If Namjoo must be compared to a musical resident of our hemisphere, that person would be Brazil’s Caetano Veloso, with whom the Iranian shares a mutual concern for love and society, a passion for both traditional and nontraditional music, a history of political banishment for their art and adoration by both the masses and intelligentsia. And just as Veloso has chronicled the history of Brazil’s ’60s-kindled Tropicália movement, Namjoo, whose own work dips into the era regularly, provides an insider’s analysis of Iran’s 21st-century “underground” music scene in essays and lectures.

Namjoo was in “unplugged” mode when he stepped onstage at Manhattan’s Asia Society recently. Dressed in sandals, flared jeans and a long-waisted shirt, he carried the setar, a three-stringed long-necked lute, he would play all evening. Drummer Yahya Alkhansa, who notably, perhaps symbolically, played traps rather than traditional Persian percussion, joined him. The duo performed pared-down versions of songs Namjoo had recorded originally with full bands, thereby shifting the emphasis to his remarkable classical and extended vocal techniques and a relatively rudimentary setar style.

ZZ Top met 14th-century Iranian poet Hafez in “Del Miravad” (The Heart Slips), a cross-cultural boogie that found Namjoo yelping and growling in registers high and low like Captain Beefheart singing John Lee Hooker. Just as blues singers reconfigure familiar stanzas for their own purposes, Namjoo samples and re-edits verses by Hafez, Rumi, Saadi and other Persian poets in his songs, sometimes adding his own words. In “Del Miravad” he choogled out to Persian lines like “O master most generous/ In gratitude to your health/ One day bestow your grace/ Upon this dervish of no wealth.” Namjoo, however, is rich in references, and a later song, “Morghe Shayda” (Lovesick Bird),” was based on an Arabian rather than Persian scale while borrowing its musical guts from the opening riff of David Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold the World.”

A week after his Asia Society show, Namjoo discussed underground music in Iran at the museum with the help of an interpreter. He spoke about his musical background, noting that his first exposure to Western rock was the Doors’ “Break on Through,” which he appropriates, along with “People Are Strange,” in the jazzy vocal trippiness of “Ro Sar Beneh” on both his remarkable 2007 studio album Toranj as well as in a longer, stranger live version on his audacious 2012 live album, 13/8, recorded in Berkeley with a jazz quartet.

If Islamic culture lacks a Dionysian carnival tradition, as Namjoo believes, his passion for the Doors is pretty easily understood. As a recording artist in Tehran, Namjoo was required to submit his songs to the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance for approval. Every album was obliged to include songs praising either Islam’s Messiah or Ibn Ali (the Prophet Muhammed’s cousin and son-in-law), and Namjoo paid his dues accordingly. In 2009, while touring in Italy, he learned that he’d been sentenced in absentia to five years in prison for an allegedly “contemptuous recitation” of Quranic verses in his song “Shams.” He denied the charge, apologized unsuccessfully and has resided in the United States since.

Thanks to the Internet, permission to produce music was no longer necessary, or even possible, and Namjoo found himself an involuntary “underground” musician when his first and unfinished album Jabr was leaked without his knowledge. (On stage, he insisted his new songs not be filmed.) He ended the show with the 14-minute title track of his 2011 live album Alaki. Reminiscent of Leonard Cohen in its epic accretion of detail and obliquely melancholy minor key, “Alaki” (meaning phony) is ultimately hilarious. Namjoo, who wrote the entire poem, delivers his verses in increasingly absurd voices. “O! The ’60s were very fun (phony nostalgia, phony nostalgia)/ There was manhood in the old days, (phony figures, phony physiques)/ When we were children, there was homemade bread (phony flavors, phony flavors)/ Now men only have mustaches (phony mustaches, phony mustaches)…”

Namjoo’s music speaks to an expatriate community that would prefer to still live in Iran but refuses to toe the fundamentalist line. His music is funny, deep, ironic and border-erasing in the best of ways. What he really needs is a proper introduction to the West, a righteous translation that could also serve as an introduction to Iran’s rich and vibrant musical culture past, present and future. Tehran’s loss, meanwhile, is Brooklyn’s gain.

When Dona Marivalda Maria dos Santos took the stage at Lincoln Center in Manhattan recently, she flickered like a psychedelic Snow White.

The glittery queen, priestess and president of Maracatu Naçao Estrela Brilhante wore an elaborately spangled, mostly red and white hoop-skirted gown she had sewn herself and would wear for but a single year. She was flanked by a pair of equally dazzling “ladies of the palace,” who carried the calunga dolls said to contain the ancestral spirits who guide this 96-year-old maracatu drumming “nation” (or nação) from the city of Recife in the state of Pernambuco in northeastern Brazil. Her king, holding both scepter and sword, danced beside her while a large androgynous “slave” had the wearying task of holding an oversized parasol above the royal couple. Behind the court, seven Estrela Brilhante (“Bright Star”) drummers created a titanic wall of rhythm. Like master of ceremonies Mestro Walter de França, who led the call-and-response songs that characterized their set, they wore Estrela’s blue and white garb adorned with namesake stars that lent an interstellar vibe to the affair.

Maracatu is both a percussion style and a culture in Brazil. Played on a variety of drums, cowbells and shakers, the music starts, stops and shifts gears at the leader’s whistling direction. During Carnival, maracatu groups of some 150 drummers and as many flamboyantly attired dancers fill the streets of Recife amid millions of spectators. Founded in 1906, Estrela Brilhante is a renowned and respected example of a 400-year-old tradition that bears a large and somewhat uncanny resemblance to that of New Orleans’s Mardi Gras Indians — as demonstrated by opening act Big Chief Monk Boudreaux & the Golden Eagles.

