Second album, second novel, second tour programme – the follow-up is always tricky. But the timing couldn’t be better for Acosta Danza, the Havana-based dance company which made its UK debut in 2017. These 20 young Cubans, handpicked by Carlos Acosta and bursting with talent, can’t know how badly the UK needs a shot of their sunny optimism right now.

The magnificent, controversial Cuban ballerina Alicia Alonso, who asserted that she would live to 200, died yesterday in Havana, aged nearly 99.

This well-meaning biographical jukebox musical about icons Gloria and Emilio Estefan, which did two years on Broadway and a US tour, is good summer scheduling, what with its Latin-pop bangers, infectious dance routines and “Dreams come true” messaging.

Percussionist Pedrito Martinez is one of those musicians who forces you to re-think what instruments are capable of – while making you wonder if there is actually anything he can’t do. He plays congas, batá drums and bongos with breathtaking facility and flow. He sings everything from Yoruba chants to “Quizás”. He dances. And he can turn a side drum and a hi-hat (no sticks, all played with hand/foot) plus cajon drum as if by magic into a rock drum kit.

Great music is often born of “what if”s. What if we played Beach Boys-style songs lo-fi, loud, at high velocity? What if we played indie guitar with a hint of Congolese rumba? What if we added a string section to late-Sixties pop-rock? What if we tried to play disco even though we can’t play our instruments at all? That sort of thing.

He's known for his myriad collaborations – Public Image Ltd, Primal Scream, The Orb, The Edge, Can, all the way through to recent work with singers PJ Higgins and Hollie Cook – but Jah Wobble really deserves attention in his own right. A cosmic Cockney of immense erudition, he has created some extraordinary fusions of global sounds, ambient, electronica, post-punk and more.

All things considered, there aren’t many criteria by which this album, however cosmopolitan its influences, sensitive and precise its vocals and supple its rhythms, is really the best of the year. I’ve had a few sleepless nights recently over the growing suspicion that, for example, Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN, and several contemporary jazz recordings – to mention only what I’ve been following closely – do more that’s landmark-constructingly novel.

The eel is dying. Its body flits through a series of complicated knots which become increasingly grotesque torques. Immersed in a pool of brine — concentrated salt water five times denser than seawater — it is succumbing to toxic shock. As biomatter on the sea floor of the Gulf of Mexico decomposes, brine and methane are produced, and where these saline pockets collect, nothing grows. Dead creatures drop into it; live creatures that linger in it die.

It’s a been a good year for the Stones as they play into their sixth decade – a free festival audience in Havana in March, preceded by an adulatory South American trek that saw some of the band’s best performances in recent times – down at the crunchy bottom end of Keef and Ronnie’s two-guitar dynamic, heard best on the new Havana Moon set, where the Cuban audience of one million warm-blooded souls see the Stones raise their game to make Havana their best live outing on record since the Love You Live set from the Seventies.

It’s as if the over-produced, over-choreographed big tours of the Nineties, when the band became a brand in the fullest sense, has given way to the core four being a real live band again. If further proof of returning to basic principles were needed, then Blue & Lonesome is it – the result of a three-day gathering at Mark Knopfler’s British Grove Studios in West London to work on as yet unfinished new songs, but reverting instead to the reverberating repertoire of their club days, the same songs a teenage Keith noted in his tiny diaries (recently on show at the Saatchi Gallery). That is, the Chicago Blues.

The best of these cuts are as sharp as blades

As any good barman knows, there’s a time to clear the taps, and that’s what Blue & Lonesome seems to have done for the Stones. At times, Jagger’s vocals sound as fresh and uninflected as they do on their first three albums and EPs. The Ronnie and Keith shadow play on guitars is crunchier and punkier than any time since those 1977 Pathe-Marconi sessions – the sound of a room in Paris – and the live and electric feel of Blue & Lonesome sees the band energetically testing the sound of a room some 29 years later, the excitement and impulsion palpable not only on the cuts themselves but in the off-mic shouts and cries you can hear at the front and back of the juiciest performances.

Being wholly covers, it is more annex than central part of the canon, but rewarding and essential if you’re a Stones fan, and a lot of fun if you’re a more casual listener. The tunes they chose to light upon are pretty deep and wild ones – Howlin’ Wolf's inexorable “Commit a Crime”, the outrageous down-home imagery of Johnny Taylor's “Everyone Knows About my Good Thing” (with guest Eric Clapton playing a strong slow blues), Jagger’s howling harp on Lightnin’ Slim’s “Hoo Doo Blues” peeling away from the meat and bones of song like a rotten undervest.

The best of these cuts are as sharp as blades, with very little fat left untrimmed. The Stones may be the last of the breed when it comes to extant classic rock bands from an era now so far from our dystopian own it feels like a distant Byzantium, and with the Chicago Blues in their pocket, they still know how to roll, and no one else will ever roll it quite like them.

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@CummingTim

Overleaf: watch 'Hate to See You Go' from Blue & Lonesome and 'Brown Sugar' from Havana Moon