Brilliant, jacking, extended, improvisatory, ancient dance music played at the initiation of diviners (drugged with jolonthi, to ward off spells) on a twelve-blade xylophone with calabash resonators.

Highly rhythmic ensembles of percussion, flutes, whistles and trumpets from the mountainous north of the country; and brilliant pichanchalassi playing, five flat stones struck with two oval stones.

Switzerland has four official languages and numerous dialects, and this mosaic of sounds is judiciously wide-ranging and open — starring wonderful yodelling, alphorn, Jew’s harp, zither and musette-style accordion.

Work songs, music and songs about everyday life, or the calendar, or perhaps to run alongside ritual feasts, with guitar, mandolin, accordion, guimbarde, tambourine, bagpipe and reed flute.

1950s recordings, mostly vocal, with wide range and variety — Alpine choral polyphony, poetic improvisation from Central Italy, funeral laments from the South, Sicilian songs to cure tarantula bites…

From the south-east corner, with uneasy Estonian identity, and ties to Russia via the Orthodox Church — striking singing about everything, in different lineups, with recordings from the 1930s till up to date.

Shashmaqom trio improvisation from Uzbekistan, artful and serious: heartfelt singing and fine tanbur lute playing, set off by the accompaniment of dutor and rabob lutes, and doyra percussion.

Deeply moving singing from Ferghana in Central Asia — classical, slow, suspenseful and meditative in a world of pain — accompanied by lutes, chang (a psaltery), nay flute, dayera tambourine, and ghijak spike fiddle.

From the north-eastern provinces, mixing Spanish, African and Guarani influences (and long derided for it), a distant cousin of tango. Guitar and six-string guitarron, accordion and bandoneon, double bass, singing.

Haydee Alba’s 1990 debut album — emotional and poetic from the off, already steeped in tradition — following the evolution of the form over its nineteen tracks. ‘An artist’s job is to make her public dream.’

The eighteenth-century poetry of Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai as celebrated nightly by waee faqirs, whose penetrating lutes and high whirling voices bridge musical and mystical experience.

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.

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

‘Wild songs’ (without words), sophisticated choral singing, improvisations, pastorals and newer song forms.

Erik Marchand singing, with his accompanist Thierry Robin finding the ud better suited than guitar or mandolin to the intervalic arrangements of quarter tones peculiar to this repertoire.

Various songs — and valiha zither, made from a bamboo trunk, the sodina flute, the angorodao accordion, the kabosy lute, and the amponga tany, a ground zither made of plant rope, wood, and shit.

Fine singing and oud-playing, with zither and violin, and the percussion which characterises the hejaz style — nasgar and naqrazan, darbuka and tar, both held at the same time in the left hand, struck by the right.