been playing pretty much for the last year and a half. Europe, Australia, back to the States… I must admit I’m a bit exhausted now. But now I’m only going to play two gigs in Copenhagen and then just work on my new album.

You’ve been doing your thing with a lot of success in Europe for some time. But it feels like you are having one of those breakthrough moments in the US right now. The blogs were buzzing about your set at Coachella in particular. Was that set as special for you as it was for the crowd?

It did feel special. For me Coachella has always stood for something special. Many of my favorite bands played there. We were really looking forward to it. We had played San Francisco the night before, and we partied pretty hard after the show, and so at Coachella we got on stage with pretty heavy hangovers. And that was actually good for us, it made us more down to earth, it made us just play our music and not think too much about having 20,000 people waiting for us.

But on the same tour you also played some small clubs. It is weird to go back and forth between intimate rooms and huge festival venues? Do you change your show?

It’s very different. But I like both. When you’re playing in front of a big audience you maybe show off a little more. And maybe you concentrate on the music more in smaller venues—maybe. You do get a much more intimate feeling, you can see the crowd in their eyes, it’s much more personal. But then there’s this massive energy you get from a crowd of 20,000. It gives a fantastic energy to the band. But here in Denmark I sometimes DJ a rock set for a hundred people…

That must feel like family.

Exactly. It’s my way of relaxing. Here in Copenhagen I’m mostly playing for free beers. It’s fun, my friends are there. It’s always important to remember where you came from.

Do you think Americans tend to want something different from their electronic music experience than Europeans do?

I’m maybe not the right one to ask about that, because I feel my connection to electronic music is not very up-to-date! But I remember when I deejayed a few years ago, and I was in the States, it was fun to see that some of the sound from Berlin, this minimal thing, was just arriving, late. In that way, Europe was ahead.

But then you have Detroit, Chicago house, which was a big influence in Germany. So it goes both ways.

In your own work, one is struck by the variety—the different levels of energy, the minimalism and then big maximalist sounds, almost both at the same time.

That’s just how I do music. I’m a big music lover, I listen to classical music, jazz, indie rock… so it’s about trying to define music from my own heart and not one specific style. I think my record label in the beginning found it a little frustrating. But it’s more important that I challenge myself with the music I write.

You’ve been criticized sometimes for seeming to try to do to much, to be all things to all people. Do you ever feel like you’re pulled in too many directions?

I can definitely see that sometimes. But it comes out of this love for so much different music.

So you get bored easily?

Yes and no. I get bored musically when I feel I’m repeating myself. It’s important not to get bored with your own ideas. It should be a playful thing. If I don’t get a kick of adrenaline from a new melody, a new bass line, then it’s no fun for me.

How did electronic music come to you in the first place? What made you go this way instead of being a regular rock and roll guy?

The breaking point was when I went to London about 15 years ago. At the time I was playing in local indie bands in Copenhagen. In London I heard trip-hop, drum and bass, jungle… I was blown away by the energy. Especially the energy of jungle—it reminded me of punk energy. Also I listened to the early Massive Attack and Portishead albums. When I went back to Denmark to the two bands I was playing in, I tried to incorporate breakbeats, using a sampler. Adn the other members felt I had lost it completely. So I quit and started making music on my own, where I didn’t have to make so many compromises. I did 10 years making music on my computer, and then I missed the feeling of a band.

Were you into lots of different keyboards, or were you all about programming and software?

Actually the first 10 years I was using my old Atari computer with just 1 MB of RAM! While my friends were all into Macs and PCs, I was still really into working on this Atari. But then it started crashing all the time.

They must have made fun of you.

Yeah, I was known as being stupid because I kept making all my music on this crappy computer. But when you are limited technologically you can also come up with some new creative ways of making music.

Your album The Last Resort has that very wintery feel. Is that about your own mood and esthetic, or is it pretty much a Scandinavian thing?

