Angélique Kidjo returns to Performing Arts Center

Catching her breath for a minute during her last energetic show at the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center last August, the always-dancing and multilingual soulful-singing Angélique Kidjo had a confession to make.

“Every so often, they make me go into the studio and record,” she said in the husky, low and slightly hoarse voice that turns honey-smooth when she starts to sing. “They have to make me, because I would rather be making live music and singing to people when we can all be together like this.”

With a new album, “Oyo,” under her belt—it was released April 6 of this year—and one week away from returning to the PAC on June 26, Ms. Kidjo was asked in a phone interview if she still feels the same way.

“Oh, yes,” she said without hesitation. “That’s still true.”

She doesn’t have any kind of a formula to work from, a magic number of live dates before she will submit to demands that she make another album. “I don’t even want to start to think about it,” she said, with a laugh, of her live performance schedule. “I just go.”

And just going means a lot more than heading out on the road to play more dates. On June 10, she was a featured performer at the opening concert for the World Cup soccer competition in South Africa. After that, she said she was headed to Montreal, Colorado and San Francisco, before a quick stop home in New York City just prior to Saturday’s concert at the PAC.

In addition to all her tour stops, Ms. Kidjo is committed to a number of philanthropic efforts. She recently created her own charity, Batonga, which is dedicated to creating a culture that promotes secondary education for girls in Africa. On “Oyo,” the UNICEF goodwill ambassador has included one song, “You Can Count On Me,” to support efforts to eradicate newborn tetanus. For every free download of the song from unicef.org, Pampers will donate one dose of vaccine for a pregnant woman or newborn baby in Africa.

To help her cope with the demands on her time presented by cutting a new album, she has cultivated an approach to recording that takes some of the most onerous parts of the process out of the equation.

“I have a little studio at my home,” she said, “so when I am inspired while I am at home cooking in the kitchen with my husband, I can just go in there and work out a new song or an arrangement.

“That way I can be all prepared when I go into the studio to record. I’ll get together with the musicians who will be recording with me, and we will rehearse everything and learn all the songs. Then when we get to the studio and have a new idea, it’s easy to work it in. We can be finished recording quickly that way, and I can go back to performing live—which is what I like the best.”

Ms. Kidjo said that she doesn’t go out on the road with the musicians who accompany her in the recording studio. “They are all soloists, with schedules as hectic as mine,” she said. “What I look for when I go out to play on tour is the best human beings first, before musicians. That’s the most important part when you are going to be spending so much time together.

“If I don’t like you as a person, then I don’t want you to be around me,” she said with typical candor, not to say disarming bluntness.

Some of the musicians who work with her on her albums are not only soloists, they have significant start power of their own. On her last album, “Black Ivory Soul,” she recorded one song, “Iwoya,” with Dave Matthews, who had become a fan when Ms. Kidjo was opening for him during a recent tour.

On “Oyo,” the diminutive powerhouse from the West African country of Benin cut tracks with such diverse talents as Bono, John Legend, Roy Hargrove, and Dianne Reeves, just to name a few. How did she go about setting up these collaborations?

“When you are out playing, you work together, or you cross paths,” she said in an offhand manner, as if recording with Bono was nothing special. “You find that you have interests in common, and music in common, and that creates a bond,” she said, leaving open the question of how such a bond might translate into sharing studio time for a cut on her album.

But when it comes to having music in common, Ms. Kidjo has the widest possible frame of reference for intersecting with other genres, types and styles. On “Oyo,” she records in no fewer than six languages, including her mother tongue of Fon from Benin, Hindi, Yoruba from Nigeria, English, French, and Mina, which is spoken in Togo, Ghana and Benin. “No Portuguese on this one,” she added with a laugh.

The absence of Portuguese on the album doesn’t reflect any change in Ms. Kidjo’s approach to cross-pollinating the traditional music of her homeland with elements of funk, jazz, R&B and the music of Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean.

“Oyo” includes three soul songs as a tribute to the music that shaped her taste when she was growing up: Curtis Mayfield’s “Move On Up,” James Brown’s “Cold Sweat,” and a new take called “Monfe Ran” on the Aretha Franklin version of “Baby I Love You,” performed as a duet with Dianne Reeves, whom Ms. Kidjo calls “the greatest jazz singer in the world.”

Her philosophy about performing live is wrapped around the basic precept that she “never take the public for granted,” she said. She believes she has a responsibility to “be naked spiritually on stage, to open my heart. Then, when it comes together and the magic happens, it is so beautiful, and we can all forget that we are divided.”

Life on the road can be difficult, she said, since she doesn’t get to see her husband often, and she has missed too much of her 17-year-old daughter’s growing up.

“It’s hard to be alone” when she is not performing, she said, “but the best price to pay is to be on stage and make people happy.”

Angélique Kidjo will perform at the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center on Saturday, June 26, at 8 p.m. Tickets are $45, $60 or $75, available online at whbpac.org; by calling 288-1500; or in person at the PAC at 76 Main Street in Westhampton Beach.