A few reasons to head up Highway 49

Well, yeah. Especially when it’s two days past deadline, and then to add insult to injury an interview with Mickey Hart, the former Grateful Dead drummer who’s carved out a thriving second career as an “ethnomusicologist” and world music artist in recent years, appears in a certain local daily the same day our interview was scheduled.

Hey, thanks.

Nevertheless, Hart and his group Bembe Orisha are playing the California World Music Festival this Saturday at the Nevada County Fairgrounds in Grass Valley, a Thursday through Sunday event that deserves mention—if not for Hart’s gig, then for a number of other fine acts that will be appearing.

The Wayfaring Strangers, who play Sunday, are a group assembled by Boston-based violinist and composer Matt Glaser to explore music both domestic (bluegrass, jazz, Appalachian folk) and immigrant (Celtic, klezmer). Typically, such ambition results in the kind of pastiche that’s easier to appreciate from an intellectual standpoint than a musical one, but Glaser manages to make it work, with the help of such contributors as fusion banjoist Tony Trischka and Boston rock singer-songwriter Tracy Bonham, along with guests Laurie Lewis and Laszlo Gardony.

When you call something a “world music festival,” many people associate that term with music from the African diaspora, and Thomas Mapfumo and the Blacks Unlimited, which appear on Sunday, fill that bill. Mapfumo, originally from Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), is a bandleader whose career dates back to the 1960s; his band incorporates multiple players of the mbira—think a kalimba thumb piano grafted onto a gourd resonator—who play a fluid style of African funk-rock with heavy political undertones called chimurenga, which comes from a word for a style of fighting.

Other acts include Scottish fiddler Alasdair Fraser, who operates a Nevada City-based label called Culburnie Records that specializes in Scottish music, Australian groups the Waifs and Fruit, American sister folk act Katryna and Nerissa Nields, Sikh singer Dya Singh, a guitar night (Friday) featuring former Wings and Al Stewart guitarist Laurence Juber with Peppino D’Agostino and Brian Gore, singer-songwriter Alice Peacock, fingerstyle guitarist Don Ross, Mexican jarocho group Conjunto Jardin, female vocal sextet Adaawe, and more. (For a full list, go to the Web site www.worldmusic festival.com.)

In many ways, this Festival represents “world music” the way the Sacramento Jazz Jubilee represents jazz—there’s a bit there, along with a lot of other stuff you might not expect. But that’s all right, right?