How do you hear music? And don't be a wiseass and say, "With my ears." Seriously: What happens with you, an individual, as sounds work their way into your head, are processed through your brain, and interpreted through your experiences and sensibilities into that thing we call music? How do you make sense of things that might be unfamiliar, things from other cultures or from experimental approaches or even from glitches in the transmission? Some of that was addressed by neurologist Oliver Sacks in his 2007 book 'Musicophilia,' which for a music lover includes things scarier than anything Stephen King ever wrote. (We can lose the ability to enjoy or even recognize music??? Noooooooooo!!!)

But these are also questions inherent in 'In the House of Mirrors,' the new and, sadly, last album by unclassifiable composer/producer/contextualizer Hector Zazou. The Algerian-born, Paris-based artist passed away in September at age 60, having just completed this project for which he formed the group Swara with four musicians from India and Uzbekistan working in classical/traditional formats. It's at once the most straightforward album he ever made -- and the most profound example of his distinctive, if elusive, stamp. (There are long samples of the songs that can be heard here.)

"I used to go to this old viola player," a friend tells of his youthful years in the post-revolution 1980s of Iran, when Islamic rule made music difficult to find. "He was about 80 and had a photocopy shop in one of the old parts of Tehran. He had this huge archive of LPs, and I'd order some Persian or classical music and he'd record it on cassette. That was the only way. Then we'd copy it and distribute it. On many occasions, I went to someone's house, someone I didn't know before, someone I just met. He'd invite me to dinner or something, and I would see my own cassette there that had circulated! So he got Bach from a friend of a friend of a friend who got it from me. That was my experience with music in my teenage years and my 20s."

So it was with some sense of wonder that he handed over a bag across a restaurant table. Inside were stacks of CDs, about 20 of them, fresh from the markets and street stalls of Tehran. He'd just returned from his second trip to Iran in recent months, his first visits to his native country in more than 11 years, and the bounty he presented was evidence of the dramatic changes that had happened while he was away. There was a four-CD set of archival ethnographic recordings from various regions of Iran released via the Mahoor Institute, several sets of experimental/modern classical and film soundtrack compositions released by the wide-ranging Hermes Records label and some street-stall-purchased burned MP3 discs of uncertain provenance containing everything from contemporary Iranian pop and a disc of Persian folk/classical star Sima Bina to lengthy recordings made in the field from tribal dance events, all blaring zirne and burbling hand drums. It was an impressive variety even by Los Angeles standards. For him, based on the Iran he'd left behind in the '90s, it was unthinkable.

Meet the 'Novas Bossas,' same as the bossa nova?

Yes and no. 'Novas Bossas' is the new collaborative album by the great Brazilian singer Milton Nascimento and the Jobim Trio. And, as the name implies, it's both an homage to and twist on the bossa nova traditions, with a full-circle trip back to the roots, which, in the process, refreshes the style.

The set was ostensibly released to mark the 50th anniversary of bossa nova and honor the late composer Antonio Carlos Jobim, one of the form's foundational artists. Jobim's vast catalog includes the ubiquitous breakthrough 'The Girl From Ipanema' ('Garota de Ipanema') and the iconic score to the 1959 film 'Black Orpheus.' And the Jobim trio isn't just taking his legacy in its name but in its genetic makeup, as it is anchored by his son, guitarist Paulo, and grandson, pianist Daniel. And both on the album and in a warmly intimate night at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles this past week, the music was at once as familiar as one would expect from sounds that have become ingrained in he global language or music -- a core of jazz, pop, even classical repertoires -- but also in the best moments bracingly alive and growing. It all succeeds via simplicity, sticking to the basics in instrumentation -- just piano, acoustic guitar, bass, drums and vocals onstage and little more on the recordings but with a progressive streak that utilizes imaginative harmonic development and almost chorale-like interplay.

Miles Copeland grew up around spies and diplomats -- his dad worked for the C.I.A. and the family lived in the Middle East for much of his childhood. Still, he was surprised to get a call from then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's office a few years ago. He thought it was a friend pulling a joke.

Instead, it was the start of a chain of events that took him to Egypt, Lebanon and Jordan to recruit Arabic stars for collaborations in Los Angeles with Western musicians. In Cairo, he found boisterous shaabi-style pop star Saad El Soghayar. In Damascus, he signed up devout Muslim composer/keyboard player Tareq Al Nasser. Beirut, at the time reeling from military conflict with Israel and the bombing assassination of Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri, yielded both young singer-activist Tania Saleh and pioneering hip-hop artist Wael Kodeih (a.k.a. Rayess Bek). Also brought into the project was Iraqi guitarist-composer Ilham Al Madfai, whose groundbreaking blends of Western and traditional music in the '60s and '70s led to him living in exile since the 1979 revolution.

