The joropo, pasaje and tonada (with roots in sixteenth-century Spain) played on the bandola, a pear-shaped, four-stringed guitar, made from cedar — with maracas and cuatro accompaniment.

From the Central Coast, afro music for rites and festivals, sharing with salsa drums like the cumaco (using the heel of the hand to vary pitch) and redondo, besides cow horns, car wheels, plates, sea shells.

Refined, improvisatory, endangered traditional music for a quartet of two-stringed spike-fiddle, zither, two lutes.

Soul Jazz back in Port-au-Prince after twenty years, to record again with the Drummers of the Société Absolument Guinin. Mesmeric rhythms and beats traditionally used to induce spirit possession in the Vodou religion — ‘dynamic and riveting in their intricacy and power,’ said the Quietus about the first volume.

Two EPs of storming, squinty Shangaan Electro to herald the European tour of Tiyiselani, the Tshetshas and producer Dog, in the summer of 2011.

‘Shidaiqu means ‘songs of the era’: a hybrid musical genre arising in the cosmopolitan city of Shanghai in the late 1920s, blending traditional Chinese elements with western pop, jazz, blues, and Hollywood-inspired film soundtracks. It represented a musical and cultural merging that would go on to shape a golden age of Chinese popular song and film in the interwar period.
‘Waiting For Your Return ranges from early beginnings — like the 1927 recording Drizzle, often considered the first shidaiqu 78, composed by Li Jinhui and performed by his daughter Li Minghui — through to more polished examples in succeeding decades, by such stars as Bai Hong, Wu Yingyin, Yao Lee, and most prolifically Zhou Xuan.
‘The recordings here reach up until the shidaiqu’s local demise in the early 1950s, when the Chinese Communist Party denounced it as ‘yellow music’, outlawing nightclubs and the manufacture of pop music, and destroying western-style instruments. At this point many of these singers decamped to Hong Kong, enjoying further success throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s.’

Treasurable 78s about sex, booze, marriage — the original Yidl Mit Seine Fidl, a wild Simchas Torah — from the first Yiddish theatre in Europe. Patrons like Kafka, Joseph Roth and Chagall were knocked sideways.