It’s very typical for Scandinavian music, that it has this wintery feel, this blue vibe to it. When you listen to other bands from Scandinavia, like Sigur Ros, they have this melancholic vibe. I don’t know if it’s because it’s always sh**ty weather here. Even 300, 400 years ago, folk music from Scandinavia also had that melancholic vibe.

What did you want to do differently for your last album, Into the Great White Yonder?

It was quite important that I got back to playing instruments. The first album was done pretty much in front of the computer, using a mouse. But I play a bit of different instruments—guitar, keyboard, bass, drums—and it was good to go back and do that. When I started working I was sitting at my upright piano, finding melodies…

Instead of starting at wave forms on the computer!

Yeah, exactly. It’s much more important to use my ears. And then after that I use the computer to build around the melodies and the chord progressions.

And that’s why you play with a live band now.

It’s something that came out of a need. I wanted to play the album live, and it was clear I had to have six people on stage—there were so many guitar parts, and drums.

And I wanted to make different versions in different contexts. With electronic music often people just change the tempo, but there are so many other ways to give the music a new face.

That’s a paradox—is live instrumentation the future of electronic music?

Yeah, it’s hard to tell what will happen, but for me mixing it together is very important. There are too many electronic musicians who play “live” but are just standing in front of a computer with a MIDI controller. It’s still controlled by the computer. I want the opposite, to be using the computer as an instrument. You shouldn’t be a slave to it.

You’ve also got an elaborate stage set.

My former drummer is also a fashion designer. He has really cool visions about music. We wanted a stage design that was pretty analog, not so high tech. Something a bit mystic. So when the curtains go up not quite in sync, or the light flashes a little bit weird, all those errors are built into it. We don’t want just projections on a backdrop, we want to work with the whole stage, and feel three dimensional. It really has this big effect when people come to a venue they know, you go into this room that you know and find that suddenly the whole stage has changed. Even if it’s a lot of work to set up, and it’s also quite expensive to fly everything in.

You’ve just released Remixed/Reworked which shows this great exchange—there’s some of your remixes, and then remixes of your songs by other people. It’s a blurring of the roles.

It’s a good exchange. The Modeselektor and UNKLE stuff, it all started when Modeselektor wanted me to remix one of their tracks, and I said instead of paying me money they should remix me back. So it was just artist to artist, no labels were really involved, and no money was involved. It was just about the musicians.

You’re also trying your hand at producing now, with the band Darkness Falls…

Josephine, the singer in Darkness Falls, also sings for me, and she has toured with me. Last year she was playing some demos that I really liked. She was pushing me to produce it. In the beginning I was afraid it would take too much time. But one of the great things about producing is that you suddenly have a chance to step outside of yourt own stuff. It’s challenging to see the music from outside. It was a great process for me.

Give me some other Danish bands that we need to listen to.

Right now Choir of Young Believers is a fantastic band, they’re about to release their second album. There’s a band called Chimes & Bells, they’re on my remix album. Another one is Sleep Party People. They’re really interesting, they also blend electronic and rock and they do it in their own weird way. And then of course there’sThe Raveonettes, who are more famous.

I’m noticing that all these Danish bands have English names. Is that some kind of requirement?

That’s true! I could also mentionEfterklang. They have a Danish name. They’re pretty well known too. But it’s funny, not so many bands have Danish names, but they all have a very Danish or Scandinavian sound.

Speaking of Denmark, are you satisfied staying based in Copenhagen? It’s home and family, but does it stimulate you?

Copenhagen is cool. It’s really cozy and small, and I like the fact that there’s not that much happening here. You have quiet space to think your thoughts. But if I were to choose another city to live in, it would definitely be New York.

Both in Europe and America right now there’s an atmosphere of crisis, protests, the economy is bad. As an artist, do you feel affected by those things?

Kind of. I’m not the one who makes political statements in my music; it’s more about feelings. Some people use music as therapy; this world is so chaotic right now, music is a place for people to go that is still pure. But the whole vibe is depressing right now. It is quite a dark moment for the whole world.

