In his 1999 song “Brooklyn,” the rapper and actor Mos Def sang a homage to his home borough: “Best in the world and all U.S.A.” That’s a sentiment the Brooklyn Academy of Music is adopting as its presents its first borough-wide music festival, Brooklyn Next.

The festival features performances by either Brooklyn-born or based artists during the next two weeks, beginning tonight with a two-night stand by Mos Def at BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House. Next weekend, Gordon Chambers, an R &B crooner who has performed at past BAMcafé events, takes over the opera house; and from next Thursday to next Sunday, 14 venues across the borough will feature showcases by local artists, including indie rock acts like the French Kicks and Les Sans Culottes, the afro-jazz group the Arturo O’Farill Quartet, and a 75th birthday bash for the late Johnny Cash presented by Brooklyn Country Music.

The entire project, according to the executive producer of BAM, Joseph Melillo, began with a confluence of events: The organization received a grant from the New York State Arts Fund, which was created with profits accrued from lawsuits when Governor Spitzer, then the Attorney General, famously sued record labels for “payola” schemes in 2005. Mr. Melillo saw an opportunity to expand BAM’s contemporary music offerings, which included its annual Rhythm & Blues festival at MetroTech.

“We were trying to find the right kind of music-artistic initiative that BAM should be doing,” he said in a phone interview Tuesday. “So we did [MetroTech] and felt we had finished our discourse in that pursuit. And, simultaneously, the New York State Arts Fund appeared as an opportunity.”

Mr. Melillo decided that BAM needed to chase after a bigger goal, namely surveying the wider music spectrum in Brooklyn beyond R&B. “I started to do my own research of the music scene in Brooklyn, and I felt we could, with integrity, create a multiple-year musical initiative that celebrated the amazing spectrum of music that can be found in Brooklyn,” he said.

Almost immediately, Mr. Melillo thought to take an unorthodox approach to organizing the festival: Typically, organizers decide the artist lineup of large-scale music festivals. But Mr. Melillo opted to hire an independent producer, Chris Wangro, to contact venues throughout the borough, who then decided what local artists to book for the festival. “Once we agreed that our attack would be not to re cruit artists [but spaces], it was a major decision,” Mr. Wangro said. “We as the creators of the festival are not curatorial. We decided to say to the booking guys, it’s your venue, it’s your community, it’s what are you bringing to the table.”

Not surprisingly, the 14 participating venues took the invitation and ran with it.

“Here in Brooklyn, there’s an unbelievable hotbed of cultural music,” Mr. Wangro said. “You have a number of scenes, and the scenes rarely connect — indie rock, they have their indie rock thing. The jazz guys have their thing. Here’s a festival that brings it all together, and we’re inviting them to hang out all together.”

Despite the largesse of the festival, only a few events are taking place at BAM, including Mos Def’s and Mr. Chambers’s performances, and two nights of music curated by Galapagos Art Space next weekend at the BAMcafé. Mos Def’s inclusion in the festival began with a request made by the rapper himself. “Mos came into my office several years ago and said he wanted to do something with BAM,” Mr. Melillo said. “He was the first artist to say, ‘I want to do something in the community, in the ‘hood.’ He was the first and the only artist I went to.”

Local artists participating in the festival were contacted by both conventional and contemporary means. The French Kicks were convinced to play the festival through a message sent on MySpace by the booking agents at Union Hall in Park Slope. Lead singer Nick Stumpf said that playing Brooklyn provides a comforting opportunity to perform for new audiences. “It’s fun to play in Brooklyn because you kind of get more of the crowd that would be home if you weren’t there,” he said. “If you can play Northsix or Southpaw, those people might be at home if there wasn’t a show.”

Mr. Stumpf, like Messrs. Melillo and Wangro, understands that Brooklyn — especially the lesser populated neighborhoods — have as much music to offer as any area in the world. “There are things going on in outer Williamsburg and Greenpoint that are really cool,” Mr. Stumpf said. “I went to a Holy Childhood [a band featuring Danny Leo, brother of indie rock star Ted Leo] show at a gallery in Greenpoint. I met him years ago, but his band played for the first time in a while, and it was a raw, party-vibe rock show. It was so great. These things are happening in places like Bushwick, where it’s still cheap, where kids are still living in raw spaces and working.”

Messrs. Melillo and Wangro are going to see how the festival goes this year before deciding to make changes to its structure. But the goal remains the same: exploring as much of the music that exists in Brooklyn as possible. “Moving through the borough was an important avenue to pursue,” Mr. Melillo said. “What I wanted to do was take a photograph — not the only photograph — but just one photograph of what’s happening in the borough.”

Mos Def will perform tonight and tomorrow at the Howard Gilman Opera House (30 Lafayette Ave., between St. Felix Street and Ashland Place, Brooklyn, 718-636-4100).