Dance music at a blues festival? You betcha! Hot guitar licks. Conga drums. Latin rhythms. Paul Cebar and his band will bring the total package to this year’s Columbia Blues Festival. A native of Milwaukee, Cebar has evolved from a coffeehouse folkie to a full-fledged party-music showman over his 30 years of making music. Cebar’s motto is “Tomorrow sound now for yes music people.” In other words, those who get within earshot of Cebar’s forward-looking sound should put away any pre-conceived notions and be prepared for a steaming stewpot of exhilarating multi-ethnic music. Jim Macnie wrote in the Village Voice that Cebar and his bandmates might be from Wisconsin, but “their hearts are somewhere in the fifth ward of New Orleans. They put a lively spin on all sorts of American strains, from second-line to funk to zydeco, and they do it with a load of whimsy.” Cebar went from the Milwaukee coffeehouse circuit in the mid-1970s to playing jump blues and R&B at college in Sarasota, Florida. He wrote a thesis about the rhythm and blues of Louis Jordan and Buddy Johnson and developed a deep fascination for the music of Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Cebar led a band called The R&B Cadets during his early years, and that combo morphed into The Milwaukeeans around 1986. The new band developed a dance-floor mentality, and its music took on some energetic, pan-ethnic grooves. Their first studio album, “That Unhinged Thing,” was released in 1993, and it sparked a wider touring schedule for The Milwaukeeans who took their music to Canada and the West Coast for the first time. The band’s 1995 record, “Upstroke for the Downfolk,” earned some nationwide radio airplay on adult-alternative channels, thanks to the rollicking single, “Didn’t Leave Me No Ladder.” A six-song EP, “I Can’t Dance for You,” followed in the spring of 1996, and a full-length album called “The Get Go” followed in 1997. But it was the long-requested live album, 2001’s “Suchamuch,” that brought Cebar further recognition, and he and The Milwaukeeans have been touring hard ever since. The band’s current lineup includes percussionist Romero Beverly and bassist Patrick Patterson, who join veterans Reggie Bordeaux on drums and Bob Jennings on saxophone and keyboards. It’s a lean, mean dance-music machine, with lots of space for Jennings’ Hammond organ and saxophone honking, and Cebar’s multi-faceted guitar lines. The band’s latest album is called, of course, “Tomorrow Sound Now for Yes Music People,” and it’s been hailed as “the best batch of songs yet of an endangered strain of fortified, intensified, fully-jacked-up, roaring, and exceedingly personal music-making from a singular Midwestern master.” Sounds like there’s nothing left to do but get out of your seat, get down to the front of the stage, and shake it!