We have this picture of Scandinavia as a place where social values are strong. You’ve said that a government arts subsidy helped you get your start in music. Is that in danger now?

It’s definitely in danger. Everyone has to save money now and unfortunately the arts often don’t get attention, because it’s not as important as giving old people a place to live, for example. So artists have to fight more now. But there’s something good too, because otherwise you get complacent. Sometimes bad times create good art, so maybe in a weird way it’s good for something. One thing for sure, art will never die.

From the start, it doesn’t feel like fado. Nor does the players’ entrance fit the norm for Lisbon’s hallowed style of melancholy song. It is not the genteel Portuguese guitar but a sharp synthesizer beat that ushers the artists on stage. There are not one but three singers – a woman and two men, sporting tattoos in lieu of the customary black shawl. Behind them, a full rock band, and behind that, a string orchestra.

But the song that launches this show, held in 2009 at the Coliseu in Lisbon and captured on a live DVD, is one the crowd recognizes. It is “Com Que Voz,” the title piece from a great 1969 album by fado’s empress, Amalia Rodrigues. And this band, Amalia Hoje (meaning “Amalia Today”) is a special project commissioned to honor Rodrigues, who died in 1999.

Now, behind the runaway success in Portugal of their studio album, live recording, and concerts, the Hoje team (minus strings, but plus a video art component) are bringing their pop approach to the Rodrigues songbook for two concerts in the United States. They visit the Berklee Performance Center on Sunday.

Fado lovers will know many of the songs, whether from Amalia’s renderings of yesteryear or from versions by the new crop of fado singers such as Misia, Mariza and Cristina Branco. The Hoje interpretations are different: They operate in a realm of alternative rock, tastefully rendered, lavish without becoming baroque.

This is the domain of the Gift, a long-running Portuguese pop band whose leader, Nuno Goncalves, was invited by Rodrigues’s label to produce Hoje. He called in a trio of singers: Sonia Tavares from the Gift, a Portuguese goth-metal singer named Fernando Ribeiro, and Paulo Praca, a singer-songwriter from the country’s north.

If this unorthodox team had a trait in common, says Goncalves on the phone from Lisbon, it’s that none of them ever particularly cared for fado.

“I preferred listening to the Cure and Joy Division,” Goncalves says, citing a rather different reservoir of melancholy music. “Fado was for my father.”

He confesses that even his knowledge of Rodrigues, despite her exalted status in Portuguese culture, was slender. “I knew four or five songs,” he says.

All this was reason enough for Goncalves, at first, to turn down the opportunity. But a deeper listening caused him to relent.

“I asked the label for her discography,” Goncalves says, and he took the songs with him on a long overseas flight. “And the first one I heard was `Gaivota.’ And somehow I realized this song would change my mind.”

Indeed, “Gaivota,” as sung by Tavares, became the first single off the Hoje album, with a stylish video that has exceeded 2 million views online. It’s another indication that the project has touched a broad constituency – evidenced, Goncalves says, by what he sees at their concerts.

“You see a typical heavy metal fan and a 67-year-old lady, and they are singing the songs together,” Goncalves says. “It was a very social meeting that we generated with this.”

That speaks, of course, to the unparalleled role that Rodrigues and her repertoire play in Portuguese art and society. Her impact endures not just in fado but far beyond, says musicologist Richard Elliott of Newcastle University in the United Kingdom, whose book “Fado and the Place of Longing” came out last year.

“The shadow of Amalia is absolutely massive over contemporary Portuguese music, whether popular music or the `novo fado’ of the last decade,” says Elliott. “It seems you can’t be a fado singer now without some kind of gesture toward Amalia. But what’s interesting about the Hoje project is they seem very keen to downplay the fado aspect.”

That, says Goncalves, is because even though Rodrigues is indelibly associated with the form, her own work took her far outside its conventions.

“Amalia was more than fado,” Goncalves says. “She was more colorful than the black dress, black shawl, and black hair. She was a pop star.”