Two days before the show, ringleader Scott Kettner, who performed with both his Brooklyn-based Nation Beat and Maracatu New York groups, explained to me that both the Indians and maracatu nação were created by African slaves and flourish during Carnival in unique costumery created new every year. They blend African roots with indigenous influences to deliver loud, raucous call-and-response parade music. Maracatu nations, however, are aligned with Brazil’s syncretic Candomblé and Jurema religions. Dona Marivalda is both the group’s spiritual and secular leader. And maracatu drumming in Recife, where city-sponsored competitions have goosed the drummer body count upward, is both more rhythmically complex and simply more overwhelmingly populist than its New Orleans equivalent. Some, however, feel that competition has been a negative influence on maracatu groups, whose popularity increased through its association with the funky, fusion-y Mangue Beat movement of the early ’90s spearheaded by Chico Science’s Nação Zumbi.

Nation Beat drummer-bandleader Kettner’s first learned of maracatu from drumming teacher Billy Hart. Invited to play a Paraguay jazz festival in 1999, Kettner subsequently flew to Recife, where American ethnomusicologist Larry Crook hooked him up with Jorge Martin, the longtime Estrela Brilhante member who became the 22-year-old’s mentor. Communicating solely through the language of rhythm, Martin taught Kettner both how teach maracatu, as well as how to play it, by taking him into the favelas (shanty towns) where he taught drumming to children. Since opening his own maracatu school in Brooklyn in 2002, Kettner has brought Martin north several times as well as taken groups of students to study in Recife and to parade with Estela Brilhante.

In 2005, Kettner took his Brazil-New Orleans–jazz-Celtic fusion band Nation Beat south to record their debut album Maracatuniversal with Estrela Brilhante. These “bumpkins from Brooklyn,” as he describes his posse of young jazzers, became the first contemporary band to record with a traditional maracatu group. The experience “changed our lives,” he says simply. “We ended up throwing away all our notions about what music could or should be.” Nation Beat returned home a new attitude, a striking homage to the thunderous and beautiful world of Estrela Brilhante, and a new singer in Brazilian native Liliana Araújo.

Teaching maracatu drumming to gringos allowed Kettner to educate his potential audience, avoid flipping burgers for rent money, and spin off Maracatu New York the band from his school of the same name. Consisting of a half-dozen professional and semiprofessional percussionists filled out by students who’ve risen to the top, Maracatu New York released its own debut, Baque do Brooklyn (Brooklyn Beat), in July 2013. Nation Beat’s musical “cousin” adds horns and jazzy solos to traditional maracatu percussion arrangements that pay tribute to its sources without mimicking them overtly. “It’s a challenge,” Kettner admits. “I’ve been very careful artistically to not try to recreate what the traditional maracatu groups do. That’s a battle you’ll never win. I want listeners to say, ‘What is that?’ when they hear it. I want my music to lead people to the traditional groups.”

A revelation of updated traditionalism from West Africa

West Africa’s largest nation, Niger, has one of the region’s smallest musical profiles. But that should change once the world gets wind of Kaani, the thrilling third album (and first export) by Tal National, a Niamey-based group that emits as much jubilant energy as any on at least a couple of continents. Formed in 2000 by guitarist (and current municipal judge) Hamadal “Almeida” Moumine, Tal National combines high-speed contrapuntal guitar lines, hard chikita-chikita beats, and chattering mbalax-flavored talking drums into a breakneck polyrhythmic skein. “Kaani” means “sweet” in the Zarma tongue, and the title track is a seven-minute thrill ride that delivers an appropriate rush. The band also sings in Hausa and French, a polyglot stew reflected in music that can evoke Zairean congotronics, Sierra Leonan Bubu and Kenyan benga without sacrificing any originality. Tighter than 2010′s A-Na Waya, Kaani is a revelation of updated traditionalism in a regional scene currently noted more for exceptional crate dives than the intoxicating here-and-now.

Hoisting their freak flags aloft on their ninth album

“Open your mind, it’s time to get high,” sings Sergio Dias, the sole original Mutante here, in “Once Upon a Flight,” an art-rocking incitement to “trip, trip, trip, trip…” Dias and company hoist their freak flags aloft on the group’s ninth album, their second since reemerging in 2009. While their sound is somewhat more orthodox, little has changed thematically since Os Mutantes spearheaded the burgeoning Tropicália scene with youthful hippie fervor, hedonist politics, and producer Rogerio Duprat’s uncanny knack for one-upping George Martin with homegrown psychedelia. Fool Metal Jack‘s trajectory leads out of the charnel house (the title track and cover’s mutant war pig) toward the blissed-out regions of “Valse LSD,” wherein synths mimic minds exploding. And just as the three original Mutantes tweaked Brazil’s military dictatorship, the latest iteration bites the Bush regime, in the faux-reggae “Ganjaman,” and religious orthodoxy via the George Harrison-flavored “Bangladesh” and its chant of “Hari Rama, Hari Krishna, Hari Lucifer.”

Collecting Iasos's greatest hits from the '70s

With its minimalist sounds and big ideas, New Age music nearly always promises more than it delivers. But whimsical excess is precisely what makes Greek-born, mono-monikered Iasos’s “inter-dimensional” creations more convincing than the average “Hearts of Space” radio spin. Celestial Self Portrait collects Iasos’s greatest hits from the ’70s, when he was translating what he has described as “crystal giggling energy,” as well as other gifts bestowed by angelic cohorts, into spacious sonic architectures.

