With the Beijing Olympics imminent, a chat with Sa Dingding -- a rising Chinese star on the global-music stage -- seemed a perfect opportunity to gain some insight into the vast and daunting world of her country's sounds. After all, her international debut album, 'Alive,' presents an artist with one foot in the music of her childhood on the Inner Mongolian grasslands and her other in a pan-Chinese approach embracing everything from Tibetan traditions to the most modern hi-tech rhythms and textures of Beijing and beyond.

So who does she want to single out as a current influence?

"Jay-Z -- I like him very much," she says. "Jay-Z has a very good sense of rhythm."

Any Chinese artists?

"Dou Wei," she says, noting a prominent Beijing pop and rock artist of recent years, whose Web site calls him "moody and creative," lists his roles in various Chinese groups of recent years and makes references to such Western acts as the Cure, Bauhaus and dark-toned English "post-rock" act Bark Psychosis. "He mixes his music -- some rap, a little electronic and plays the flute."

Is there any artist in America or Europe who has covered the scope of his or her culture's music to the extent that Rachid Taha has with the wide range of sounds from Algeria/North Africa and its diaspora? Any artist from anywhere?

"No! Just Rachid Taha. In the whole world."

Well, that's the authoritative word on the matter -- from, uh, Rachid Taha, delivered with a smile, but the kind that carries a sense of certainty. OK, so he might not be the most unbiased party on this. But as the saying goes, it ain't braggin' if you can back it up. And shortly after he made that statement backstage at the California Plaza in downtown Los Angeles, he backed it up with little room for doubt with a show as part of the summer's global-minded Grand Performances series coming midway through a very short North American tour.

It was an odd scene one recent evening. The Brazilian Minister of Culture -- a graying but robust man in his 60s -- danced frenetically, goofily with a 20-something longhaired, bearded American hippie. Both flailed their legs and arms, both flashed huge grins and sparkly eyes, exuding pure joy, and then walked away, arms around each other into the night.

Unusual? Maybe. But not entirely, given the setting: On stage at the Hollywood Bowl in front of a delighted crowd of more than 12,000 people, most of them dancing along. This sort of tableau is exactly the kind of thing the people at the Bowl have tried to make routine for a decade now since founding the World Festival, an annual series put on in association with noted non-commercial radio station KCRW-FM in Santa Monica. The dancing fools this night were the evening's headliners: Brazilian great Gilberto Gil -- co-founder with Caetano Veloso and others of the '60s tropicalista movement, jailed and exiled as a dissident and now for the last five years his government's culture czar -- and Devendra Banhart -- the young prince of what has been described variously as Freak Folk and New Weird (or Wyrd) America, though truth be told he reaches well beyond those labels.

Azam Ali eagerly embraces a one-world vision, the notion that the blending of cultures will lead to less division and more continuity and unity, with music leading the way.

"It's great that people are creating this kind of music out there," she says of the proliferation of artists blending elements from many different cultures. "And as the world becomes smaller, as is happening with technology, and so many children nowadays born to parents from very different cultural and religious backgrounds, more of this will happen until it becomes one thing."

So why did Niyaz, the Los Angeles-based group consisting of her, musician Loga Ramin Torkian and electronics specialist Carmen Rizzo, make its new album 'Nine Heavens' two things? The release from Six Degrees Records is split up into a pair of discs, the first utilizing Rizzo's electronic touches, the second strictly acoustic. But both sport largely the same material, even the same basic performances of music rooted in Persian, Turkish and South Asian elements, all played sparklingly by a very versatile ensemble with Ali's stunning, rich voice offering lyrics drawn from classical Urdu and Farsi poetry. The electronics-enhanced version of 'Ishq – Love and the Veil' is a good example of how the different elements are blended into an arresting experience. But the acoustic performance of the same song is no less striking, even while offering an entirely different atmosphere. (You can hear a clip of the acoustic version, as well as bits of all the album's tracks, here).

Seun Anikulapo Kuti is looking a bit professorial in his black and white dashiki and black-rimmed spectacles, sitting at a table and discoursing on the persistent, oppressive colonial impact on Africa revolving around oil, trade deals and imposed religion.

