Among the emails that flow in daily from listeners to the World Service, a small number plaintively ask, why so much music from Africa? For once, this week not a single track is directly from Africa, but three affirm the everlasting influence of Africa on music from other parts of the world, especially the Americas, both north and south.

Cedric Watson was among the artists appearing at the recent Barbican event celebrating Harry Smith’s epochal collection of American Folk Music, reissued on CD by the Smithsonian in the late 1990s. Cedric is a violinist and accordion player who grew up in San Felipe, Texas, just across the border from Louisiana, birthplace and home of Cajun and Zydeco music. Looking back, I realise this kind of music was my introduction to what we now call world music. Sung in a mixture of French and English, originally by very poor whites in Louisiana who called it Cajun, and then picked up by nearby black musicians who adopted similar band line-ups and repertoire but added a washboard as a tough and simple rhythm instrument. ‘Colinda’ is a standard in this repertoire.

Novalima have pioneered a new style in Peru, based on the music of descendants of African slaves and now bedded in programmed rhythms that will bring dancers to the floor and offer a challenge to some of the better know Latin American idioms.

When people ask, why not more music from Asia?, the response is that most of it does not sit so comfortably alongside everything else I like. I have never set out systematically to make sure every inch of the globe is proportionally represented, but just pick and choose from what I find, while looking further and further. Blue Asia, the project of Japanese producer Makoto Kubata,  has turned out to meet all my criteria, offering authentic voices, melodies and instruments from various Asian countries in rhythm beds that are friendly to these Western eras of mine. Hotel Bangkok continues to reward attention, and was played here as a link into a song from A R Rahman’s Oscar-winning soundtrack from Slumdog Millionaire which has received widespread acclaim. I seem to be in a minority in not having been being blown away by Rahman’s music, here and elsewhere, but this sounds like the best song on the album.

La Troba Kung-Fú is a project from Barcelona highly recommended by Bryn Ormrod, the curator at the Barbican in the City of London, who has booked the band to play an imminent performance there.

Finally, back to that African influence in Latin America, with Grupo Socavon, whose track is to be found on a collection of music from the Pacific coast of Colombia..

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