More is generally more here. The twangy, swooping double-necked slide guitar of “Rainbow Canyon” is much more of a third-ear pleaser than, say, the echoing flute fantasia of “Winds of Olympus.” “Angels of Comfort” was Iasos’s half-speed modification of a hasty session with an Arp String Ensemble synth. Whatever lies inside of “Siren Shallows” is carbonated irresistibly, while “Crystal Petals” could be the score to a glassine Ballardian apocalypse. Celestial Self Portrait climaxes with “Crystal-White-Fire-Light,” a 14-minute elemental epic whose lilting cosmic snap is punctuated by what sounds like a shower of celestial bit-coins before fading slowly, slowly into the void.

Working in his bedroom during the 1970s, Rodion Roșca invented an immediately identifiable style of electronic music with only a pair of Tesla Sonet Duo reel-to-reel tape recorders, guitar, and a Soviet-made Faemi organ with flanger, phaser and fuzz pedals. Like his equipment, Rodion’s sound was a relatively complex assemblage of fairly simple parts obtained from Anglo-American rockers and German electronic experimentalists. Sometimes it sounded like Tangerine Dream performing Black Sabbath; at others like Kraftwerk as interpreted by Emerson Lake and Palmer.

The good news is that the powerful East European sounds of Rodion and his ever-changing band, Rodion G.A., were rediscovered in 2012 (by blogging filmmaker Luca Sorin) and have subsequently been anthologized by the Strut label as The Lost Tapes. Unfortunately, Rodion feels his recognition is way past due. As he told an interviewer in a promo documentary for the project, “It hurts me because it’s too late. Even if I became a millionaire now it will be too late…[My] life was destroyed.”

Rodion was under the weather but eager to relate his story when we spoke recently over the phone from Bucharest. “I’m a little bit ill because I have a very big problem with my liver,” he explained in halting English. “I have cirrhosis.”

Born in 1953, Rodion spent nearly his entire life in Romania’s second largest city, Cluj-Napoca, in the Transylvania region. As a teenager, he was an avid record collector devoted to the Rolling Stones (especially “Paint It Black”), the Beatles (especially “Hello Goodbye”), Frank Zappa and his favorite hard rockers, Black Sabbath. “Caravane” and other tracks demonstrate a marked Kraftwerk influence as well. His local listening included Romanian rockers such as Phoenix, Chromatic, Iuliu Merca and Beat-Grup 13, the first band he played in.

The first iteration of Rodion G.A included bassist Gicu Fărcaș, a friend from the boiler factory in which they toiled, and drummer Adrian Căpraru. It was not a permanent relationship by any stretch, and the group’s “G” lasted two years, its “A” only one. “I played with 16 keyboard players, eight drummers, and 10 bass guitarists,” says Rodion of his revolving-door lineup. “The problem was that they did not like to play somebody else’s music; they all wanted to be the chief.” Although Rodion found teaching the band how to play his electronic works frustrating, tracks like “Disco Mania” and “Citadela” suggest how potent they must have sounded onstage. With the end of the so-called “open” period in 1972, Romanian bands were under intense pressure by the secret police and neighborhood snitches to soften both their message and volume, and Rodion self-censored the protest music he wrote.

Rodion’s music is modular, with most of his relatively short tracks containing from three to six sections. “I don’t like the long songs of six or 10 minutes,” he says. “My music is very active, with many changes and many ideas.” After learning how to bounce parts between tracks on his reel-to-reels to create echo and other effects, he began to recycle sounds like a Jamaican dub producer, all without benefit of either a mixing board or synthesizer. The tracks “Caravane,” “Paradoxe,” “Stela si Lumini” (Stars and Light) and “Imagini Din Vis” (Dream Images), for example, were all based on drums sampled from an earlier track, “Ora” (Hour), which was recorded during a rare session for Romania’s state-owned Electrecord label. In the ’80s, Rodion’s palette expanded to include an East German Vermona drum machine, a toy Casio VL Tone (as heard on Trio’s “Da Da Da”), and a Soviet-made Faemi organ he augmented with flanger, phaser and fuzz pedals.

When Romania’s national radio station played his music, Rodion says, the songs inevitably topped the charts. He recalls being fascinated by the annual military parades in Cluj-Napoca, and it’s understandable why his Martian martial music was sometimes heard during news and sports broadcasts on Romanian national television — although he was never paid for its use; likewise for his Olympics-caliber “Diagonale,” which a local instructor commissioned as a gymnastics accompaniment.

Rodion stopped making music entirely when his mother died in 1989. “She was a most happy person when my songs were played on the radio and TV,” he says. He worked in another factory after her death, repairing audio equipment on the side (“There are no loudspeakers in the world I cannot repair”), until four years ago, when he once again began to compose music, for his daughter.

“I never thought I would be in this situation,” says Rodion of his recent reemergence. “Romania radio stations and magazines say that I am the father of electronic and new-wave music in Romania. And when I read this, I am very, very surprised. It’s very strange for me. I cannot understand how that is possible. Still today, I cannot believe that is true.”

