Peter Sellars has a talent for controversy, from his early days when he was the director who brought you Così fan tutte set in a diner on Cape Cod, Don Giovanni as a cocaine-snorting, Big Mac-eating slum thug, and Figaro getting married in Trump Tower. At his best, in John Adams's Nixon in China, Saariaho’s L’amour du loin, or his Teodora at Glyndebourne, the results have been some of the freshest and most inspiring stagings of new music seen in recent times.

Over recent years a number of musicians and bands have immersed themselves in the exotic funky sound of 1960s/70s Ethiopian jazz (brought to our attention by the Éthiopiques CD series) to produce excellent new music. The best of these acts include The Heliocentrics (with guest Éthiopiques star Mulatu Astatke), The Imperial Tiger Orchestra, Getatchew Mekuria and the Ex (Mekuria being another of the style’s original exponents) and Dub Colossus. The latter provided a useful launchpad for this supremely gifted and versatile young pianist.

The strikingly clumsy cover (possibly designed by a 12-year-old boy with a rotring pen, a compass and a setsquare) is so amateurish that it just about tips over into being good, but it gives no indication of what the music therein might be like. So it came as something of a pleasant surprise that it was the most sophisticated, superbly played Afro-funk I’ve heard in the last year.

With Euro 2012 about to end and the Olympics looming, we'll be hearing an awful lot of national anthems over the next couple of months. Don't we all agree that the majority of them are inadequate - often being turgid tunes with no reference to the culture of the countries involved?  Isn't it about time we had some alternatives? Here are a few suggestions.

United Kingdom

Anthem: God Save the Queen

Some people go on holiday to relax on a beach. Others to trek through a glorious landscape. Or to explore magnificent architecture/extravagant nightclubs. Myself, well, I’m a musical tourist. Which often means I’m in rather blighted states. I’ve spent more time in Mississippi than New York, regularly returned to Romania yet barely know France. So when the offer came to attend a musical festival in La Réunion I didn’t have to think twice.

“Let slip the dogs of war.” Somewhere in the bowels of Kiev’s Olympic Stadium, a football coach will have said something along these lines around the half seven mark. Meanwhile, over on the clever-clever channel, an alternative meeting between England and Italy took place.

A powerful trend in contemporary theatre is the family play. But the families usually depicted tend to be of the standard two-point-five variety, while other more complex forms — families as they actually are — tend to be ignored. So initially the good thing about Vivienne Franzmann’s new play is that it focuses on a family where the child is adopted. More controversially, it is about a white man who adopts a black girl from Africa.

Everything But The Girl: Eden, Love Not Money, Baby, The Stars Shine Bright, Idlewild

Jasper Rees

This Tanzanian crew of eight youngsters play a galloping bongo-led music called “Mchiriku” that spews torrentially from the speakers, exhausting your reviewer after just the first couple of songs. Perhaps if the arrangements and instrumentation had been more varied and nuanced I might have felt differently, because there’s certainly much here that charms and intrigues.

Peter Brook is probably at his happiest in Africa. Through his Paris theatre, the Bouffes du Nord, he has long had access to gifted Francophone black African actors. They’ve always been a significant contingent of his troupe there, which has also included Maghrebis, Americans, Japanese, Germans, French and even, sometimes, Britons. Brook’s first focus of attention was West Africa, then South: in 1973 he was blown away at the Royal Court by township actors John Kani and Winston Ntshona, and set out on a project to inhabit and stage the black African soul which has lasted four decades.