This album was recorded in Nepal at Tibetan Buddhist monasteries of the Gelugpa and Nyingmapa sects. Most of the cuts are Gelugpa, including part of the Chäd – a cleansing ritual. Other sections include the assembly call (with conch horns), prayer wheel, prostration rites, and more. A second group of tracks includes a ritual to Vajrayogini – a major female deity in Tibetan Buddhist practice. Various ritual instruments (thigh-bone trumpets, hand drums, cymbals, oboes, etc.) are heard.

Deep Forest is the first studio album by the musical group Deep Forest, consisting of French duo Eric Mouquet and Michel Sanchez. The album mixes New Age electronics with UNESCO field recordings of music from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Solomon Islands, Burundi, Tibesti, and the Sahel. Deep Forest was nominated for the Grammy Award as Best World Music Album in 1994. For Sanchez and Mouquet, the most important purpose of the album was to express their own fascination with the Efe people, and open the world's ears to the exquisite sound of a quickly vanishing culture. As Mouquet noted, "It's not very often you can hear a Pygmy singing on the radio."

The 20 years referred to in the title of this 2CD collection is only the length of the Bombay-born percussionist's solo career. Gurtu was already beginning to play Indian classical tabla at the age of six, eventually opening his jazz-fusion phase by gigging with Oregon and Don Cherry. This set's subtitle blurb reads 'the serial collaborator in full flight with…', then proceeds to list a highly impressive gathering of guest artists, hailing from both jazz and global music zones. There's always the danger, particularly with drumming leaders, to be subsumed and sidelined by your singers, guitarists and horn players, but Trilok always invites his collaborators into his own universe, retaining a strong sense of Indian classical tradition. Often this will be pleasingly filtered via a fusion with jazz, funk, soul, hip hop, African, Latin, Far Eastern or Western classical musics, but Gurtu usually tends to emerge unscathed and undiluted.

To lovers of Brazilian jazz, the pairing of these two legends of the genre amounts to something of a musical orgasm. The only serious misfire isn't really that bad, just a bit incongruous. Why would two consummate Brazilian ambassadors choose to do their one English lyric song – George Harrison's "Something" – as a reggae tune? The groove is silly, but actually some of the guitar work is fun. Just as when Ivan Lins sings in his native Portuguese rather than stilted English, this tandem is most at home conveying emotions that go beyond simple semantics, usually with Gil writing the music and Nascimento the lyrics. "Sebastian" is a moody bass-and-drum driven power ballad which functions as a showcase to their raspy vocals. The romantic, accordion-enhanced "Duas Sanfonas" would be more effective without the guest vocals by Sandy and Junior.

Borders consists of a succession of themes with nostalgic accents and travelers, whose melodic and dancing strength is overwhelming. Here and there we recognize familiar melodies (for example "Child", heard by Romano Sclavis Texier, or "Fortuna" who comes from Napoli's Walls). In this sense, this disc is close to Danses et autres scènes, published by Label Bleu in 1997 or Half of the world at JMS in 2007. Like them, it occupies a place a little apart in the discography of Louis Sclavis. Borders is not the culmination of a project as such as Napoli's Walls, The Lost Language, Lost On The Way or Sources, but a step back on a succession of distinct works of which however, coherence allows for natural assembly. At a steady pace, every ten years.

Ali Farka Toure and Toumani Diabate come across like the Odd Couple of Malian music. Toure is the tall, bespectacled veteran with the long fingers and a wide grin, looking very relaxed as he settles down to play a loping riff on his acoustic guitar. Diabate is younger, shorter, more intense, arranging himself in front of his kora, the ancient, multi-stringed west African harp. When you see him on video, you can’t quite believe just how quickly his fingers dance around all those strings.

During the Meiji Restoration (1868-1912) a broad diffusion of Western music flowed into Japan, first in the form of military band music and. later, Protestant hymns. By 1900, recitals of piano, violin and song were quite popular. Composers like Prokofiev, and performers such as Heifetz, Kreisler and Segovia also encouraged this musical direction, which strongly followed German Romanticism and French Impressionism. The new Western repertoire found a place with the traditional Japanese music, hdgaku, and as the two traditions came in contact, a new and unique form of music emerged. One of the most fascinating developments in Japanese music was the introduction of new instruments in the south of Japan, and their metamorphosis as they migrated north via Kyoto and Tokyo. Several composers on this disc have focused on natural themes, with water being a favourite and obvious choice. The works have been chosen to give a sampling of the diversity of Japanese music, from the beautiful, traditional folk-songs to the complex and challenging multi-movement works, many of which evoke the traditional instruments, namely shakuhachi and koto.

The Wind is Kalhor's second musical journey outside of his native land, this time to Turkey to meet and learn from the premier baglama (saz) master, Erdal Erzincan. Kalhor plays kamanche (Iranian spike fiddle), which is usually bowed, and thus contrasts with the plucked sounds of both the sitar and oud-like baglama.Made up of twelve unnamed "Parts" that run into each other, The Wind is really one long improvisation that rises and falls, inhales and exhales as Kalhor and Erzincan become one musician with one mind.

AfroCubism is more than a fusion. I call it an explosion because it's the merging of two such strong powers. It's the musical big bang. ~Eliades Ochoa