L.A.’s Ozomatli lives a charmed existence. In 2004 several members of the eight-piece band, famed for its free-wheeling style, faced police charges in Texas after leading partying fans onto the streets of Austin at the end of a performance. Luckily, they got off, and three years later the left-leaning L.A.–based musicians became official U.S. State Department cultural ambassadors, an astonishing achievement under the Bush administration given the band’s anti-war beliefs.

“At first there was a big question mark in our heads,” recalls saxophonist and clarinetist Ulises Bella, reached in Tucson, Arizona. “It was like ”˜Do you know what we talk about on our records, and what we’ve stood for?’ But they still wanted to pursue it. After a lot of debate on both sides we ended up seeing the golden opportunity in front of us—to travel to super-remote places bands don’t usually go to, to play and connect with people that I don’t think we’d ever be able to reach otherwise.”

Since then government-sponsored tours have taken Ozomatli and its unique blend of Latin-music, urban rock, pop, hip-hop, funk, raga, and samba to audiences in Africa, South America, Asia, and the Middle East. The octet thus linked up with a tradition of cultural diplomacy that includes such figures as jazz masters Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, and Louis Armstrong.

There’ve been some memorable gigs for Bella and his bandmates—like when Ozomatli played in Chandigarh in the Punjab, India, and ended the show with its hallmark descent into the audience while playing, thereby raising the crowd’s temperature another few notches. “It felt like people were bouncing off the walls. I think it had a lot to do with their traditional music and bhangra, their party music. In a weird way we and that energy vibed together, and it felt like a beautiful chaos was going on.”

The band travelled to Nepal as part of a celebration of the guerilla-war-torn country’s newly ratified peace treaty and played an outdoors gig in Kathmandu. “I thought 100 or 200 people might show up out of curiosity, but the stage was in an area usually used for political demonstrations and just before we played huge crowds started turning up,” Bella recalls. “It was amazing to connect with such a large number of people who wouldn’t know you from Joe and had no previous connection to the music or the band.”

Ozomatli is starting to put songs together for a follow-up album to 2007’s brilliantly punchy Don’t Mess With the Dragon. It’s too early to call the direction the music will take, according to Bella, but he promises new multicultural spices, inspired by all the globe-trotting. Meanwhile, he’s looking forward to Ozomatli’s next tour, in May, as cultural ambassadors to Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam.

“Vietnam has such an iconic position in U.S. history,” says Bella. “It’s going to be a real treat for us to go there as Americans on a totally different level, you know. I’m going with a sax, and not a machine gun. We’re all about breaking stereotypes—whether it’s the ones others have of us or the ones we have of them.”

Ozomatli plays the Commodore Ballroom on Friday (April 17).