Aviici Turns to Nashville for Ultra Music Festival Show

Karsten Moran for The New York Times Avicii performing in 2012.

MIAMI â€" The Swedish producer and D.J. Avicii is known for catchy house music like the hits “Levels” and “Silhouettes.” But on Friday, at the Ultra Music Festival here his one-hour set more resembled a Nashville concert than a performance by one of the stars of electronic dance music dance.

In a preview of his as-yet-untitled debut album, due this summer, Avicii shared the stage with the country and bluegrass artists Mac Davis, Audra Mae and Dan Tyminski, as well as three members of the alternative band Incubus. It was a set unlike any other at Ultra, which spanned two weekends this year for the first time, featuring seven stages and more than 200 D.J.s.

Mr. Davis has had a long music and acting career that included writing songs for Elvis Presley, including the 1970s hit “Baby Don’t Get Hooked on Me.” While Avicii manned the mixer on Friday, Mr. Davis performed with the singer and rapper Aloe Blacc, who sang “Black & blue,” a song Mr. Davis wrote with Avicii. “How am I ever going to get my head on straight,” Mr. Blacc sang as Ann Marie Calhoun played the violin.

Mr. Blacc opened the night with “Wake Me Up,” a collaboration with Avicii and Michael Einziger, the Incubus guitarist, and the first single from Avicii’s album.

Ms. Mae sang “Addicted to You,” a song Mr. Davis also wrote with Avicii and later played kazoo on “Road to Hell.” Mr. Einziger and his bandmates, the bassist Ben Kenney and the drummer Jose Pasillas, provided backup.

Avicii, in an interview the night before his Ultra performance, said he and his management team had decided that Ultra was “the perfect place” to preview
the album. “It was the live streaming,” he said of the festival’s Web streaming this year, adding, “This is the most interesting time for electronic music right now, because it has never been this big before.”

His fans, though, seemed a little subdued during the set, which was sandwiched between performances by Cazzette and Tiësto, who played more traditional, higher-energy house sets. Avicii “turned off quite a few people, but I think it is going to win over a lot of new fans,” said Adeeb Hakim, 27,of Long Island, New York, who attended the show. “I am just really proud of him for doing something like that. It was very risky.”

Mr. Davis said he collaborated on two tracks for the Avicii album. Neil Jacobson, senior vice president of A&R at Interscope Records, first contacted him about writing with the 23-year-old Avicii. “They dragged me out of retirement,” said Mr. Davis, 71. “We were in the studio within a week and wrote together and hit it off.”

“When I wrote songs for Elvis Presley I sat down by myself and wrote a song,” he went on. “This process of co-writing and jamming is new to me, but it is a great process. You cut something to a click track and he does his magic on it. He calls me ‘yo, bro,’ and I call him ‘genius,’ and he is.”