Cold Damp Valley

Nashville pedal-steel ace's songbook project. Spencer Cullum's Coin Collection 2. Full Time Hobby. A British-born sideman stepping out front with a rotating cast of singers.

Michael Collins' west-coast soft-rock project. Hiding in Plain Sight. Mexican Summer. A duet with Charlottesville singer-songwriter Kate Bollinger.

Hazy, sun-warped folk-rock from Nathan Thelen and Marcus Congleton. Yard Work. Mexican Summer.

Pedrum Siadatian of Allah-Las, solo and drifting. Spiritual Vegas. Mexican Summer.

Chilean folk ensemble of the Allende years. Basta (Remasterizado 2021). Discos Pueblo. La Muralla sets Nicolás Guillén's poem about the wall that lets love in and locks the enemy out.

Music featured on Balm Valley Authority.

Lo-fi producer. Died 2018. Raw emotional honesty.

Josh Tillman. Sub Pop. A wedding song about the impossibility of knowing anything for certain.

The Piano Prince of New Orleans. Rounder Records. The Bayou Maharajah, an eye-patched piano genius fusing classical chops with gutbucket blues.

Half of Air. Au service de la France. Because Music. A spy-series mood piece named for white Algiers.

Los Angeles League of Musicians. La Lom. Wonderwheel Recordings. A hotel-lobby trio playing cumbia, bolero, and '60s soul.

The father of Jamaican jazz guitar. Softly With Ranglin. Island Records. The man who wired mento and ska to bebop.

Geneva instrumental ensemble. Polymood. Beyond Beyond Is Beyond Records. Kosmische funk from the Alps.

Melbourne cinematic soul-jazz band. Education & Recreation. Big Crown Records. Moody grooves scored like a '70s library film.

Gambian griot family band built on the kora. Keira. Sahel Sounds.

Lebanese composer-singer. Ounadikom. Habibi Funk. A resistance anthem drawn from Palestinian poet Tawfiq Ziad's poem, addressed to the Arab street.

Finnish ensemble fusing West African rhythm with disco and balearic drift. Tropic of Tulli. Sahel Sounds.

Tuareg women's collective from a village outside Abalak. Eghass Malan. Sahel Sounds. Tende percussion and guitar led by Fatou Seidi Ghali.

Sichuan guqin master. Gold Finger: Chinese Guqin. Wind Music. A seven-string zither recital, three thousand years deep.

Shanghai-born '50s star nicknamed the Mambo Girl. Ying Chun Hua, 'Welcoming Spring Flowers', a Lunar New Year standard.

Rebecca Pan, Hong Kong's east-meets-west cabaret chanteuse. I Love You. Diamond Records. Later the landlady in Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love.

Gong Xi Gong Xi, 'Congratulations.' Written by Chen Gexin in 1946 to mark Japan's surrender, it became the Lunar New Year's anthem. Sung by 'Silver Voice' Yao Lee with her composer brother Yao Min.

Taiwanese singer-actress. Xiao Xiao Qiu Shui Han, 'Cold Autumn Water.' From the album Endless Road (走不完的路).

Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs. Columbia Records. The El Paso album, a doomed outlaw's last night, sung with a gunslinger's calm.

Live at Gruene Hall. MCA Records. The Mr. Bojangles troubadour, live at the oldest dance hall in Texas.

Mi Historia. Sony Music Latin. Chente, the king of ranchera, in the full-throated style of Huentitán el Alto.

Mexico: Days of Struggle. Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. The corridista who chronicled the 1968 student movement and the Tlatelolco massacre in song.

Homowo. Soundway Records. Ghanaian highlife and funk named for the Ga harvest festival.

Conflict. Strut Records. The highlife and afrobeat guitar master with his Uhuru-Yenzu band.

Fear of Death. Spacebomb Records. The comedian's earnest, deadpan country-rock about land, mortality, and what we own.