A lysergic flashback to the gnarly heyday of SST Records

A chaotic serotonin kick lies at the core of Portland power trio Sun Angle’s bracing debut, which opens with a blast of echoey urgency worthy of the Pop Group. Recorded loudly in the numinous hinterlands of Zigzag, Oregon, Diamond Junk often suggests a lysergic flashback to the gnarly heyday of Deadhead-punk founded SST Records — so imagine an overdriven and smeared Meat Puppets, even a disco-version Minutemen. Guitarist Charlie Salas Humara creates a glorious off-the-cuff caterwaul throughout, wah-wah-ing his way through dizzying half-riffs that split the difference between Hendrix and Curt Kirkwood. Nailed to the starry sky by Marius Libman’s cumbia-core bass and Papi Fimbres’s Keith Moon beams, Sun Angle makes music of muscle and allusion with the attention span of a spun-out gnat. The trio cover a lot of ground in three-minute cerebral symphonies such as “Yes Beach,” which gets fast, then slow, then weird very quickly; or the epic “Time Snakes,” which captures an Animal Collective-like sense of the divine before accelerating into a multi-dimensional reverbogasm. The result, as the album’s title implies, splits the difference between precious and disposable.

John Terlesky's craftiest album since breaking up the Original Sins in the early '90s

T. Rex goes P-Funk — or maybe Ween goes Bevis Frond — throughout much of Pennsylvania psych-pop do-it-yourselfer John Terlesky’s craftiest album since breaking up the Original Sins in the early ’90s. Funky drum machine, squiggly synth lines, distorted vocals and sustained fuzzy guitars provide the bedrock for some pretty witty wordplay. Things begin to get weird with “Muffintop,” a slow-groove paean to fleshy surplus; JT returns to this topic a few tracks later in “Sweatpants,” a Zappa-esque slice of TMI-electrofunk that declares, “Life is hard enough, you need some wiggle room.” Brother JT also lays it on the line in the lysergic existentialism of “Be A” (“Be an anchor, be Ravi Shankar, be a tanker spillin’ love”) and the choogling “Things I Like” (“Pretty eyes disarming me, high and lonesome harmony”). Insinuatingly nostalgic in an early-Bowie kind of way, “I Still Like Cassettes” pretty much serves as Brother JT’s aesthetic credo while explaining how a 40-something Pennsylvanian might “really missss all the hissss” of an outmoded technology. Heads up, however, ’cause “here come the drop-outs!”

An elegiac jewel

New-school American Primitive guitarist Glenn Jones’s fifth solo album is an elegiac jewel. You may even discern the arc of a son’s bittersweet ruminations on his ailing mother and New Jersey motherland from the music alone, before taking in song titles or back-story, which sketch the contours of a sweetly autobiographical journey. Jones is a butter-smooth fingerpicker known for diverse open tunings and other harmonic alternatives; wind chimes and upbeat tracks bookend the album, which takes a stormy turn in the middle with “Alcoeur Gardens” (the name is for the Alzheimer’s care facility where Jones’s mother resides), a spontaneous composition augmented by ambient rain and thunder. Jones serenades another invalid in “Blues for Tom Carter,” celebrating the titular then-ailing guitarist with a partially capoed blues in the key of Mars. Charles Ives’s rollicking spirit levitates “Like a Sick Eagle Looking at the Sky,” which is about as fine an example of the new American Primitive spirit as you’ll find.

Highlighting local tribal rhythms, Nigerian afrobeat and Congolese rumba

East African music has long taken a backseat to the sounds of West Africa, at least abroad. Soundway offers a sprawling and entertaining corrective with this double-album follow-up to its Nigeria and Ghana “Specials.” From the ’60s into the ’80s, Nairobi’s River Road commercial district, with its hundreds of record shops, fed the country’s seemingly unquenchable appetite for seven-inch singles. Kenya Special spotlights 32 bright, bouncy ways that local tribal rhythms, Nigerian afrobeat, Congolese rumba and American funk and soul came together in regional hits and small-run gems.

In Kenya, no sound was bigger than benga, which originated among the Luo people. Benga’s synchronized guitars are in full effect on “H. O. Ongili,” the DO 7 Band track that popularized the style. But check out the Kalamba Boys’ Kamba version, which replaces benga’s fast instrumental section with a thrilling garage-rock exit strategy. And dig the Arabic tinge to Hafusa Abasi & Slim Ali’s “Sina Raha” (I’m Sad), not to mention the funky eight-minute Swahili-rumba epic “Sweet Sweet Mbombo” by Orchestre Baba National. Tanzania’s Afro 70 almost seem to go Sun Ra in “Cha-Umheja.” And on and on. How exceptional is Kenya Special? There’s not a slack track to be found, and presumably plenty more yet to be excavated.

A stunning, evocative man-to-nation love letter

The final track on 2004′s I Remember Syria — producer Mark Gergis’s evocative man-to-nation “love letter” consisting of street sounds, political commentary, homosexual confession, random bursts of radio, plus a few actual musical selections — is a conceptual stunner. “The Norias of Hama (Blood Irrigation on the Orontes)” is eight minutes of what sounds like jets but is actually Hama’s famous wooden water wheels, which have been adopted as a symbol of resistance to current president Bashar al-Assadh, son of former president Hafez al-Assad, whose tanks and bombs killed some 30,000 Syrian Sunnis in 1982. I Remember Syria is thus more timely than ever, and its re-release benefits the Syrian Arab Red Crescent (Red Cross).

More than 70,000 Syrians have been killed during the current civil war, while another 2.2 million have either been displaced or fled abroad. I Remember Syria, with one disc dedicated to capitol city Damascus and another to its hinterlands, celebrates an ethnically and culturally diverse country noted for its hospitality and beauty. The religious chants of “Ramadan Radio,” the wonderous chaos of “Dueling Cassette Kiosks,” and Assyrian star Jermaine Tamraz’s lovely “Moumita” offer audio snapshots of the conflict’s catastrophic cultural cost.

