On "Silent Ways", Danish vocalist Caecilie Norby interprets her favourite singer/songwriter melodies, from Bob Dylan to Paul Simon, CCR to Soundgarden, charging them up with classical and jazz influences. The almost chamber musical, tranquil form hinted at by the album's title is classical, as is the emotional expressiveness of her interpretations. The jazzy approach lies in her singing technique, in the arrangements and the hand-picked musicians in the band improvising magically together.

Nguyên Lê's collaborates with vocalist Ngô Hồng Quang on Hà Nội Duo, an apparent study in contrasts as the two Vietnamese artists could not have had more different upbringings and musical education. And yet they found they had common goals, to express and share the soul of Vietnam with the wider world, bringing together the roots and the future of Vietnamese music. They each contribute three original songs to the album, rounded out by four traditional numbers. The duo is joined on various tracks by trumpeter Paolo Fresu, koto player Mieko Miyazaki and tabla player Prabhu Edouard.

On his third album for Moonjune Records, Indonesian pianist Dwiki Dharmawan delivers a highly focused work and presents a wide array of styles, bound together by a core quintet and one common musical vision. While its predecessor Pasar Klewer found Dharmawan working with two alternating guitarists over a two-disc set of compositions, on Rumah Batu he happily settles with France-based Nguyên Lê, giving this record a special sense of uniformity and spontaneous dynamism. Yaron Stavi and Asaf Sirkis return on upright bass and drums, while Charles Benavent joins the band on electric bass.

Scandinavian jazz musician Geir Lysne says he had decided it was time to meet new people, make new music and broaden his sphere of activity when he started planning the aptly-titled "New Circle", on which he works for the first time with a relatively small ensemble joined by a panoply of well known guest stars. Although his ensemble only contains five acoustic instrumentalists, New Circle sounds as "orchestral" as his earlier big band albums. The key element here is Reidar Skar, a "true master of the computer," as Lysne says.

Nguyên Lê is a magician; his art reveals itself not only in his own compositions but also in his celebrations of the music of the past, where his approach to the latter resembles sculptures made of new clay. Remember Purple, his tribute to Jimi Hendrix, or more recently his Songs Of Freedom and its evocations of rock's greatest moments. He's a flamboyant guitarist and, while he shows courteous deference to his source material, he has always expressed the full diversity of an imaginary world engendered by his own history, that of a nomad, self-taught virtuoso: his music feeds on influences embracing all continents, and is painted with colours drawn from jazz, rock, and a kind of world fusion permeated with light.