It's rather a contrast from how he seemed a scant 30 minutes or so earlier: shirtless, specs-less and sweaty and shaking his tail feather with quite a fury in front of what is certainly the funkiest, most powerful Afrobeat ensemble in the known universe -- while discoursing on the persistent, oppressive colonial impact on Africa revolving around oil, trade deals and imposed religion.

It's a fittingly hot Summer Solstice eve, if not quite Lagos-level swelter, on which Kuti and the band Egypt '80 -- the band that played with his ultra-iconic father Fela Anikulapo Kuti, the late warrior king of Afrobeat and, not randomly, the subject of the very first Around the World column in April 2007 -- are kicking off their first full U.S. tour, coinciding with the release of Kuti's debut album. The setting is the California Plaza in downtown Los Angeles, home of the annual, global-minded summer series of free Grand Performances events. The stage is nestled among hotel, apartment and office towers with a shallow concrete pond between the band and the pack-in crowd and a dancing-waters fountain behind the group shooting spurts 30 ... 40 ... 50 feet high, in time with the heavily rhythmic music as a backdrop.

It looks pretty simple: A guy on the right of the stage playing guitar, a guy on the left playing a different plucked-string instrument and three guys between them alternately clapping rhythms, singing and dancing. The performance of the group Son de la Frontera at the Echoplex in Los Angeles' hip Los Feliz neighborhood is anything but simple, an invigorating set of music as complex as it is passionate. And on such pieces as 'Un Compromiso/Toda Una Vida' (listen to it here), it's immeasurably passionate, the sounds of the instruments bearing equal amounts of highly disciplined precision and gifted instinct, with the highly demonstrative singing and dancing, at times bordering on overwrought, coming from the depth of the soul of the performers and from the depth of the centuries of dramatic history behind this flamenco music.

But it was also more than that. It was a living map of this group's approach. Think of Paco de Amparo's guitar as Andalusia, the home of Son de la Frontera. On the other side of the stage, Raúl Rodríguez's stringed instrument, the Cuban tres, represented Latin America, the true frontier of this Son. Flamenco didn't stop at the edge of Spain, of course, but came along with the exploration and settlements of the New World. And between these two geographic stand-ins, singer Moi de Morón, dancer Pepe Torres and Manuel Flores -- all of them contributing the compás (clapped and stomped beats) -- are the passage across the Atlantic, reaching even across the Americas into the hills of Mexico and to the Pacific coast of Peru and Ecuador in sounds that echo in this night's music.

When we last spoke to Alex Minoff of Extra Golden last fall, a big topic around the band was 'Obama,' the tribute song the half-American/half-Kenyan benga-rock band had recorded honoring the senator and his staff for helping to get the African members into the U.S. for some concerts.

Now, as the band embarks on a U.S. tour, there may be a new tribute song called for, and this one with a lot of names to consider -- not to mention some darker political aspects behind it. At the end of December, while Barack Obama was just getting his then-underdog campaign for the Democratic Party presidential nomination up to full speed over here, in Kenya a contested election exploded into violence and strife, bringing singer Opiyo Bilongo and drummer Onyango Wuod Omari, the Kenyan members of Extra Golden, their families and other friends and musical associates into grave danger and serious hardship.

"The all live in Nairobi," says Minoff. "Onyango had traveled with his local band to West Kenya, kind of the stronghold of the Luos, the party of the opposition, basically planning on playing celebration parties, which obviously didn't work out. So he ended up stranded there about a week while his family was still in Nairobi. He was basically freaking out."

Barthelemy Attisso doesn't remember a lot of specifics about the first time he recorded the song 'Pape Ndiaye' as a member of the Orchestra Baobab. But then, that was way back in 1972 when the ensemble was the house band at the Club Baobab in Dakar, Senegal, and recordings were made under fairly crude conditions.

"In the 1970s, there weren't studios," says Attisso, the band's original guitarist. "What was recorded on disc was recorded in the clubs when we played. Sometimes there were three or four dance floors operating at the same time. They'd place microphones around so they could catch the singers."

