A three and a half-hour ride on the Pendolino train that connects Prague to Ostrava will deliver music fans to three intense days of over 60 quality acts on 10 stages. Even though Colours of Ostrava's fifth-year lineup includes a full spectrum of music styles ranging from hip-hop to punk to experimental, the emphasis of this year's headliners — which include Robert Plant, Värttinä and Salif Keita (pictured on the cover) — is on the style loosely called World Beat.

"I feel a very strong connection, a very spiritual connection, to my musical heritage and history when I'm on stage," says Keita, reached by phone during a tour stop in Brooklyn, New York City. Being born to an aristocratic family that frowned on his career as a musician positioned Keita early in life with one foot outside of his home country of Mali. After suffering a childhood of harassment for being an albino, Keita moved to places like Guinea and the Ivory Coast in the 1970s, where he built a solid African reputation for his vocal talent. During those years he extended the richness of West African music with influences from Arabian and Spanish music, supplemented by ideas from Cuba, Brazil and American R&B. Keita, directly descended from 13th-century Malian royalty, also carries a signature Mandiga melodic sense.

Moving to Paris in 1983, Keita began the international phase of his career, over time attracting producers like Weather Report's Joe Zawinul and Living Colour's Vernon Reid. Although the Paris experience gave Keita what he describes as "more exposure to diverse ways of thinking about music," it was his return to his hometown of Bambako in 2001 that inspired his most potent synthesis yet. There, he built a cultural center and recording studio that he shares with emerging Malian talent. The results have been two CDs on Universal — 2002's Mossou and 2004's M'Bembe — that marry the dynamics of modern production with ancient instruments, driven by Keita's ever-resonant voice.

Though that voice echoes with history, pathos, urgency, love and compassion, Keita invariably paints a bright picture. "Because so many bad things are happening in the world right now, we don't need to keep people thinking about bad things all the time," he says. "That is why I'm really optimistic with my art."

The hope and concern integral to Keita's music goes far beyond his lyrics. In January 2006, he told the Wall Street Journal, "There are atrocious things going on with albinos [in Mali], crimes against humanity. But it's all hidden from sight, and the government couldn't care less." For years, Keita has been known to give a sizable portion of his income to help the albinos of Mali.

Before getting off the phone, Keita insisted on mentioning, "I'm trying to build a foundation for albinos, and we want people to help us build a hospital and school for them, because they need help." The atrocities Keita speaks of include infants being banished from their homes, as was his case, and recent reports of exploitive "healers" sacrificing and dismembering albinos for use in quack medicines.

What Keita shares with the other headliners at Colours of Ostrava this year is a track record of bringing traditional inspirations to the studio and, ultimately, to the ears of modern listeners. Robert Plant, for instance, whose work began with the impulse of delta blues and UK folk music as dynamically expressed by Led Zeppelin, has been adding convincing touches of Saharan music in recent years with his band The Strange Sensation. Finland's Värttinä, which sprang from an ensemble focused on "pure" traditional forms, found their voices more effective when mixed with the sculpted effects of modern stage and studio techniques. These pioneers will share the festival's stages with Czech world music-inspired acts like Gipsy.cz, Gulo Čar, Autopilote and Nana Zorin, as well as dozens of artists spanning the globe from Japan to Bosnia.