Miquel Gil + Maria del Mar Bonet

Chicagoans can be forgiven for assuming Spanish roots music starts and stops with flamenco. We get a healthy dose of it here, often in the form of touring guitar virtuosos like Juan Cañizares and Paco de Lucía. The kickoff concert of this summer’s Music Without Borders series muffles the olés in favor of a wildly diverse Catalan bill. Two established legends, Miquel Gil and Maria del Mar Bonet, pair with three new-guard Barcelonans: jazz-fusion saxophonist Llibert Fortuny, Guinea-Bissau–expat kora player Nino Galissa and the Orquestra Arab de Barcelona, a Strait of Gibraltar–straddling ensemble whose trance-inducing North African patterns ought to weave well with the two headliners.

Both Bonet and Gil share an insatiable jones for Mediterranean fusion fare. Bonet, a national treasure on the order of the Alhambra, is Majorca’s answer to Joni Mitchell. A nova cançó chameleon, she adapts equally well to solo acoustic guitar renderings of Catalan folk standards, collaborations with Tunisian ensembles and Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis, and symphony orchestras.

Bonet also has recorded with cantor Gil, a Valencian Tom Waits whose jagged excavations of rustic Catalan folk forms, flamenco, Algerian raï and Greek rembetika metamorphose thrillingly—as on his most recent release, the fantastic Eixos. Lyrics by Valencian poets drift in a motley landscape of guitars, lutes, accordions, woodwinds, brass and the odd electronic undercurrent. We’re mesmerized by Bonet, but if Gil summons those coastal currents, they may well swipe her thunder.