It was quite the contrast when they recorded in that song again last year for the just-released album 'Made in Dakar.' The sessions took place at a state-of-the-art studio owned by Senegalese star Youssou N'Dour (who guests on the burbling track 'Nijaay,' which can be heard below) and was overseen by producer Nick Gold, the man behind World Circuit Records and such essential global music projects as the Buena Vista Social Club releases and many Ali Farka Toure albums. The song's original singer, Laye M'Boup, was gone, having died in a 1974 auto accident.

Sitting in a Santa Monica, Calif., recording studio, Djivan Gasparyan takes his right hand, places it against his left hand and interlaces his fingers. He's been speaking in his native Armenian, translated into English by his grandson, also named Djivan. But this needs no interpretation. The elder Gasparyan -- the Armenian idol, a true national hero for his artistry on the ancient reed instrument known as the duduk, and with a statue being erected in Yerevan to honor his 80th birthday -- is explaining the essence of the collaborations he'd done with innovative producer-musician Michael Brook. They've been working together off and on for the past 20 years, most recently on their just-completed 'Penumbra,' a seductive and at times startling combination of sounds and approaches. Gasparyan looks at Brook, sitting on the couch a few feet away, and tightens the clasp of his hands, pushing them toward his partner for emphasis.

"The melodies he chooses," narrates Junior, as the grandson is called in this setting, "and Michael's music go together, becomes one piece." The senior artist speaks again, the grandson translating: "Our tastes are becoming the same from experience."

They are about to put this to a new test: Where the recorded work they've done has largely involved separate efforts combined in the studio -- Brook creating soundscape frameworks, Gasparyan adding duduk melodies and then Brook editing the results -- their May 30 concert at UCLA's Royce Hall will be entirely live and in the moment in a way they've never collaborated before.

Veterans of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival are accustomed to hearing languages other than English, particularly at the vast event's Fais Do Do stage, where throughout the two weekends there are routinely Southwest Louisianans singing in Cajun French. But people wandering by that stage one day during JazzFest just a few weeks ago were doing double-, if not triple-takes. That woman up there, playing the banjo -- she's singing in, what? Is that Chinese?

As the Cajuns might say, mais oui!

"There's a lot of explaining when you sit down and sing in Chinese," says Abigail Washburn, the banjo-playing-Mandarin-Chinese-singer in question. That's especially true when the music draws on American bluegrass and folk as much as on Chinese roots, and is being played by a Nashville-based string quartet, albeit one that alongside a cellist (Ben Sollee) and violinist (Casey Driessen) -- each established innovators in their own right -- centers on not just one banjo but two, the other being played by the multi-Grammy-winning modern master of the instrument, Béla Fleck. The ensemble, billed as Abigail Washburn & the Sparrow Quartet, and previewing material from its debut album, released May 20, is nothing if not unique. But in the context of JazzFest, where people are wandering among the 10 stages, flitting between blues, jazz, gospel, rock, reggae and many other sounds, and where many of the acts get just a quick 45 minutes or so to play, there isn't much time to explain.

Emmanuel Jal, like many assessing contemporary hip-hop, believes most of the posturing, boasting and tales of urban warfare in the genre are exaggerated.

"Yeah, everything you see," he says. "That's why it's commercial music. Everything is not real."

So what about the portrayal of strife, bloodshed and horrors in his own hip-hop? It's all-too-real. Much of his new album, 'Warchild,' draws on his own experiences not on an urban battlefront but in actual combat in his home nation of Sudan. Taken from his small village and pressed into service with a rebel army in the late '80s when he was just six or seven (he thinks he was born in 1980 but isn't certain), he spent several years as a child soldier -- one of a generation of Sudanese "Lost Boys" -- in two bloody civil wars, witnessing unspeakable horrors, atrocities and inhumanities before being rescued by a British aid worker. In the songs here he raps of the awful deeds, tortured existence and still-fresh psychic scars of his war experiences ('Forced to Sin'), the economic rape of his homeland ('Vagina'), the ongoing battle with his own understandably accumulated demons ('Bakki Wara'), his struggle to overcome them with his Christian faith ('Shadow of Death') and delivers an emotional tribute to Emma McCune, the woman who rescued him and moved him to Nairobi but died in a car accident not long after ('Emma').

Eminent writer-director David Mamet says that his new movie, 'Redbelt,' is in essence an "American fight film, an alternative samurai movie."

