When it comes world music there are few countries bigger than Mali in terms of impact and popularity. (Cuba probably ranks a close second.) It’s from Mali that Songhoy Blues hail, one of the few major new successes in world music to emerge in the past few years.

Never has the world of music been so open to exploration, nor so rich in paradox. Recording is abolishing history – the music of the past is being subsumed into a voracious and ever-expanding musical present. The shrinking of the globe to a digital village is abolishing geography: everyone can listen to everyone else’s music, wherever they happen to be. But in a piquant irony, just as the short-lived “world music” CD boom was whetting people’s appetite for new sounds, so those sounds were becoming homogenised out of existence, in response to the demands of the global pop market.

Athens, 1987: Youssou N'Dour opens for Peter Gabriel on a world tour. It's a wonder – and to his credit – that the British rock star should dare follow such a powerful performance. Few bands at the time could produce such a seductively joyful sound.

For three unassuming musicians, sitting cross-legged in a row, Korean folk-noise fusion band Jambinai’s London debut last night was seismic. With an ambitious project to integrate the techniques and idioms of traditional Korean folk with a blend of noise-rock, drone-rock and electronic music, they gave a concert that was, from the moment the grinding drone of the geomungo started yawing through the crowd, utterly distinct and original.

Not many concerts at the Queen Elizabeth Hall culminate in a string of beautiful African women sashaying down the aisles to the stage to press fivers and tenners upon the still-crooning singer. After taking their hands in turn, as if in benediction, Kassy Made Diabate turned and dropped the fistful of notes at the feet of his ngoni player. Then, after the encore, the final bows, the raising of the house lights, the ngoni player got up with his instrument and left the money there behind him. Enough for a very good night out.

Africa Utopia at the Southbank Centre is back for its third year with a raft of concerts and events, and for Friday night Senegal's Orchestra Baobab returned to the UK for the first time in three years, one of the great names of the post-independence African renaissance. They were joined by a young French-Cameroonian artist, Blick Bassy (pictured below), who was coming to London for the first time with his debut album Ako.

Producer Ruf Dug has released a slew of singles and remixes, both on his own label, Ruf Kutz, and other independent imprints, including Porn Wax and Banoffee Pies, that have made the UK such an exciting prospect for new music for the past few years. For this, his debut LP, he decamped to Guadeloupe, a location that has clearly influenced the very bones of the work. After a vinyl release earlier this year, it’s now getting the full treatment later this month, and deservedly so.

Eno Williams is lead singer and composer of the band Ibibio Sound Machine, an eclectic fusion in which contemporary dance and synth are laid over classic Nigerian highlife rhythm and vocals. The full line-up consists of eight musicians working with a range of influences, including Brazilian percussionist Anselmo Netto, Ghanaian guitarist Alfred Bannerman, and producer and saxophonist Max Grunhard.

Now was the summer of our disco tent. The disco tent in question backstage was not jumping as much as in previous years – somehow strutting your Travolta moves in wellies doesn’t quite cut it. A glam tribute band at Molly’s Bar on Thursday night, knocking out Bolan and Bowie numbers dressed in cheap sci-fi tat were hugely entertaining though.

Trudging through the mud at last weekend’s WOMAD provided fleeting moments of random entertainment, as if surfing old-style across the bandwidths of a short-wave radio, you’d stumble unexpectedly on snatches of exotic sounds from around the globe: an eerie double-bass Mongolian throat-song one minute, and a horror-dark wisp of electronically enhanced tango the next. The food was taste-bogglingly varied too, from Algerian-flavoured steak wraps to a mysterious array of Tibetan treats.