You don't see toddlers running through People's Park very often, and most people probably wouldn't say kids are a prominent feature of Berkeley's most infamous plot of land. But on Saturday, June 7, prominent they were, accompanied by parents in lawn chairs, a Cajun dance band and the odd t-shirt salesperson. If nothing else, the fifth annual Berkeley World Music Festival brought generations together.

World music, it seems, has a way of doing that. "It crosses boundaries of age, race and gender," says Felix Elieff, a man who has worked in record stores since 1989 and currently divides his time between Amoeba Music and Musical Offering. "A lot of women, a lot of men. There are older couples looking through the salsa section and young people picking up LPs."

Elieff's in-store observations appeared to reflect the outdoor crowd early Saturday afternoon. Attendees watched Andrew Carriere and the Creole Belles from 1 to 2 p.m. in People's Park, sharing the space in an amicable fashion with basketball players and the park's more permanent residents. Though this group at the People's Park Dance Party was sizable, it was only one of the festival's dozen venues, and spectators started to collect in various locations as the day and the acts went on.

While not an insurmountable hike, this dispersal of bands up and down Telegraph Avenue was perhaps the only detriment to some of the musicians. Musical Offering, for example, was the location of Dina Rowan and Lily Storm's set of Ancient and Old World Lullabies. The map was clearly labeled, and Bancroft Way isn't exactly a lawless frontier, but groups at outlying locations may have suffered as a result of their distance from the action's center between Channing and Dwight Way.

Regardless of the space between the sites, the extensive appeal of world music was reinforced at each venue. The genre tends to attract one of the widest demographics possible, principally because the concept of world music itself is pretty far-reaching. Even a rudimentary linguistic analysis of the category reveals its geographical breadth; the music has to encompass each nation, every continent, the entire planet. World music comes from everywhere, because if it didn't, it would no longer exist.

And the Berkeley World Music Festival certainly tried to cover the world. A small selection of countries represented included Ukraine (Barvinok Ensemble), Argentina (Hombres de Tango), Greece (Disciples of Markos), Trinidad (Val Serrant), Brazil (Eva Scow Ensemble) and Ireland (Laurie Chastain and her "Celtic Rad-trad Fiddle"). There was even an act called Sila and the Afro Funk Experience, referred to in performance guides as "Africa's James Brown."

One of the few uniform aspects about the musicians was the high quality of their performances. Still, the best aspect of world music is the worst aspect, too. Because the genre is essentially comprised of everything that isn't pop (and, as David Ralicke of Cambodian group Dengue Fever wisely noted, contemporary pop in every country sounds more or less the same), the odds are high that a given festivalgoer will not like every group she or he sees. In other words, all people will enjoy some world music, but some people won't enjoy all world music.

In general, though, all people would probably enjoy the Berkeley World Music Festival. Twenty toddlers, their parents, a bunch of couples, and a few singletons in People's Park can't be completely wrong.