Since achieving international success in the final years of the 1980s, the late Cesária Évora has dominated much of globe’s perception of music from the Cape Verde (officially Cabo Verde). This fascinating pair of releases reveal other aspects which may not have caused similar world-wide waves. Crucially, they're hugely enjoyable.

Early in the first part of his sprawling metafictional docu-whatsit Arabian Nights, the director Miguel Gomes is reflected in a café window as he flees his crew for conceiving the absurdly overambitious project he’s set up. It was "the dumbest idea", he says in voiceover, to think “I could make a fine film of wonderful, seductive stories while following Portugal’s miserable situation for a year.” To reconcile militancy and escapism, he goes on: “That is betrayal. Disengagement. Dandyism.”

Pedro Costa’s Horse Money begins with a silent montage of Jacob Riis’s grim photographs of late 19th-century Manhattan slum dwellers, some of them former slaves or their offspring. One photo shows a bowler-hatted young black man sitting athwart a barrel; beside him stands a white woman with a filthy face. The former looks like he had enough wits to survive the squalour for a while, the latter looks doomed.

There is something strange happening in mainland Europe at the moment. Perhaps this has been spurred on by a feeling that the old certainties of the past aren’t quite so solid, but a mind-expanding psychedelia with an eye for the dance-floor and free of navel-gazing pastoral whimsy has been springing up in all kinds of unexpected places.

José Mourinho is Setúbal’s most famous son. Non-Portuguese readers are not expected to know the two other celebrities most feted by this extraordinary port city on the estuary of the River Sado, with miles of sandy beaches opposite where a school of dolphins resides and the lush national park of the Arrábida mountain range just to the west.

Squeezing nearly 300 events into the 10-day dash that is the London Jazz Festival, which has just ended required dozens of venues – many not regular presenters of jazz – to open their doors. From the 606 Club in the west to Oliver’s Bar in Greenwich in the east, the Finchley Arts Depot in the north to the Hideaway down south in Streatham, it is in the pubs, clubs and community venues of London that the jazz festival’s heart beats.

It was already apparent from Melody Gardot's last album, My One and Only Thrill, that she harboured a more than passing infatuation with the music of Brazil and Latin America. "I love Brazilian music, it's one of my favourite genres," she said at the time. "I love the Stan Getz bossa nova years, I love Getz/Giberto, Jobim, Caetano Veloso... "

London's Barbican Centre is 30 this year, and with a special Olympics subsidy boost as the world's eyes turn to the British capital this summer, it aims to be as lovely inside as it is famously unlovely outside. Film beauties Cate Blanchett and Juliette Binoche appear live on stage and theatre giants Pina Bausch, Philip Glass and Shakespeare are celebrated in a season of prominent internationalism. Peter Sellars, Toni Morrison, Yukio Ninagawa, Krzysztof Penderecki and Chick Corea are among many other world names invited to EC2 over the season.

Cesaria Evora was one of the great singers, her lived-in voice and poignant, heart-wrenching music affecting nearly all who heard it. She had been in poor health after a heart attack in 2008 and a stroke last year, and died on the island of São Vicente in Cape Verde where she was born. I had the honour and pleasure of meeting her in Lisbon in 2001, on the occasion of the release of one of her best albums, São Vicente Di Longe. She seemed hugely modest and rather amazed at the fact that she had become a global star.

“This story is not my child, or my godchild. It is not a work of fiction. It is a diary of suffering,” a title says at the beginning of Raúl Ruiz’s magnificent Mysteries of Lisbon. A sombrely beautiful 19th-century costume drama spanning decades and continents and featuring tortured lovers, deathbed confessors, abandoned sons, femmes fatales, sniping aristocrats, Napoleonic-era firing squads and duellists, Ruiz’s labyrinthine, flashback-laden movie makes for a peculiarly heady blend of Romantic epic-cum-soap-opera and Modernist disquisition on narrative self-reflexivity.