Dan Saks must hear a lot from people who have a love for 15th-century Sephardic music. Or not.

"I don't hear that a lot," he tells someone who just said that very thing before a Los Angeles concert by Saks' Brooklyn-based band DeLeon, which plays music largely drawn on that very style.

That's fine with him. "Rarely there's a 15th century historian at our shows. Generally it's people who like different kinds of music, someone coming to a show to dance and rock out. They come up after and we can talk about where the music comes from. But it's not a history lesson. It's rock 'n' roll."

Blame it on the Buena Vista.

All that gratuitous cigar smoke. All that reduction of Cuban music to a "lifestyle" background soundtrack. Heck, even the turn of Havana as a "fashionable" travel destination, if not the subsequent tightening of trade and travel restrictions.

Blame it on Ry Cooder. Blame it on Nick Gold. Blame it on Wim Wenders. Blame it on Rubén González and Omara Portuondo.

Watching and listening to Césaria Évora perform at UCLA's Royce Hall, it's hard not to wonder who will fill her shoes. Well, if she wore shoes. But then, the Barefoot Diva's engaged and engaging appearance rendered that question irrelevant. Relentlessly upbeat and spirited deliveries of the Portuguese-language mornos, sambas and bossa novas that have made her the voice and face of Cape Verde music gave the impression she has no intention of stepping aside. But she is 67 and has lived a life that would have done in most others by now. And even after 20 years since she emerged on the European and then global stage, she still stands as far and away as the best-known -- perhaps on the international level the only known -- singer from her island nation. Heck, maybe the only known person from there.

As she took a break to let the band do an instrumental showcase and -- as anyone who knows anything of her expected -- took a seat at a little table, pulled out a cigarette, lit it up and wagged it tauntingly at the smoke-free California crowd, it was clear that she's simply one of a kind.

It almost seems too obvious to work: reggae aesthetics spliced onto Ethiopian music. Ethiopia is, of course, the promised land of the Rastafarian beliefs at the core of the Jamaican reggae roots; the late Emperor Haile Selassie is worshiped as a supreme prophet, if not more. Musically, though, it seems an unworkable combination: the regular, loping reggae beat imposed upon the skittering melodies and highly irregular rhythms of the African nation, made familiar to many through the landmark and comprehensive 'Ethiopiques' albums series released by Buda Musique in recent years.

"It shouldn't work," agrees Nick Page. "But it does."

Forgive him if he sounds immodest, for it's his vision and talents under his alias Dub Colossus that made it work on the album 'A Town Called Addis,' new from Real World Records. The set is revelatory in how effectively it blends two cultures that are linked in mythology but by most accounts are at odds otherwise.

No one would mistake a recent in-store performance at Amoeba Records in Hollywood for the time Paul McCartney played there last year. For that visit, the sprawling music retailer was jam-packed, every inch between the CD bins taken up by worshipful fans. This night business was moderate at best, shoppers casually browsing the vast expanses as Etran Finatawa took the stage. A couple dozen people gathered in front of the stage, apparently there specifically for this. But quickly others started to take notice, even before the music started -- understandably, as it was a visually colorful ensemble strolling out: five West Africans, two of them wearing long, blue-tinted robes and turbans, the other three in brown tunics and bright yellow stripes painted from the tops of their foreheads to the tips of their noses, each with a single feather sticking straight up from his head.

Then they started playing, one of the two robed men playing a Stratocaster, the other four providing percussion, all five singing and/or chanting. The guitar lines had a bluesy insinuation, the chanting too, together forming circular lines over the burbling rhythms. It was simple but mesmerizing. And surely throughout the store among those who had apparently not come to see the group, heads came up, shopping ceased and people were one-by-one drawn toward the stage. By the time the group finished its 40-minute set, most other activity in the store had come to a standstill and all eyes and ears were trained on the stage.

"One day I will sing the songs with no lyrics and everyone can imagine for themselves if it's abut love, disappointment, banalities or about Plato," sings Juana Molina in the opening title song of her new album, 'Un Día,' due for release Oct. 7.

A recent evening on the Santa Monica Pier in California was, in fact, that one day. As the innovative Argentine electro-folk singer-composer previewed some material from that album, she indeed mostly sang just sounds and not words at all. For that matter, when she did sing actual words, they were in Spanish and therefore not understood by many in the audience. And the words to the song quoted above are also in Spanish, as were the words on her four previous albums. But that's not enough for her these days.