Africa Oyé Festival @ Sefton Park, Liverpool, 22-23 June

If you didn't throw a massive weekend-long festival in Liverpool's Sefton Park in celebration of your 21st birthday, you did it all wrong, mate. One of the UK's biggest live celebrations of African and Caribbean music, Africa Oyé has grown from humble beginnings as the odd gig here and there in 1992 to a park-straddling two-day affair bringing together music, dance, food, fashion and arts and crafts, all for resolutely zero pence – and this year celebrates its 21st anniversary and its solid track record of having brought such names as Tinariwen, Femi Kuti and John Peel favourite Kanda Bongo Man to Merseyside with a line-up hailing from Zimbabwe, Ghana, Cuba, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Nigeria.

Riding the success of their 2012 album Rising Tide, young Zimbabweans Mokoomba and their energetic, Tonga-influenced infusions are likely to be among the programme's highlights; as are Atongo Zimba's thoughtful, searching songs, sung in a mixture of Fra Fra, Hausa, Ga, English and Twi and exploring themes of power and respect within relationships, everyday life, and love, romance, and spirituality. Having been based in the UK for the last 10 years, he brings along his Ghanaian band to accompany him on his two-stringed lute, the 'koliko', a traditional West African instrument that he learned to play and make as a child under the tutelage of his grandfather.

A recent addition to the line-up is singer-songwriter Jay and his band, who festival director Paul Duhaney witnessed in performance at the Atlantic Music Expo in Praia, Cape Verde, in April – Duhaney was so impressed that he booked them for not one but two performances at this year's Oyé. Delivering a seemingly effortless hybrid of hip-hop and reggae with his group of seven young Cape Verdean musicians, Jay offers a fresh-faced and boundlessly energetic festival show – and with Cape Verde's minister of culture, export officer and the band's manager having all clubbed together to organise his trip here, he seems to us to come with a pretty strong seal of approval.

Elsewhere on the bill are Ghana's long-standing Osibisa and powerful performer Black Prophet, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo's nine-piece ZongZing All Stars; and if all these rousing anthemics get too much for you, there are more than 80 stalls of arts, crafts and nosh in the Oyé Village, and workshops in drumming and percussion, and African and Caribbean dance.

Finally, if you feel pretty terrible about having a wicked 48 hours just shambling about from one gig to another for basically nothing, you can contribute to keeping the festival free – and open to all – long into the future by donating.