Toddla T signing to Ninja Tune shows that even as they celebrate their 20th anniversary this year, they are still a force to be reckoned with and party with a bit of Sky Surfing.

Does Peterson ever stop? Clearly not as he’s recently returned from Cuba recording a new album with Danay plus this new release on his own Brownswood Recordings label with a launch party in London and Roberto Fonseca live with the New Cuba Sound at the Barbican on the 6th July - phew!

Dub has come a long way since Lee “Scratch” Perry, King Tubby, Scientist, Mikey Dread and such legendary knob controllers from the echo chambers pioneered the sound in Jamaica but over the years the UK has had its own stars and here’s one of the best kept secrets.

Once again Joe Davis at Far Out Recordings does it again, this time with a re-issue of a very highly sort after album that feature some of the best, if not greatest, Cuban musicians of all time! Irakere’s Cuba Libre is fantastic to say the least!

This project represents a significant undertaking for British DJ, producer and all-round global beats guru, Gilles Peterson.

As this is on the Sound Way label with a sub-title of “Biguine, Afro & Latin sounds from the French Caribbean, 1964-74” can you imagine that this CD is totally excellent from start to finish? Well, I think I can say that it’s even better than that!

Following on from Nu-York, Brazil and Cuba, Nascente Records’ fourth “Funk Experience” concentrates on the genre’s influence in the Caribbean.

Subtitled ‘Funky sounds from Cuba & Miami 1973-1988’ DJ John Armstrong’s compilation does exactly what it says on the tin

Charlie GIllett scoops up yet again the tracks you loved but never got round to owning and those that would otherwise have entirely slipped past you unnoticed like so many logs floating down the Niger in the middle of the night

If the young standard-bearer of Cuban music Roberto Fonseca was once recognised chiefly for his performances with the Buena Vista Social Club, it’s surely now his work as a composer and bandleader that earns him his considerable reputation. A rhythmically-charged and beguiling set that displays Fonseca’s remarkable musicianship and myriad influences, Akokan, picks up where Fonseca left off with debut album Zamazu

Yet another compilation of Cuban music? Check out if DJ Lubi Jovanovic’s selections are worth your time

Condensing four decades of Cuban dance hits onto two CDs, Havana Sí! proves to be an appropiate showcase for the genius of Los Van Van.

On paper this is all wrong. A government funded programme in response to social unrest in Harlem, a group of mostly non-Latins making a Latin record, a huge cast of non-professional musicians. And what did they produce? Only one of the top 5 Latin records of all time

Original, soulful recordings that are fresh and and direct from Jamaica that have been hand picked by the one and only David Rodigan makes the second edition of Real Authentic Reggae as essential as the first.

Soothsayers’ third album sees them teaming up with the The Red Earth Collective in an old skool reggae ‘Meets’ connection but delving into the roots ‘n’ jazz with loads of afro-funk that’s really FLY.

Mungo’s Hi-Fi is a dub reggae, dancehall and dubstep soundsystem in the original roots tradition based in Scotland so don’t be surprised that the 12-track album features some of the finest old and new MC talent.

Anthony Joseph was called Bird Head Son when he was growing up in Trinidad. Now it’s the name of his second album with his mates from South London, the Spasm Band, that find all of them in a unity of poetry and music; and that means, album of the year candidate!

An awakened interest in the unique music of a small Central American community has led to this fascinating re-release of traditional Garifuna music from the Gulf of Honduras

Ten years ago, with the help of Juan de Marcos González and support of Ry Cooder, a bunch of elderly Cubans dusted off their instruments, cleared their throats and, with seemingly effortless ease, delivered arguably the most acclaimed album in world music history

The first recording of the ongoing collaboration between the legendary drummer and the innovative Cuban group is a testament to the success of fusion music.

On his sixth solo album, the award-winning Wilson looks more towards commercial influences than previous work

Madera Limpia is a young Cuban band with a rhythmic groove sound inspired by hip hop and reggae; so how eager do you think Daniel Haaksman was to get the remix out?

How hard can it be to pick 16 of your favourite reggae tracks for a compilation album? Well if your after a Primer 101, look no further than Ziggy Marley’s selction on this new CD for the near perfect choice.

Roberto Fonseca’s most recent album, Zamazu, grooves seamlessly from start to finish as his sound at once nods to his musical roots and speaks in the original voice he set out to find many years ago

Named after a hearty Cuban root vegetable stew, Ajiaco is itself a hearty stew of rootsy influenced remixes from a host of worldwide DJs and producers, each putting their stamp on the sound of Cuban ska.

