Thanks to correspondent Neil Foxlee, I was finally able to pronounce the name of Queen Ifrica properly – eye-frica. This track, ‘TTPCN’, in praise of a community organisation in Jamaica, grows stronger with every play.

Nneka is a Nigerian singer songwriter based in Hamburg where she recorded the exceptional album No Longer at Ease. Sometime the music feels like R&B, but reggae is an ever present influence and thread, coming to the fore on track 15, Kangpe, in which Nneka sings in a mixture of English and Pidgen. Congratulations to Howard Male on picking this out so quickly when he first received it last summer. It has taken me much longer to appreciate and applaud.

So far I have played only one artist since my revelatory visit to South Korea last October, but here’s the famous Pansori singer Soo-Jong Chae. Voice versus percussion. Powerful.

The temptation to follow with a similarly powerful American singer is too strong to resist. The gospel singer Mahalia Jackson was the forerunner of many celebrated younger admirers, notably Aretha Franklin and Mavis Staples, and ‘In the Upper Room’ was one of her best known songs back in the 1940s.

The show finishes with two singers encountered in person during the year.

The Cape Verde singer Sara Tavares entranced many who heard her performance in a studio session, broadcast two months ago. Her album Xinti deserved more recognition than it received.

Encountered during my trip to Istanbul during the summer, Sevval Sam is a well known actress in Turkey whose album Karadeniz is known as the Black Sea Album, because the songs are associated with the region and sung in its dialect. ‘Ben Seni Sevdiğumi’ was written and first recorded by Kazým Koyuncu, whose version is included on the soundtrack of Fatih Akim’s film The Edge of Heaven. Great song, unforgettable melody.

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