That explains the Japanese taiko drumming that makes a dominant motif in composer Stephen Endelman's evocative score. But what about the prominent Brazilian influences of the four songs by Rebecca Pidgeon, with some lyrics in Portuguese sung by both Pidgeon and noted Brazilian singer Luciana Souza, that come at key points of the story as well as providing musical themes also used by Endelman?

It's no stretch, says Mamet. The style of jiu-jitsu at the heart of the story, and the whole surging movement called Mixed Martial Arts that is showcased, grew out of intertwining of Japanese and Brazilian cultures.

If you haven't seen this video, watch it before you read on. Heck, if you have seen it, you know you'll want to view it again. In either case, do it now. We'll wait.

OK? You might never watch Bollywood movies the same way again. Or maybe even hear music in a language you don't understand. Sure, the Buffalax person behind this bit of work is a genius, but don't be surprised if this sort of thing starts happening spontaneously in your head. If you've seen Woody Allen's 'What's Up, Tiger Lily?' -- arguably the gold standard of this sort of thing -- and then tried to watch a camp Japanese film, you know about that. Speaking (er, writing) as someone who listens to a large amount of music sung in languages he doesn't understand, that is a concern.

Now, there's a discussion going on among international music promoters and boosters about whether it would help draw more fans to some of these acts to have translations of lyrics for non-English-language songs scrolling on iPods or some such. Sure, not understanding something can be a barrier to enjoyment. But at times it seems it can also be an enhancement. There's something in the purity of sounds, something that changes when meaning is assigned to them, whether the real, literal meaning or the Buffalax treatment. And there is certainly a lure of the exotic, enhanced by a sense of true foreignness. Listening to some French pop recently spurred the question as to whether the same thing in English would be just kind of average, while in a breathy en Français chanteuse delivery it's sexy and romantic. Frankly, it's a lure that's not just a matter of the verbal language but musical too.

A celebration marking a half century since the opening of the seminal Los Angeles folk/blues/world club the Ash Grove brought something home: The roots of American roots music is in rootlessness.

All night long, in the first of two evening concerts marking this milestone, artists who in more recent years shaped modern American roots music -- Ry Cooder, Taj Mahal, Dave Alvin -- reminisced warmly on the stage at UCLA's Royce Hall about teenage journeys to the Melrose Ave. music spot to worship and learn at the feet of the masters: bluesmen including Lightnin' Hopkins, Mance Lipscomb, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee and Rev. Gary Davis, such mountain music mainstays as the Stanley Brothers, plains balladeers such as Ramblin' Jack Elliott, even Eastern European folk music revived under the direction of musicologist Mike Janusz.

"The Ash Grove," noted Alvin this night in a scorching electric blues song he wrote in tribute to the old club he and his brother Phil made regular pilgrimages to from nearby Downey, "that's where I come from."

Some thoughts while strolling around the City of Lights:

The First Lady of Song: Being newly married to French President Nicolas Sarkozy doesn't seem to have helped Carla Bruni's music career in the capital of her reign. While she's splashed on the covers of Paris Match and pretty much every other publication on the newsstands all over town, her CDs are not exactly getting a big push. A couple copies of her two discs in the bins at the Virgin Megastore below the Louvre were in fact the only examples even sighted in a 10-day stay.

Where is the Parisian sense of history? Have the locals forgotten about Thibaut, who was not only the king of Navarre and Count of Champagne and Brie (no truth to rumors that he invented brunch) but also ruled the 13th century pop charts as a top troubadour of his times with music as rich and rewarding, creative and consumer-friendly as any of the era (or many eras hence). A collection of his tunes reconstructed by Gregorio Paniagua and Atrium Musicae de Madrid remains one of the most electrifying folk-tradition releases in the early music revival of the past few decades -- though good luck finding it, as the 1979 album, originally issued by the Harmonia Mundi label in France, has never been released on CD. You can find various examples of Thibaut pieces scattered around the early-music oeuvre, by artists such as the Paul Hillier/Andrew Lawrence King pairing, Anne Azema and the Paris-based Ultreia, which gives performances at the city's Cluny Middle Ages Museum in the Latin Quarter.