Funny thing about each New Year – at first its music feels a lot like the old one. So here’s a mixture that is not dissimilar to what we were listening to as 2009 closed down.

Having gone out on a limb over CeU’s album, I’ve been gratified at how many others have shared my enthusiasm, notably the European radio DJs who contribute to the EBU chart and made it their album of the year for 2009.

Haruna Ishola was a famous singer in Nigeria during the last days of vinyl, basically the 70s and 80s, and it has been hard to find his material reissued on CD. But I struck lucky in a Nigerian grocery store near Mare St in Hackney, East London, where I found an album Punctuality full of songs I had not heard before, notably the one whose title translates as ‘Mechanic’. Fantastic backing vocals and percussion.

Ibrahim Tatlises is a popular Turkish singer who was introduced to me during the Radio Ping Pong with the Israeli singer Yasmin Levy on Radio 3 last year. Ibrahim is unashamedly commercial but unarguably does have a touching voice.

There is some confusion about the identity of El Principe Gitano – The First Gypsy – who seems to have been born in 1931. Why is his album subtitled ‘1940’? One of the two singers who used this name had a big hit in Spain with his Spanish language version of ‘In The Ghetto’. Maybe somebody can help unravel this mystery.

Yasmin Levy’s own album gets better as it goes along, giving up several gems by the end, including ‘Yigdal’.

I have mixed feelings about playing one good track from an otherwise unremarkable album. Three-ality is not the most promising of artist names and the album cover does not bode well either. But the Dutch trio manages to escape the usual pitfalls of poppy folk on the track ‘Wij Meiskens Net’. They started out as specialists in European medieval songs, complete with frilly costumes, but on their first album they teamed up with producer Onno Krijn who added non-Western musical layers.

Patrick Sebag's Bagdad Guru travelled in the opposite direction, at least musically speaking: he recorded four venerable Sufi singers at the shrine in Nagore, Tamil Nadu and later clothed them in both traditional Indian and 21st century electronic sounds.

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