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The world was fused at Globalfest on Sunday night. The sold-out event at Webster Hall was the ninth-annual world-music showcase, timed to coincide with the Association of Performing Arts Presenters’ annual convention: 12 acts from 5 continents. At Globalfest the old image of world music as ethnomusicological finds — pure local styles directly imported from out-of-the-way places — has given way to a more worldly music, played by artists who self-consciously decide what to mix. They select from their own heritage and countless other possibilities; after all, they’ve got Internet connections themselves. Globalfest was recorded for NPR.

The singer Mayra Andrade was one cosmopolitan paradigm. She was born in Cuba to a family from Cape Verde; her stepfather was an ambassador, and she grew up in Cape Verde, Senegal, Angola, Germany and France, but also loved Brazilian music. Her set hinted at all of it. Her band played lean, percussive syncopations tinged with samba, jazz or Cape Verdean funaná; her voice, dusky and leisurely, glided over the bumpy rhythms with sultry aplomb, like a plush hovercraft.

The Gloaming puts Irish music through prisms of jazz and minimalism. It merges the long-running duo of the fiddler Martin Hayes and the guitarist Dennis Cahill — who already push Irish music in impressionistic directions — with the singer Iarla O Lionaird (from Afro Celt Sound System); another fiddler, Caoimhin O Raghallaigh, who also plays hardangar, a Swedish fiddle with sympathetic strings, and the pianist Thomas Bartlett, a k a Doveman. With chordal layers or subtle counterpoint, Mr. Bartlett’s piano transformed slow vocal melodies or racing fiddle tunes into meta-Irish music, ruminations on a long legacy.

Yemen Blues hopscotched across cultures, often in midsong. It could sound like an Arabic pop orchestra accompanying serpentine melodies, or a North African trance group driving a modal riff, only to switch toward jazzy horn and flute solos or hints of chamber music. The through line was Ravid Kahalani’s grainy, impassioned voice, whether he was sustaining the inflections of a cantor or verging on rap. Even more insistently eclectic was the Silk Road Ensemble — more than a dozen musicians from East and West, merging a string quartet with, among other things, tabla, Galician gaita (bagpipe) and Chinese sheng (mouth organ) — which played chamber pieces extrapolated from traditional sources, a virtuosic pastiche.

Wang Li, a Chinese musician based in Paris, performed solo, finding a futuristic sound in humble instruments. He played jew’s-harps, twangy little instruments that were closely miked and enriched by reverb so that every touch and resonance was audible in detail. His pieces were fascinating, introspective perpetual-motion meditations. The rhythms of sharply pinging, clicking notes sometimes suggested electronic dance music; ghostly overtone melodies sighed up above. It was deeply solitary music, quietly spellbinding.

The tradition of songwriter as public conscience turned up at Globalfest, though blocked at times by language barriers. BélO, a Haitian singer based in Paris, has a voice with the reedy determination of Bob Marley by way of Sting; he places his messages in reggae, ballads and some promising Caribbean hybrids. M.A.K.U., a Colombian-rooted band from New York, merged Afro-Colombian rhythms with hints of Afro-beat, delivering exhortations as dance grooves. SMOD, from Mali, had songs railing against corruption and poverty (as well as praising Malian women). Led by Samou Bagayoko, the son of the Malian pop singers Amadou & Mariam, it juxtaposed rapping and three-part harmony, but its sparse drum-machine and keyboard grooves had the stiff, nursery-rhyme simplicity of SMOD’s producer, Manu Chao — a long way from Mali’s musical richness.

There were vintage styles, too. Zaz the stage name of the French singer Isabelle Geffroy, had a lithely swinging trio that often harked back to Hot Club jazz as it backed her tangy voice and playful scat-singing. The white-suited Diogo Nogueira, from Brazil, brought a large, supple samba band but came across like a supper-club act, doing suave but conventional versions of old Brazilian hits.

A different archival impulse paid off for Debo Band, a Boston group devoted to the Ethiopian funk of the late 1960s and ’70s: fierce, jagged, complex and galvanizing music. With a beefy horn section, biting violins and a lead singer with a convincing Ethiopian quaver, the group brought back a live version of a style that was never recorded as vividly.

The most traditionalist group at Globalfest was Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino, from Salento in the Puglia region of southern Italy, and it was a whirlwind. It plays an ancient style called pizzica tarantata: ritual healing songs driven by speedy, triple-time tambourines and declaimed in sharp-toned voices. But even as they exulted in their heritage, they stretched it. For one song the group brought up a Lebanese trumpeter, and soon the tambourines were propelling a chromatic, zigzagging melody that was headed away from home.