Moody, elusively different, singer-songwriter folk, recorded in Beirut in the late-1970s by this treasured secret of the Lebanese underground, collaborator of Issam Hajali and Fairuz.

‘Musician, poet and painter Roland Brival’s 1980 album is a lost classic of Caribbean spiritual jazz. Recorded with a group of Martinique’s top musicians, and combining the bèlè percussion traditions of the island with free flowing saxophone, rhodes flourishes and languorous bass, the album was rejected by Roland’s label of the time, and was ultimately self released in miniscule quantities to a small local audience. Themes of créole identity and colonial injustice combined with universal ideas of love and longing sung in Créole, English and French sound like an Antillean answer to Gary Bartz and Jon Lucien, underpinned with the insistent rhythms of the ti bois percussion. Long unheralded in the English-speaking world, Créole Gypsy is a key piece of the jigsaw of Caribbean music.’

The spell-binding Romanian gypsy singer, accompanied by cembalo, violin and accordion.

An insurgent blend of rock, rumba, soul and traditional grooves.
Including never-before-released recordings by legends like Thomas Mapfumo and Oliver
Mtukudzi, amongst many others.

Dazzling, smash-hit, fully-fledged blend of flamenco, reggaeton and post-Timbaland r&b, with a Middle Eastern flavour to the singing. It’s the re-telling of a medieval story about a woman locked in a tower by her husband, and her escape. There’s even an Arthur Russell sample.
Lost in the Christmas rush here, but so nice we’re serving it twice.

From 1971, A Guitar in the Foreground is Rosinha’s best record. Classic, chilled Bossa shot through with her scintillating guitar-playing.
Check this version of Summertime for her instrumental virtuosity. (Tyler, the Creator burglarised it for Tomorrow, on Chromakopia.)

The royal music of the Ganda, Nyoro and Ankole peoples, lost when the palaces were burned down in 1966, and many of the musicians killed, and their instruments (some of them over four hundred years old) destroyed.

‘Barely disco and hardly jazz, Rupa Biswas’ 1982 LP is the halfway point between Bollywood and Balearic. Tracked in Calgary’s Living Room Studios with a crack team of Indian and Canadian studio rats alike, Disco Jazz is a perfect fusion of East and West; sarod and synthesizer intricately weaving around one another for thirty-seven transcendent minutes, culminating in the viral hit Aaj Shanibar.’

Eighteenth and nineteenth century folk repertoire featuring horn, overtone flute, panpipes, vertical flute, shepherds’ trumpet — and violin or balaika.

‘Rhythme Congolais From Africa To The Antilles, 1963-77.’

Aka SJOB Movement, spun out of Sonny Okosuns’ set-up: Samuel ‘Spark’ Abiloye, Johnnie Woode Olimah, Ehima ‘Blackie’ Ottah and Prince Bolarinwa Agba.
Militant funk, deep and rootsy.

Gorgeous, lilting Palm Wine classics from the venerable Sierra Leonean.

Her classic, debut album from 2005; now out on vinyl for the first time.
A precociously masterful collection of sambas and bossas, featuring some of Brazil’s very best musicians, including Azymuth crew.

‘Every song is a mini-masterpiece, be it heavy acid rock psychedelia, horn and guitar drenched funk grooves, or gripping soul ballads reflective of life during wartime.’

A thought-provoking, deeply enjoyable consideration of displacement and dislocation, and abiding but adaptive cultural memory, this fourth collaboration mashes expert, haunting samples of the classical Iranian pop of greats like Andy, Hayedeh, and Fereydoun Farrokhzad into tough, quick-fire beat-downs.

Joyful rug-cutters and sweet soul-uplifters from the town of Morogoro, in early-1960s Tanzania: muziki wa dansi, inspired by Cuban 78s, and dance crazes like the twist and cha cha cha, but making them its own. Here is the cream of over a hundred recordings by Salum, mostly for Mzuri Records of Kenya; pretty much lost till now.
In an old-school tip-on cover, with lyrics in Swahili and English on the inner sleeve.
Lovely stuff.