The Garifuna communities of Central America’s Atlantic coast are beginning to seem like the new Cape Verde — there is so much good music coming out of there. The truth is that it has as much to do with the love of Belizean producer Ivan Duran for the music and the people as any one musician breaking it big

If you’re new to the Nueva Vision or an old hand of the Afro-Cuban rhythms, here’s a fantastic compilation full of tunes for the dancers in all our souls

Santiago de Cuba is at the heart of the country’s dance music or, as the album subtitle puts it, it is ‘the cradle of son’. Part promo for the restaurant Floridita, part compilation, the album serves up 14 distinctly Cuban cuts

Reggaeton plus son equals reggaetoson or so we are told…

Charlie Gillett mixes the well-known with underground discoveries, crosses continents, sifts thousands of songs, balances the sexes and blends contemporary and traditional on this year’s crop

Willie Colón performs his final farewell set at London’s Roundhouse as Fania records release his double CD retrospective: The Player

This CD is one of three new compilations in a ‘Carnaval’ series released on a new label Resiste this week at a bargain price. Definitely worth another look.

The Def Jam of Latin music is back with the latest in its series of re-issues. This time it’s the voices of the Fania stable that get the digital treatment

In Cuba they have a stew called ‘agiaco’ into which anything can be incorporated, Revolucion is the musical equivalent. It mixes son Cubano, jazz, funk, Latin dance and reggae, it has tracks in both French and Spanish and owes as much to New York as Cuba.

The prolific compiler and taste-maker Gilles Peterson delivers his first Latin compilation after digging through a few hundred Fania albums

Jazz Cuba is a nifty little sampler showcasing some of Warner’s plans for 2007 which, if you haven’t guessed yet, is a series of Cuban jazz albums

The debut album by Anthony Joseph & The Spasm Band lives up to everything that the ‘Buddha’ 12” promised. Yep, it’s that good

Wátina is where the ancient and modern worlds meet, where African rhythms blend effortlessly with Latin flavours. It is full of loping rhythms (familiar yet new), warm, powerful voices and perfectly blended percussion

How fitting that Ibrahim Ferrer’s last release should be devoted to the melting sound of the bolero - a style he was never allowed to sing in his youth on account of his un-macho voice

Jeremy Marre’s landmark music documentary series began 30 years ago in 1977 in Jamaica with Roots, Rock, Reggae

Salsa is and was a controversial term for music that escaped between the edges of definition. It wasn’t simply Puerto Rican, Cuban, commercial, from New York, black etc and yet it wasn’t possible without all of these things

In the Buena Vista vein Candido Fabre’s Cubano Soy is a catchy
collection of Cuban salsa.

Traditional Tango with a contemporary twist and a personal touch.

Sub-titled Afro-Cuban music from the roots, “percussion and voices traditional and experimental” it’s vastly different to some of the other Cuban-inspired music we’ve featured recently.

I love the cover to this album, it’s as if Pitbull - dressed in his boxing robes - is just having a paddle but contemplating how he’s going to take Cuba from Mr Castro single-handed.

Robert Mitchell and Omar Puente have worked together for sometime now and this album proves there’s a magical connection between the duo

At the heart of this album is Paz’s return to his homeland, Cuba. Sounding like a young, more charming and less cheesy Julio Iglesias, Paz manages to get the right balance between the effortless coolness so easily possessed by the artists behind the Cuban music revival and a real depth and philosophy in lyrical content

The latest thing is still Dubstep and the warrior queen leading the charge on Radio 1 is Mary Anne Hobbs (not pictured).

You can’t have escaped the hype surrounding Dubstep over the last few weeks as Mary Ann Hobbs created vibrations worldwide via her Breezeblock Show.

To celebrate 20 years of recording, World Circuit will be releasing a superb double CD collection on the 16th October

The Mad Professor has been a leader of dub for many years and this new CD follows the high standards of previous releases

Here we go with some ‘authentic’ reggae sound on another big track for the summer

When they say, “they don’t make good reggae” anymore, Yellowman would be an example of both the maligned post-Marley ragga-come-dancehall and the “good” stuff of old.

The sound of summer is here again, courtesy of The Kemia Bar at Momo’s, a fresh and charming club in London’s West End that evidently knows how to have a good time. With new takes on old classics and somehow finding a rare middle ground between old and original, your heart will thank you for listening to this.

It’s from Putumayo — expect nothing less than for it to do exactly what it says on the tin.

The latest in the DJ Andy Smith Document compilation series is a departure from previous releases as he plunders the vaults of Trojan Records.

If there is more likeable rascal of a record this year, I’ll eat my swizzle stick. Filthy “double ententes” rub shoulders with stinging satire much as the original patrons of Dirty Jims mixed it up back in the day

A long-lost, hot and hard be-bop masterpiece from Jamaica’s legend of the tenor saxophone resurfaces to blow us back to the heady days of the 60s London jazz scene.

