Until now, the easiest non-bootleg way to hear the early Rolling Stones live was via the various home cinema editions of October 1964’s T.A.M.I. show. Otherwise, although they employed backing tracks for broadcast, the American DVDs of their Ed Sullivan Show appearances caught the band in thrilling full flight.

Not since the 1960s has there been so much global shit to protest about! The Sixties, of course, gave us the protest song – and how well the best of them have worn. “Masters of War” and “With God On Our Side” are timeless classics. “Give Peace a Chance” can still be heard from the barricades.

It’s impossible to discuss TootArd without digging into the history of their region. They’re a funky desert blues outfit but they don’t derive from Saharan Africa; they were born and raised in the village of Majdal Shams in the Golan Heights. This is the region Israel grabbed off Syria in the Six-Day War of 1967, then fully annexed in 1981, claiming it as Israeli territory. However, Arabic Syrians who remained were rendered stateless, given “Laisser-Passer” travel papers by the Israeli government rather than the passports of a full citizen. Hence the album’s title.

The band, currently consisting of Nakhleh brothers Hasan and Rami (vocals/guitar/bass/percussion) and saxophonist Amr Mdah, are now based in Europe. They originally came together as a reggae covers outfit and there’s certainly a rolling dub feel to some of their music, but their first album to receive international release has more in common with the likes of Tinariwen and Tamikrest, as is made clear from the festival-rockin’ explosive opening title track, protesting their statelessness in song.

These musicians are also marinated in Arabic classical and western pop, which adds up to an approachable sound. They’re kind of a jam-band but with the discipline to keep things tight, percussion bubbling to the surface on cuts such as “Sahra” and the droning, propulsive “Bayati Blues”. Wind instrumentation swoops in and out, giving a rich sense of Middle Eastern jazziness. TootArd are equally capable of mellow numbers, stoned-out widescreen affairs that do, indeed, summon up the desert, as on the melancholic closing instrumental “Syrian Blues” or “A’sfur”, which bears a passing resemblance to Hans Zimmer’s iconic music for the film Thelma and Louise.

Because it’s not sung in English the politics of Laisser-Passer are implicit rather than battering at the average listener. However, TootArd’s way with a groove is compulsive and liable to drag listeners bobbing and dancing unforced into their musical world.

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Overleaf: Listen to the title track of TootArd's "Laisser Passer"

Mélanie De Biasio is a Belgian jazz singer, an album-charting artist in her home country, and rising star elsewhere. She is not a woman who takes the straightforward path. No album of Nat King Cole covers for her. No Jamie Cullum guest appearances on her third album, Lillies. Instead, she offers up her own moody take on alt-pop which, if she feels like it, as on the smoky slow late night piano title track, might sit within an immediately recognizable jazz idiom, but is equally liable to be something pulsing, electronic and very quietly groove-ridden, as on the single “Gold Junkies”.

De Biasio has said she composed the album by locking herself away, no flash studio, just her, some software and a mic. “I wanted to go back to the seed of creativity, the simplest materials,” is how she put it. Lillies is, consequently, often pared back. “Sitting in the Stairwell”, for instance, acapella, with just finger-click percussion, recalls the ethno-musical folk recordings of Alan Lomax across the southern US states, a blues worthy of Vera Hall, although De Biasio’s voice is gentler and more musically nuanced.

There’s not much you can dance to, unless we’re talking slow ballroom in a dusty bar in a David Lynch film, but occasionally De Biasio sets an electronic pulse tickering along. “Afro American” fits this bill, offering up a midnight electronic head-nodder, with a catchy tune and, tinted with flute, De Biasio’s original instrument. Lillies also has something of post-punk’s aesthetic about it. The closing “An My Heart Goes On”, wherein De Biasio whispers against a scratchy backdrop, is stark, sonically bleak, a bit New York no wave, but eventually builds via a rising bassline into something more red-blooded.

Mélanie De Biasio's latest work does not put her in easily definable territory, occupying jazz’s shadowed underbelly, but its gloominess is never morose, and what eventually shines through is warm and very human.

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Overleaf: Watch the video for Mélanie De Biasio's "Your Freedom is the End of Me"

Close your eyes and be transported. Not just to Greenwich Village, New York and America’s west, but to Copenhagen, Belfast and Swansea, from whence Dylan Thomas – dedicatee of “The Sparrow of Swansea” – set out on his adventures. The album was recorded in Austin, Texas, and the spirit and the sound of such country music greats as Johnny Cash, Marty Robbins and Roy Orbison permeate the music.

Russell is an architect of “Americana” and his mighty fistful of albums includes a series of folk operas, including the much-lauded Rose of Roscrae. His songs have been recorded by Cash, Doug Sahm and Nanci Griffith, among others, and then there’s his prose and his art, some of which adorns Folk Hotel. Russell is a genuine polymath who can indeed stand tall “in boots that have walked 10,000 miles”.

His sleeve note is brief: “My mind is an old folk hotel in the Village, haunted by troubadour ghosts who sang songs that will never escape my soul.” Nor should they, for those ghosts made music which will forever endure. The cover painting suggests the streets around Washington Square, the beating heart of the folk scene long before Bob Dylan hit town. The Hotel to which he refers could easily be the old Earle, where Dylan and Joan Baez and many of their confrères (whose presence you sense in these songs) lived and where Dylan Thomas stayed when he wasn’t at the Chelsea. A Russell painting of the latter adorns the CD.

No matter the style (traditional folk here, a touch of mariachi there, a cowboy song, talking blues) or the subject, Russell inhabits every track, his sometimes world-weary voice masterfully accompanied by guitar, the verses occasionally punctuated by harmonica. He’s both storyteller and guide, leading us down the foggy ruins of time in the company of such figures as James Joyce, Joseph Mitchell, JFK, Hank Williams and Ian Tyson in songs replete with literary and historical allusion. His ballad for Dylan Thomas is poignant indeed and the imagery of “All on a Belfast Morning” raises a smile: “Spanish Frankie with his ironmonger’s nose”, the cat “licking at her whiskers in a puddle”. “

The CD includes two bonus tracks: a cover of “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues”, gentler and more empathetic than the Bob Dylan original, on which Russell trades verses with Joe Ely, and “Scars on His Ankles”, a tribute to the great Lightnin’ Hopkins.

Buy Folk Hotel and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, dim the lights and settle into a comfy chair. It’s all the company you need.

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Overleaf: Eight minute film in which Tom Russell talks about his Folk Hotel album

Rarely has an album’s artwork better reflected its content: blackness, or the void from which light occasionally emanates. This is a collection of instrumentals enhanced by vocals, rather than what might be called songs. The opening minimalist piece “Lightshaft” begins with a single plucked guitar note and its long vibrato-laden after-echo, like the sonic equivalent of a lone flickering candle.

Fellow defenders of the Delta tradition Taj Mahal and Keb’ Mo’ have never recorded together before. Billed as a “historic collaboration”, this album features appearances from starry performers including Bonnie Raitt, and excellent young jazz singer Lizz Wright. After a couple of listens, however, fans will be dismayed at the misuse of the term “historic”. An opportunity was missed to do something original.