Exploring the 2026 Blissfest Lineup, Part V
Global Roots Highlights
From West Africa to island nations to the Caribbean and back again, music travels, transforms, and returns home in new forms. These musical traditions were carried across the Atlantic through the transatlantic slave trade, one of history’s most devastating forced migrations. At Blissfest, we celebrate these artists and the global stories they carry through their music.
From the islands of Cape Verde off the coast of Africa, singer Elida Almeida carries a sound shaped by centuries of migration. Cape Verdean music holds within the creole culture shaped by African roots and Portuguese colonial influences of the wider Atlantic. According to Afropop Worldwide, women in West Africa are leading much of today’s musical and cultural innovation. Elida Almeida is increasingly recognized among this generation of artists, alongside established voices such as Angelique Kidjo and Fatoumata Diawara.
Follow those currents west with the transatlantic slave trade, and you arrive in Cuba, where African rhythms fused with Spanish traditions to create entirely new musical languages. Taking their name from the word for heart in the Afro-Cuban religion of Santeria, OKAN, embodies this blending of those roots with jazz, folk, and classical music. Throughout an OKAN set, you’ll dance, clap, chant, and be mesmerized by the world they create before your eyes.
Returning to the continent of Africa, in Senegal, the kora has long been a vessel of history. Master musician Mady Kouyate carries forward a griot tradition that stretches back generations where music is a vessel for oral history. It is storytelling, memory, and cultural continuity. Kouyate and his family currently reside in Michigan and they have embedded themselves into the musical thread of this state. Little did we know that for years, the “rhythm family” could be found at our Drum Kiva and the Song Tree sharing dances and rhythms. We are excited to put an even larger spotlight on them this year. 
Carrying forward a 151-generation lineage of Griots, his daughter KORÓ both honors her ancestors through sacred West African melodies and boldly tests the bounds of genre writing neo-soul, folk, pop, and branching out into electronic disco and country. KORÓ incorporates her sacred, traditional West African tunes in her artistry to honor her ancestors.