Anga Diaz successfully translated his eclectic Echu Mingua album into a captivating live experience

Soundway Records are best known for their crate-diggin’ compilations of African music. So can they pull off the same trick of releasing meticulously researched and beautifully re-mastered records but of a Latin tinge? ¡Claro que si!

Don’t be too smug if you think you are the only person outside of Cuba that is hip enough to have a Los Orishas CD spinning in their entertainment system. The group from Havana are exploding onto the international music scene. Named after deities of the African Yoruba religion of Santeria, these gods of music are touching spirits all over the world

Cuban son gets a simultaneous revisitation and a fresh kick in the form of Son: Soul of a Nation.

Sue Steward continues rifling through the Fania back catalogue for Rough Guide; this time she brings us a fresh selection from the Mambo King himself Tito Puente. With over a hundred albums to choose from, getting down to 21 tracks is no mean feat and any selection will inevitably be partial but we are treated to a wide selection of styles and collaborators including La Lupe and Celia Cruz

Afro-Cuban chants meet the jazz stylings of Mark Lotz on this accomplished and fascinating fusion album.

Compiler Lubi Jovanovich has done it again with a fine selection of surefire floor fillers from the past decade. The emphasis is on salsa dura — the tight-to-the-beat style that dancers everywhere favour — on this well-chosen selection

Cuban/Yoruba themes, chants and rhythms, jazz and a dash of the oriental come together in this striking outing from the Netherlands

Their first album was a joyously fresh combination of elements that could get the dancefloor heaving at a moment’s notice. Ska, a form of dance hardwired into even the most stiff British legs met son (the form of dancing you most want to move along to — but without Ska Cubano’s help could not hitherto). So how have they done with second album syndrome?

Against all odds, a Colombian band has managed to début with a brilliant album which shows how Jamaican music should be played

When Celia Cruz died in 2003, the Latin world went into mourning. Incredible scenes were witnessed in Miami and at her funeral in New York. Celia was always the voice of Latin America but she also represented the dream. A poor black girl with little more than a great voice and a knack of being in the right place at the right time had become immeasurably famous, respected as an artist and conspicuously rich. This is her story in song -- or at least fragments of it.

For many, the seventies typifies the golden age of reggae, linking the vocal sweetness of the sixties with the harder-edged music that was to follow. Falling into this period is much of the excellent music to be found on this introductory disc to the joys of dub featuring some cracking cuts from the likes of King Tubby, Lee Perry and Errol 'ET' Thompson.

A cross-fertilisation of black US music, most notably soul and R'n'B, with Latin beats, boogaloo came from the New York areas of Spanish Harlem, Brooklyn and the Bronx, emerging for a few intense years at the end of the sixties. This CD charts the course the music took to make Latin mainstream.

If you have never heard the music of Silvio Rodríguez, then please do me a favour: do not buy this album. It's a deeply distorted survey of his output, favouring some of his worst mistakes over some of his most sublime successes. Even when first released in 1991, the selection was questionable. Fifteen years and half a dozen albums later it's an unpardonable offence to the artist's reputation.

Cards on the table: if a more exciting album comes along this year it will be a miracle. Like a first-time novelist, Cuban conguero Miguel 'Angá' Díaz has poured everything he has and is into his first album as a bandleader, and even the most jaded listener would have to admit that the result is a thing of wonder.

Humo De Tabaco is the dÈbut album of the Alex Cuba Band, fronted by Alexis Puentes, who at age 30 is already a veteran of the Cuban musical melting pot, having navigated his way in various combos through jazz, salsa, mambo, nueva trova and points in between.

A diabolical concoction of foot-popping ska, invocations to the ancient Yoruba gods, swinging Latin brass and the results of a fiendish extraction process performed on the kings of mambo make Ska Cubano's eponymous album an instant party classic.

There's a great documentary that has been doing the rounds at film festivals and events recently, Inventos: Hip Hop Cubano. The brainchild of a young US film maker called Eli Jacobs-Fantauzzi -- who interviews and shadows a number of the well-known artists -- he gives us an intimate look at what Cuban hip hop is all about.

Sly Dunbar, Robbie Shakespeare and Bill Laswell: that is a heavyweight team if ever there was one and here they pull in collaborators to put down some dark, dark tunes. Deep bass exploration.

Subtitled 'A taste of new wave Colombian flavours', Salsa Moderna v.2 does not disappoint anyone with itchy feet for salsa. Culled from the latest tracks coming out of Colombian label Discos Fuentes by Straight No Chaser Latin Don Lubi Javanovic, this is not cerebral salsa.

The album covers everything from classics by Los Golden Boys and La Sonora Dinamita to modern salsa romántico from the likes of Orquesta Internacional Los Niches

The music is blisteringly good, the filmography marks it out as mid 70s concert footage straight away but apart from Celia herself the real stars of the show are the audience.

Hit and miss documentary about Sunsplash, Montego Bay 1983.