By 2002, Iñigo had traveled and listened widely enough to realize the need for a parallel label for his new international enthusiasms. “My musical friends made me listen to stuff and enlarged my spectrum. I got into Latin music, black American music, African music, everywhere’s music.” Assisted by his widening network of contacts, “We built up a nice catalog in a short period of time,” he says. Vampisoul’s first release was Back to Peru, a mixture of underground rock and tropical tracks from the 1960s and ’70s. Vampi slipped under the wire and managed to cut a deal to reissue classic albums by Joe Bataan, Joe Cuba, Pete Rodriguez and Ray Barretto shortly before the legendary Fania salsa label was sold again (and then once again). “It was kind of a dodgy label,” he recalls, “but you could somehow get a license from someone in New York City.” Releases of Nigerian afrobeat and highlife, Italian library music, vintage jazz from the Czech Republic, and Iranian underground rock soon followed.

Hits from the Vampisoul catalog include afrobeat co-founder Tony Allen’s albums with Nigeria ’70 and Latin boogaloo star Joe Bataan’s 2003 comeback, Call My Name. The latter, written and produced by the Phenomenal Handclap Band’s Daniel Collas, was one of the first Daptone studio projects and has the 1967 vibe to prove it. Other reissues include Peruvian cumbia from the Amazon, aka chicha, reconstituted from labels that haven’t existed for more than thirty years (which makes royalty payments difficult). Vampisoul has even spawned its own protégé label, Light in the Attic. Matt Sullivan, its founder, interned with Pastor while studying in Spain. “We became very good friends,” Pastor says. “He took the concept back to the United States, where he has surpassed us in many ways because his releases are so fantastic. Now he handles the Betty Davis stuff.”

Here’s Iñigo Pastor on some of his favorite, and odder, Vampisoul and Munster releases.

When the loud and proud nonet toured the UK for the first time in early 2013, however, founding dhol drummer Sunny Jain says “they thought it was a punk-rock band,” adding, “I’d never heard that one before.”

Formed in 2009, Red Baraat is the happy multicultural outcome of an all-American immigration saga. Sunny Jain was born in 1975 and raised in Rochester, New York. Originally from Pakistan’s Punjab region, his parents were devout Jains, adherents of the Indian religion noted for its commitment to nonviolence. Sunny was raised a strict vegetarian and prayed at pujas, Jain religious ceremonies, where he learned South Asian bhajan, or devotional songs. Outside the house he played ball with his American friends; inside he played “table tabla” with his uncles and father, an amateur harmonium player and Ravi Shankar fan, jamming out to vintage Bollywood hits and bhajan.

Jain’s two worlds didn’t entwine until he began writing jazz tunes while studying drums and composition at Rutgers. Frustrated by the music’s 32-bar AABA form, he yearned to return to the sounds he heard growing up. “They hold a place in my heart,” he says. “I began studying all the Tin Pan Alley standards when I was 10 years old. But when I started writing, I wanted to explore my standards.” As a bandleader, the drummer released three jazz albums — As Is (re-released as Mango Festival), Avaaz and Taboo — that inventively blend Eastern and Western styles no less distinctively than slightly older desi groundbreakers, and sometime-colleagues, Vijay Iyer, Rudresh Mahanthappa, and Rez Abbasi. Jain, however, was becoming increasingly ambivalent about the jazz scene; he missed the fellow feeling that connects musicians and audience in a communal moment.

Red Baraat was assembled as the wedding band for Jain’s own ceremony. A few years earlier, he’d pick up the double-head dhol drum, a sticks-struck staple of Punjab’s bhangra beats, and fell in love with it. Playing the dhol in drummer Kenny Wolleson’s Himalayas marching band rejuvenated Jain’s love of performance, and he realized that no one to date had combined Indian music, jazz, and electronic music with dhol. “I wanted to do something that reminded me of being a five-year-old in India watching my uncle getting married, when this brass band ensued, a dhol player showed up, and this cacophonous sound started happpening.”

Jain conceived Red Baraat as “another egg in the basket,” just one project among many. But it took on a life of its own. “I only wanted drums and horns, no electrified instruments,” though Altieri occasionally triggers electronic effects. “I wanted to take to the streets with a big boisterous sound.” Red Baraat joined a robust local brass-band cohort that included Slavic Soul Party!, Brooklyn Qawwali Party and Frank London’s Klezmer Brass All Stars. “I wanted a group where I could just play dhol and not drum set. But it’s taken over my life to the point where I hardly ever play drum set nowadays. I knew it was going to be unique, but I didn’t think it would take off like it did.”

Red Baraat’s new Shruggy Ji takes the energy of 2010′s Chaal Baby and 2011′s live Bootleg Bhangra and focuses it in a slightly new direction. As Jain explains, after the India Partition of 1947, “the eastern side gravitated to a rhythm called chaal, which you can hear all over Shruggy Ji. But the western side, and I’m simplifying here, went more to the faster-paced dhamaal, which you hear in ‘Dama Dam Must Qatandar,’ a three-centuries-old Sufi song. The Sufi dhol approach is much more intense.” Jain has been studying that approach on YouTube, picking up licks from the astounding “godfather” of Sufi dhol drumming, Pappu Saeen. “He’ll put the drum strap around his head and start swinging around, playing the most intense stuff and twirling for minutes. It’s ridiculous. I can do it for about 20 seconds before I fall down.”

