From This Place (Nonesuch) is a complex, meticulously produced and many-layered album which demands concentrated and repeated listening. In many ways, it is all the better for it. Pat Metheny himself has written an essay or “Album Notes” of no fewer than 2,020 words to explain how the concept of the album evolved, as it went through a several-stage process of  conception, recording, arranging, production.

Huey Lewis and the News were an unlikely mid-Eighties phenomenon. Their Sports album was a mega-success for a band already approaching early middle age. Their Fifties feel, given a contemporary polish and boosted by association with cinematic juggernaut Back to the Future, sat comfortably (yet incongruously) alongside the likes of Madonna and Duran Duran.

“Take our country back!” is the rallying cry of the self-identified “real” Americans gathered to protest the arrival of immigrants.

“Brussels – The Cultural Guide” for 2020 is a very substantial book. It consists of 212 tightly-packed pages in a quite small font. The message is that there is indeed a lot going on culturally in Belgium’s capital city.

Whereas the separatist-led government in Flanders has recently, visibly chosen to make culture into a battleground by reducing subsidies, raising the public ire of internationally known figures such as Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Ivo van Hove, the Brussels-Capital Region is keen for culture to be a magnet.

A trio of standout US vocal jazz releases included one of the year’s most hotly anticipated albums, Jazzmeia Horn’s Love and Liberation, which showcased the Dallas-born vocalist’s ever-deepening artistry and songwriter’s ear for detail. Horn’s eight originals encapsulated the sense of joyousness, playfulness and vitality that course through her music.

As the attention-jostling hype becomes ever more unashamed, we get further from the music. The myths and the 'message' get louder, to the point where the question of whether the music itself might actually be worth hearing can become secondary. I've seen music industry people this year happy to treat live music as a "hang" – in one case that stays in the mind, the headline act at a festival – and to chat through it rather than to listen.

Before the days of stardom on Jay-Z and Kanye’s scale, before Brooklyn became a millionaire’s playground, Gang Starr were deeply influential in hip hop and became pioneers of jazz rap.

In the eight years since theartsdesk last spoke to Carl Craig, a lot has happened. He moved from his native Detroit for a sojourn in Barcelona (partly for ease of access to his summer DJ residencies in Ibiza), then recently returned. He's reinvented tracks from his back catalogue for orchestra, in a style he dubbed "action and adventure" - certainly more John Williams than Debussy - and has performed them as such around the world.

Leonard Bernstein talked about “the infinite variety of music” and the late maestro would have been thrilled by the variety on display at the Royal Festival Hall where Rhiannon Giddens and Francesco Turrisi were as exciting and exhilarating as anything I’ve heard.

Composer, classical guitarist and ensemble leader Simon Thacker has spent the past decade immersed in distinct musical cultures; from the reinterpretations and reimaginings of the musical traditions of eastern Europe and the Roma people that underpin his Songs of the Roma trio, to his collaborative work with musicians from across the Indian subcontinent under the ever-expanding Svara-Kanti name.