The incoming director of the Four Winds Festival, James Crabb, wants to try something a little unusual for the first event of his five-year position.

"It's something a little similar and a little different to the iconic music festival," he says.

Four Winds Latin Festival, as the name suggests, has a focus on Latin music. It's not replacing the regular biennial Four Winds Festival, which takes place again take next year. Instead,Crabb says, it's an attempt to grow and satisfy audiences and to diversify the range of music performed beyond the contemporary classical repertoire for which the Four Winds Festival is known.

"Latin music is a big world in itself so the idea was to focus on tango nuevo and tango song form."

He worked to come up with some high-quality musicians in that repertoire as well as flamenco dancers to provide a range of concerts over the Easter weekend in the open-air Sound Shell and the Windsong Pavilion.

The festival opens on Saturday night at 7pm with a performance by Tango Jam 2. Crabb will be playing classical accordion as part of this ensemble created especially for the festival (the first Tango Jam, of which he was also a member, toured over a decade ago with the Australian Chsamber Orchestra). The group - which also features guitarist Stephen Magnusson, violinist Andrew Haveron, pianist Stefan Cassomenos and double bassist Phil Stack - will perform tango nuevo works that fuse classical music forms, jazz harmonies, Latin rhythms and improvisation by Astor Piazzolla, Gustavo Beytelmann and Tomas Gubitsch.

"On Sunday there are three ensembles," Crabb says. Rasa Duende is a collaboration between musicians Bobby Singh (tabla), Adrian Mcneil (sarod) and Damien Wright (flamenco guitar), who explore the creative potential of combining the Flamenco and Hindustani music traditions, and Bandaluzia, a modern flamenco and dance ensemble. It's led by Australian guitarist Damian Wright and features percussionist Ben Hauptmann, guitarist James Hauptmann and flamenco dancer Jessica Statham.

Tango Jam 2 will be also performing again and Argentinian-born baritone Jose Carbo will be performing songs taught to him by his grandfather among the repertoire of tango and Latin song including works by Piazzolla, Gardel and Mores.

In addition, the festival will feature tango workshops led by Rina and Nadim Sawaya, recent finalists at the Tango Dance Asian Championships, and there will be a Fiesta on Sunday night with dancing and music ranging from New Flamenco from Andalusia to mestizo-inspired sounds from Barcelona and traditional and electronic tango from Buenos Aires and beyond. Spanish food will also be on sale throughout the festival.

Crabb was born in Scotland and says he was brought up playing folk music, switching to classical accordion at the age of 15.

"I was looking for more challenges."

At the age of 18, he went to Copenhagen to study with renowned classical accordionist Mogens Ellengaard for eight years and ended up teaching in Europe for 15 years before moving to Sydney with his wife, a member of the Australian Chamber Orchestra.

Things were different in Australia - "There's no accordion culture at all" - and he says he was too old to try to establish any apart from some performing of his own but he still found plenty to do.

"I've curated a lot of events in my career," he says, and this experience came in useful when it came to landing the job at Four Winds, which he envisages as a year-round program encompassing music, dance, visual art and other art forms. While he's feeling his way in, he says he wants to get a combination of "things known and interesting things unknown as well" - drawing people in with the familiar and experiencing the novel too, then leaving them hungry for more.

"That's the goal."