Celebrating the wild and down sides of honky-tonk life

“There’s a reckless side of tradition, a push of the tide having its way,” sings Jay Farrar above a guitar, harmonica and accordion wailing plaintively in the background of “Livin’ On,” the centerpiece of Son Volt’s ambivalent seventh album. Farrar’s sense of tradition is hardly reckless as he celebrates both the wild and down sides of honky-tonk life — and its resident angels — through alternating midtempo waltzes and shuffles played by a stately country sextet. With the possible exception of its opening Cajun waltz (“Hearts and Minds”), this honky-tonk set is better suited for hard drinking than for dancing, and Farrar’s tear-stained laments about the ravages of time and the workingman’s blues (“No wage can buy what the world never wanted,” goes “Barricades”) are conveyed prettily through Brad Sarno’s pedal steel, Thayne Bradford’s accordion, and a pair of fiddlers. Even if it’s not necessarily for the honky-tonk, Farrar’s music convincingly conveys a world of hurt just across the tracks.

The most coherent of his albums of electronics con vocals

According to Invisible Life‘s credits, Helado Negro, the stage name of Ecuador-born Roberto Lange, “played the computer synthesizer to make this music.” That sounds about right. Invisible Life may be the most coherent of Helado Negro’s three albums of electronics con vocals, but it still has a distant, abstract quality to it even though it features, for the first time, four English-language tracks. The best of these, “Ghost Dance,” delivers Lange’s hookiest moment to date in the refrain, “There’s no one home, just the ghosts who dance alone.” Lange’s nearly constant headphone-happy percolations are reminiscent of his Savath y Savalas folktronic collaborations with Prefuse 73′s Scott Herren. Invisible Life also scoops up some Prince-ly falsetto R&B (“U Heard”), hints at a psychedelic samba (“Arboles”), and switches on the disco mirrorball (“Junes”). Lange sings in a low, disaffected voice, all the better to insinuate the vaporous emotions around lines such as “we came so far to see that here is only to make sure/ there’s no chance for you.” Or perhaps it just loses something in translation.

A blast of fresh vintage gospel soul

Gospel singer Rev. Gean West and his brother Rev. Tommie formed The Relatives in the early ’70s and disbanded by 1980, but their electrifying, innovative gospel-soul hybrid finally saw the light of day when their early singles and unreleased sessions were compiled on 2009′s Don’t Let Me Fall. The lo-fi glory of those recordings is now utterly fulfilled on this very long-time-coming full-on debut, The Electric Word, which augments the Relatives’ familial voices with members of Black Joe Lewis & the Honeybears. The added members powerfully facilitate the Relatives’ remarkable ability to blend the Temptations’, Four Tops’ and Isley Brothers’ gnarliest acid-soul experiments with traditional gospel.

Rooted in the sort of a cappella harmonizing heard in “Trouble in My Way” and “I Will Trust the Lord,” the Relatives’ achieve spiritual lift-off in tracks like “Let Your Light Shine,” which blends a rock-hard groove with funky horns and a beatifically needling gospel organ. “Say It Loud (It’s Coming Up Again),” borrows more than a page from Brother Brown’s soul-power sermonizing, as the title hints. And on “Bad Trip,” which oddly equates doping and rent non-payment among its titular infractions, they sneak some dirty P-funk echoes into the church. Throughout, Rev. Gean’s powerful pumice-voiced preaching delivers the word unequivocally throughout on this blast of fresh vintage gospel soul.

The great British guitarist-songwriter plugs in

Nearly everyone is found guilty in a Richard Thompson song. Take the horny geezer in “Walking on Stony Ground,” the opening track on Electric, the great British guitarist-songwriter’s mostly plugged-in “power-wimp” trio album with drummer Michael Jerome and bassist Taras Prodaniuk. Unable to contain his lust for “an Irish rose with thorns,” the codger is beaten senseless by her brothers. There’s also the hot, teasing and bible-believing Southern belles of “Sally B” and “Straight and Narrow”; the hungover wife abuser of the Kinks-ian “Salford Sunday”; and the suspicious husband and cheating spouse in the rollicking “Good Things Happen to Bad People.” Imperfections apparent, they are all regaled by Thompson’s gloriously spluttering, spiraling and harmonically inspired Celtic-tinged solos.

Thompson long ago electrified the Anglo folk tradition’s too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral and hey-nonny-nonny tropes as a founding member of Fairport Convention. His later mastery of a kind of “Anglocana”-noir manifests itself on Electric in songs like “The Snow Goose” — a duet with Alison Krauss in which he sings that “Nothern winds will cut you/ Nothern girls will gut you/ Leave you cold and empty like a fish on a slab” — and “My Enemy,” a slow, seething survivor’s tale in which vengeance is far from sweet. The instrumentation may not always be electric, but the playing, writing and singing sure as hell are.

A live performance of folky freedom songs that continue to resonate today

Pretoria-born Vusi Mahlasela’s ninth release marks the 20th anniversary of the South African activist-singer’s debut, When You Come Back, whose reconciliatory title track (also a popular 2010 World Cup anthem) continues to inspire the masses. Apartheid only began to end in 1994, but enough of its residue remains to make Mahlasela’s folky freedom songs continue to resonate today — hence the rowdy enthusiasm of his Johannesburg audience.