Because Rodrigues herself expanded fado’s domain, Goncalves felt free to make his own pop arrangements, eschewing the Portuguese guitar altogether, weaving in samplers and drum machines. He says he took some criticism from the fado orthodoxy, but he is proud of presenting music that honors a national icon – and by extension, the country itself – in a fresh light.

“Portugal is much more illuminated, has more color than just fado,” he says. And in Boston, where the show will likely attract many Portuguese-Americans, he hopes Hoje will help present the country not just as a nostalgic idea, but as the modern state it is today.

“Emigrants are tired of that image of Portugal, as a small country with no highways, only two TV channels,” Goncalves says. “They want to give the world an idea that Portugal is much more than that. It’s good for them to hear a band that gives new expression to the Portuguese idea.”

SIDEBAR: A defining and redefining voice

Last week, UNESCO added fado to its inventory of the world’s “intangible cultural heritage.” To friends of Portugal, this consecration only stated the obvious. Born in the steep streets and harborfront taverns of Lisbon in the 19th century, the mournful and romantic song form expresses the melancholy state called “saudade” that is entwined in Portugal’s cultural identity.

No less obvious to many is the dominating role in fado of Amalia Rodrigues, who began singing in the 1930s and gave her last concert in 1994, five years before her death. Her career spanned Portugal’s periods of dictatorship and democracy, and its transition from a poor, rural land to a modern economy. Her music became the country’s main cultural export, just as her successors – Misia, Mariza, Cristina Branco, Dulce Pontes, Ana Moura – have carved a space for fado on the current global music scene.

But Amalia – known simply by her first name – was no guardian of fado’s sanctity. Quite the contrary, says musicologist Richard Elliott, author of “Fado and the Place of Longing” (2010). Though she has become a synonym for the music today, she broke as many rules as she followed.

“Amalia was the original rebel in the world of fado,” Elliott says. “She was an international artist. She sang French songs, Broadway show tunes, Neapolitan songs, Mexican rancheras. It’s interesting that you get a cult of Amalia with blindness to her experimentalism.”

Traveling the world and frequently performing in New York and Paris, Amalia brought a bold voice and operatic ornamentation to what had been a spare, sober form. To match her, composers added violins and even full orchestras to the traditional accompaniment of a single Portuguese guitar. Famous poets wrote for her. Her main composer in the 1960s, Alain Oulman, was a Frenchman. She even recorded an album with jazz saxophonist Don Byas.

“That album was kept hidden for years!” says Nuno Goncalves, leader of the Amalia Hoje project. Growing up in Portugal, he says, the fado he heard barely hinted at the innovations Amalia was performing on the world stage. “The style of fado was a prison for the country,” Goncalves says.

No longer. In her later years, Amalia gave triumphant concerts that encapsulated her career and confirmed her as a Portuguese national treasure. And just as today’s fadistas experiment more boldly with rock, electronica, and folk music of other countries, Goncalves believes it is more than appropriate for a pop band to address fado, with Amalia once again the shared reference point. “We are not trying to erase Amalia from our hearts,” Goncalves says. “Just the opposite.”

NEW YORK – In the course of five albums, the singer Kiran Ahluwalia has blended the Indian classical and folk forms that are her specialty into collaborations with Portuguese fado musicians, the Celtic fiddle of Natalie MacMaster, the Inuit throat singing of Tanya Tagaq, and more. For Ahluwalia, such partnerships across genre and culture aren’t an experiment, or a social commentary on our times, or a producer’s cute idea, or a pitch to gain new listeners.

They are a personal necessity.

“The needing of collaboration comes because we ourselves are collaborations of culture,” says Ahluwalia. “We’re not pure. I collaborate in the kitchen: I make Japanese soy bean curry, Indian style. I think in English, or in Hindi – or French. Our lives are collaboration, because we don’t belong to one culture.”

