Belém’s population is one-and-a-half million. Located 100km south of Brazil’s north coast on the east bank of the Amazon feeder river Pará, it’s the capital of the state sharing its name with the waterway. The city is only 160km south of the equator, an entry point into the rain forest and closer to Trinidad and Tobago than Brazil’s cultural magnet Rio de Janeiro.

Camden’s Jazz Cafe reverberated to the sounds of a 50-year-old spiritual jazz classic last night, as saxist and MC Soweto Kinch and his quintet paid fulsome homage to NEA Jazz Master Pharoah Sanders’ consciousness-expanding album, Karma.

Milton Nascimento is 76. Physically, he is quite frail; he had to be helped carefully onto the stage and then up into a high stool for this London concert by a couple of band members. But that arrival and rather ungainly progress were, as one might expect, given a welcome befitting this hero of the Brazilian musical world. The completely full Barbican Hall was willing him on.

A hushed expectation filled the Queen Elizabeth Hall on Friday night in advance of the return on stage of the legendary Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares (now rebranded as The Mystery of the Bulgarian Voices), who graced Kate Bush’s 1989 classic The Sensual World with their astonishing style of throat singing, combining drones, quarter tones and complex rhythms, harmonies combining in marvellous permutations, seemingly colliding into each other from diff

We return, after only a week away, with Part 2 of Volume 49. Starting out with an amazing comeback from Adrian Sherwood’s Pay It All Back compilation series as Vinyl of the Month, this edition takes in everything from Prince to death metal to ambient classical. From reissues to spanking new fare, all life on vinyl is here. Dive in!

VINYL OF THE MONTH

The last time Sergio Mendes, the Brazilian bossa nova legend, played at the Royal Festival Hall was in 1980 when he opened for Frank Sinatra. He shakes his head in wonder at the memory, though it’s not so long ago in the scheme of things – his career started in the late 1950s.

The last thing many were expecting from Rokia Traoré’s opening appearance at this year’s Brighton Festival was an Afro-psychedelic head-fry, yet she and her four-piece band prove thoroughly capable of swirling our minds right off out of it. When she returns at the end of the concert and announces she’s going to play one last song. A voice shouts out, “Make it a long one!” Happily, it is.

“I think we need to get rid of labels, certainly World Music,” insists Soumik Datta, who is both composer and musician, and has lived in the UK since the age of 11. “It is possible to be a musician in the Indian tradition, as well as an electronic musician, as well as a contemporary musician...

How do we want our fleeting, precious, close-up glimpses of the royals to be? Do we want the mystique, the aura, glamour and transcendence? Or would we rather be reassured that they are, in their way, just like us?

Oumou Sangaré is not a woman to be trifled with – tales of people who have crossed her and lived to regret it abound: one story (of many) has her personally hiring a bulldozer in a land dispute and getting a recalcitrant local official sacked. She looked super-glamorous at Earth in a white dress and blue nails, and her backing singers looked and sounded ravishing in vertiginous heels and 70s hairdos.