Singing in English, Sotho, Swahili and other languages, Mahlasela covers a lot of turf: “Our Sand” voices support for resettled Kalahari bushmen experiencing the “ghostly shadows of a vanished world,” while “Say Africa” claims a more global system of “UN loans and passport controls” is oppressing the modern African. Mahlasela’s wonderful voice turns sweet, strong or grainy depending on context. He scats intensely in “Ubuhle Bomhlaba,” evokes a dove’s summer celebration with a mbaqanga Zulu groove in “Amdokwe,” and swings hard in “Tswang Tswang Tswang.” The show’s highlight, unsurprisingly, is “When You Come Back,” which begins as an a cappella lament and evolves into a hard-jiving anthem. Go ahead and dance now, Mahlasela appears to imply; the struggle remains the same.

Although Tim Maia continued to produce hit records throughout the ’80s and ’90s, the ’70s turned out to be his most artistically fertile period. And for Maia’s music, the decade can be further divided into the years before and after his involvement with Manoel Jacintho Coelho’s Rational Culture sect, whose bible, Universe in Disenchantment, Maia encountered while tripping on mescaline. Inspired by Coelho’s Scientological promises of purified consciousness and a flying-saucer rescue back to our real home planet, the Rational World, Maia cut his hair, dressed himself in white, gave away all his possessions, eschewed inebriants, and demanded that his band follow suit. Having already recorded everything except the vocals for his fifth album, Maia rewrote his lyrics, returned to the studio, and transformed his already epic blend of soul, funk and Brazilian into the two-volume 1975-76 masterpiece of propagandistic sect-acular hooey that is Racional.

You’ll find Racional‘s “Imunização Racional (Que Beleza),” “Bom Senso,” “You Don’t Know What I Know,” and 12-minute groove epic “Rational Culture” on The Existential Soul of Tim Maia – Nobody Can Live Forever. Released as part of the Luaka Bop label’s World Psychedelic Classics series on what would have been Maia’s 50th birthday, Nobody Can Live Forever cherry-picks Maia’s peak years, which began in 1970 with Tim Maia — the first of 10 eponymous titles among the baby-faced singer’s 30-something-album discography. His brilliant and eccentric blend of raw funk, remarkable soul screaming (“Eu Amo Voce”), insane instrumental rock (“Flamengo”), and breezy Brazilian pop sold more than 200,000 copies and made Maia a star.

Born in the Tijuca neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro on September 28, 1942, Sebastião Rodrigues Maia was the 18th of 19 children, of whom 12 survived childbirth. A natural when it came to music, Maia formed two bands while still in high school and performed on television. After his father died, Maia hustled his way to America, where he arrived with $12, no English to speak of, and the address of a family friend in Tarrytown, New York. His nickname “Tião” was shorted to “Jimmy,” then “Tim.” During his four years in America, Maia joined a soul group called the Ideals, worked odd jobs and committed petty crimes. In 1964, he was busted in Daytona, Florida, for smoking pot in a stolen car, and spent six months in prison before being deported. Moving to São Paolo, Maia got his break thanks to Elis Regina, who invited him to co-write and record “These Are the Songs” with her in 1970.

With his fluency in American English and soul bona fides, Maia became a powerful force for musical change in Brazil. He inspired the Black Rio movement associated with Jorge Ben, Banda Black Rio, and the Gerson King Combo. He also became an increasingly loose cannon well-known for his many concert no-shows and hard-partying ways. (His preferred “triathlon” mixed whiskey, marijuana and cocaine.) He was married five times, fathered a half-dozen children, and did yet more jail time.

Following an angry break from the Rational Culture club in 1976, Maia quickly released an innovative disco album (Disco Club) and then another excellent Tim Maia disk, which contains the poignant “Nobody Can Live Forever” and Marvin Gaye-like “Brother Father Mother Sister.” Where other Brazilian artists contemplated black America from afar, Maia had imbibed it deeply. He released tracks in English throughout a career that included a lot of late-period hits, misses, and two albums of nicely assayed bossa nova: Tim Maia Interpreta Clássicos da Bossa Nova (1990) and the valedictory Amigos do Rei – Tim Maia e os Cariocas (1997). Maia made a second and final trip to America, and Tarrytown, in ’97. This time, unfortunately, the country didn’t provide the fuel for another three decades of superbly idiosyncratic soul. Instead, Maia ballooned up to more than 300 pounds, which was his weight while attempting to record a television show in Niterói, across Guanabra Bay from Rio de Janeiro, on March 8, 1998. Perspiring heavily, he left the stage shortly after attempting to sing “Não Quero Dinheiro (Só Quero Amar)” — “Don’t Want Money (Just Want Love).” He was taken by ambulance to Antonio Pedro University Hospital, where he died a week later.

A solid collection rooted in classic country balladry and rockabilly rambunctiousness

Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Jim Lauderdale’s meet-up with his old friend (and Sirius radio co-host) Buddy Miller feels like a subtle realignment after the cosmic-country tilt of his three preceding albums – deep, sly and masterful collaborations with Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter. Buddy and Jim, by contrast, is a solid collection rooted in classic country balladry and rockabilly rambunctiousness. Miller, who produced the album with vintage flair, foregrounds the duo’s grainy close harmonies. If they sound like resigned barroom buddies in the timely, uptempo “I Lost My Job of Loving You,” they’re several breakups closer to self-immolation in “Forever and a Day” and wife Julie Miller’s “It Hurts Me” (“when you bring me to tears and you think no one hears…”).

