For 30 years African Head Charge have been ploughing their unique sonic furrow, wandering hazy-dazed around the outer borders of experimental dub and super-mellow sounds. When they first appeared in 1981 on Adrian Sherwood's groundbreaking On-U Sound label there was no equivalent band to compare them to, except some of Brian Eno's global magpie studio excursions, notably My Life in the Bush of Ghosts with David Byrne which provided them with a sonic template.

Sometimes it seems as though every bit of music from the past has been disinterred, no matter how obscure or outré it is. But, of course, surprises keep on coming and the Psychedelic Pernambuco compilation is a reminder that great stuff still lurks out there. Collecting material recorded for the Brazilian independent Rozeblit label, Psychedelic Pernambuco roams through weird folk, post-Tropicália strangeness, fractured instrumentals and more.

The downside of this job is that because new CDs are dropping through the letterbox every day, a lot of stuff inevitably gets consigned to the archives and forgotten about, when it really shouldn’t be. So when I heard that The Mexican Institute of Sound (aka Mexico City’s Camilo Lara) was rather belatedly playing live in London for the first time (his last album was released two years ago), it was an excuse to reacquaint myself with his recorded works to see if they were as good as they seemed at the time. The good news is that they are, but the less good news is that this concert didn’t really do them justice.

Given that Seun Kuti and Egypt 80’s new album nearly blew my speaker covers off with its focused punch and irrepressible energy, the band really shouldn’t have had a problem making an impression on Tuesday night’s lacklustre Later… with Jools Holland. But bafflingly, they chugged awkwardly into life but never got up a proper head of steam. A frustratingly bass-light sound mix obviously didn't help, but nevertheless it somewhat dampened my previously high expectations for last night’s Royal Festival Hall gig.

Although the phrase “world music” was first coined by American ethnomusicologist Robert Brown in the 1960s, it didn’t become a brand, as it were, until 1987, when a bunch of London-based DJs, musicians and record company folk (including the late Charlie Gillett) met in an Islington pub and landed on the idea of putting all this foreign music under one commercially viable umbrella. So you could say that world music was spawned so that record shops would know where to put world music records.

Concerts are not what they used to be: in an attempt to break the mould of conventional performance styles, promoters and artists are increasingly turning to explanatory introductions, visual aids and other means of drawing the audience in, as if music alone could not work the crowd. The Senegalese singing star Baaba Maal is touring with the journalist and playwright Kwame Kwei-Armah, and their show combines relaxed but clearly scripted conversation with stunning songs from Maal’s Fulani repertoire.

Why do bands still insist on dabbling in drum’n’bass? It was always an absurd, overwrought style, even when it first assaulted our eardrums in the mid-1990s. It’s more like a technological malfunction of the drum machine than a natural, felt groove, hurtling along, as it tends to, at a ridiculous 200 beats per minute. Ironically, Marseilles’s Watcha Clan probably think it’s one of their strengths that they throw a couple of tracks into their live set powered by this anachronistic rhythm, but they are much more effective when utilising less familiar grooves.

Benda Bilili! is in some ways very Hollywood – the story of a dream of stardom which comes true despite incredible odds. On the other hand, the subject matter of a group of homeless paraplegic musicians in a band called Staff Benda Bilili (which means something like “looking beyond appearances”) in one of the most dangerous cities in the world – Kinshasa – is hardly Tinsel Town. As the film-makers relate below, they themselves were also “nobodies” when they started filming, in the sense that they had no experience of film-making and little money.

On first hearing about Staff Benda Bilili - a Congolese band partly made up of paraplegics – I felt a little uneasy at the prospect of reviewing them. The last thing that one wants as a (hopefully) trusted critic is to feel compromised by an obligation to either give a positive review, or feel guilty about lessening their chances of bettering their circumstances with a bad review. Yes, rather embarrassingly, the vanity and solipsism of your reviewer has no limits.

Old joke: when is N’Dour not N’Dour? When he’s Frank Sinatra. The comparisons of the Chairman of the Board with Senegal’s biggest star may seem a bit far-fetched, but I wondered as I watched him whether there’s a current European or American star who has the sheer authority, laid-back charisma and utterly distinctive voice that Frank used to have and Youssou has. In Youssou’s case, his voice of warm honey and mahogany is one of the seven wonders of the world. As it happens, for the first few numbers, Youssou was also as lounge-musicy as I’ve ever seen him.