It’s a fair self-assessment. Ahluwalia was born in India, raised in Toronto, and lives in New York, where she performs on both the world music and jazz circuits. On her newest, most confident album, “Aam Zameen: Common Ground,” she has turned her ear to the desert, joining her working band with the great Tuareg bands Tinariwen and Terakaft. Gambian ritti (one-string fiddle) player Juldeh Camara appears as well, as does Iraqi-American trumpeter Amir ElSaffar.

Ahluwalia calls herself a “collaboration junkie,” and not just for the guests she brings onto her albums. Her own band, which she brings to Johnny D’s tomorrow night with the addition of Rob Curto on accordion, is itself a study in roots and hybridity.

On one hand, all five regular members have family origins in India or Pakistan, and are comfortable with the ghazals – a hallowed genre of Indo-Persian devotional love songs -and Punjabi folk songs that form the core of Ahluwalia’s material.

On the other hand, while Nitin Mitta on tabla and Kiran Thakrar on harmonium supply the classic accompaniment for Indian vocals, Nikku Nayar on electric bass and Rez Abbasi on electric and acoustic guitars dramatically widen the landscape, creating room for bold new arrangements of traditional songs as well as new compositions.

At a recent CD release show in New York for “Aam Zameen,” the band wove together virtuoso tabla drumming with searing guitar work with a jazz-rock bent: Abbasi, the band’s music director and Ahluwalia’s husband, is a jazz guitarist of growing renown.

Ahluwalia, who performs standing instead of in the formal seated pose of Indian playing, offered sassy, self-deprecating stories to introduce each song. At one point, she got the audience to follow her lead in vocalizing a syllable in increasingly complex ways – a building-block of Indian singing that a club audience is rarely invited to attempt.

Beneath the playfulness, of course, rests deep technique. Ahluwalia set aside a career in finance when she decided to return to India and immerse herself in music. Her now-octogenarian ghazal teacher, Vithal Rao, was one of the last court musicians of the Nizam, or ruler, of Hyderabad. Ahluwalia still visits him yearly to advance her training.

Despite five albums and a dozen years of performance and touring, she says she’s still working toward singing the way she wants to sing.

“I have a sonic image of what I want to sound like, and I want to always move toward that image,” she says. “I am always working on a very open-throat, unencumbered, effortless kind of singing where I visualize the air just coming out of my pipes.”

Ahluwalia may see her craft as work in progress, but what she does was enough to seduce the members of Tinariwen when they met her in a Paris studio for a session that Ahluwalia had sought, and that was organized by former Tinariwen producer Justin Adams.

“The way she sings conveys nostalgia,” says Tinariwen bassist Eyadou Ag Leche. “It made us all miss our home. We found our musical point of connection, and it all happened very naturally. The way she presented her songs, it was very easy to work with her.”

The sentiment is mutual. A highlight of “Aam Zameen” is a long version of “Mustt Mustt,” a Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan classic, featuring Tinariwen. “That was definitely one of the coolest experiences of my life, and I’ve collaborated a lot,” Ahluwalia says.

The connection was quicker and fuller than any she’d had in what can be the forced setting of a studio session among near-strangers. In Paris, the Tuareg musicians improvised lyrics in their language, Tamashek, to Ahluwalia’s Urdu, and she returned the favor.

“No one told them to clap, no one told them to sing, but Eyadou just gets up on the chair and dances, he doesn’t know my words but he’s singing behind me. We do a 20-minute song and after that there are no worries. It’s going to happen.”

Now, Ahluwalia says, anytime she meets up with Tinariwen, she ends up backstage in a long jam session with their singer Abdallah Ag Alhousseyni. This coming January she will play with them at the famous Festival in the Desert in Mali.

It all validates Ahluwalia’s view that an excess of reverence for one’s own or another’s tradition should never get in the way of crossing borders to make great music. There is such a thing as too much respect, she says.

“I’m a citizen of the world,” Ahluwalia says. “Other influences are open for me to take in. I don’t have to stick to Canada or India, I can incorporate any other piece of culture into my character and personality.”