Economical soloing by fiddler Stuart Duncan and steel guitarist Russ Pahl adds color and verve to the Cajun-rock standard “South in New Orleans” and “The Train That Carried My Gal From Town,” an oft-recorded choogler from the ’20s; nor does the concise-to-a-fault Miller waste a single note himself while soloing in B&J’s cover of Joe Tex’s “I Want to Do Everything for You” – you only wish there were more of him. Unlike T-Bone Burnett, Miller burnishes the past without overly fetishizing it, which works particularly well on a perfect pair of weirdo rockabilly numbers, Lauderdale’s “Vampire Girl” and Jimmy McCracklin’s 1959 dance-craze attempt, “The Wobble.” Buddy and Jim turn out to be just a couple of country gentlemen having a ball while keeping it down-to-earth.

The ghost of electricity howls in their fat and furious geezer grooves

During the couple dozen years since they played together as part of Public Image Ltd’s original, best lineup, bassist Jah Wobble (John Wardle) and guitarist Keith Levene have pursued somewhat different career paths. Where Wobble followed his bliss through adventurous electronic, folk and internationalist projects, Levene stumbled down the heroin highway, by Wobble’s account, until cleaning up and joining his former bad-boy bandmate for the early-2012 “Metal Boxin Dub” tour. (John Lydon, meanwhile, has been working the reality-show circuit and selling Country Life butter.) Now in their mid 50s, Wobble and Levene cast a collective gaze back upon the psychedelic and progressive music of their youth, albeit with a corrosive aggro slant.

With Wobble clearly in charge, Yin & Yang at its best packs a driving dub-rock wallop reminiscent of Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare’s best onstage moments with Black Uhuru. But the manic laugher heard early in the self-reflexive title track (“Fucking yin and fucking yang/ Soft little whisper, big fucking bang”) hints at the same prankish inclinations that inspired the duo’s 7/8 take on George Harrison’s “Within You Without You” (PiL covers the Beatles!) and that are as dubious as Lydon imitator Johnny Rotter’s appearance in “Understand.” Trumpeter Sean Corby adds punchy verve to “Fluid,” which, like “Strut” and “Back on the Block,” has an improvised immediacy perfect for Wobble’s overdriven, rattling bass and Levene’s glorious rusty-metal, nails-on-chalkboard sound. Only a fool would write these cats off today; the ghost of electricity howls in their fat and furious geezer grooves.

Exceptionally effective mood elevators

Husky-throated baritone singer Moreno (born Batambo Wendo Morris in 1955) was among the wave of Congolese musicians who relocated to Kenya during the 1970s to take advantage of Nairobi’s relatively modern recording studios and thriving club scene. Sister Pili + 2 consists of his wonderful 1983 album with the ever-changing (and redundantly-named, since “moja” means one in Swahili) group First Moja-One, augmented by a pair of tracks from a 1977 session with the group Bana Nzadi.

Jubilant lost gems of sizzling Congolese harmonies, guitar wizardry and snazzy four-on-the-floor, 140 bpm drumming (courtesy of the wonderfully named Lava Machine), Pili‘s four nine-minute tracks are exceptionally effective mood elevators. Each consists of a loping introductory section that eventually drops into a fast three-guitar seben section full of intricate patterns and witty musical asides. Moreno may lead the band, but it’s high-spirited lead guitarist Mokili Sesti (later part of the terrific Orchestre Virunga) who steals the show throughout. Moreno and his two backing singers croon mostly about women, presumably, in French, English, Lingala and Swahili. The title track specifically praises his Tanzanian model girlfriend Pili Mikendo Kassim with such terms of endearment as “You are my sunshine, Pili, let’s get it on.”

Moreno’s voice rumbles to the forefront of Sister Pili‘s “bonus” tracks, “Rehema-Piri” and a six-minute edit of “Teresia.” Rougher-edged than Moja-One, Bana Nzadi was another the many groups to which Moreno lent his distinctively soulful pipes throughout a career that ended with the 38-year-old’s death in 1993, not long after the release of his chart-topping “Vidonge Sitaki.”

Splitting the difference between opera and alt-rock

Young Brooklyn composer Missy Mazzoli’s exhilarating and ultimately heartbreaking Song from the Uproar contains traditional operatic elements – among them, romance, tragedy and cross-dressing. However, the story of the real-life Isabelle Eberhardt (1877-1904), who traveled nomadically through the mountains and deserts of North Africa dressed as a man, converted to Islam, and joined a secret Sufi brotherhood to struggle against French colonialism before perishing in a flash flood, strains against the bounds of belief. Does this tale demand three tidily arcing acts or a thousand and one nights?

Mazzoli’s solution is to concentrate on the heaviest emotional moments of Eberhardt’s journey in 15 songs linked by electronic sounds. Performed by the five-member Now Ensemble (clarinet, bass, electric guitar, piano, flute), four singers and the splendid mezzo-soprano Abigail Fischer as Eberhardt, Uproar splits the difference between opera and alt-rock. (Mazzoli’s all-female modern classical ensemble Victoire was a 2008 eMusic Selects pick.) Melodic and other epiphanies bubble up unexpectedly and dramatically from Mazzoli’s personal minimalist palette. These include the birdlike flute song of delight in “I Have Arrived,” the heady instrumental color wheel of “Oblivion Seekers,” and perhaps the opera’s real tragic climax, the two-part “Mektoub (It Is Written),” a lacerating threnody in which Eberhardt mourns the betrayal of her Algerian lover, singing “How quickly love evaporates / Leaving me a desert.” Not so much opera as distillation, Mazzoli’s version of Eberhardt’s short, memorable life is a marvel of compact complexity itself.