Multi-instrumentalist, composer, spiritual leader and the wife of John Coltrane, Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda (1937-2007) long stood in her husband’s shadow. Some certain number of more casual jazz fans, if they have known her name at all, only know it from sidewoman credits on some of his albums, and not for her own performances and recordings.

But even many more ardent fans who know her string of recordings for Impulse and Warner Bros. in the 1970s don’t know the music she created in the last two decades of her life — music that was not necessarily meant for widespread consumption: the Hindu devotional songs that she recorded as a spiritual leader and the head of an ashram near Los Angeles.

John and Alice had fallen in love in 1963; in short order, they married and had four children together: Michelle, John Jr., Ravi and Oranyan (also known as Oran). Within four years of their marriage, however, John Coltrane died of liver cancer. He was just 30 years old. Like her husband, Alice Coltrane was a spiritual seeker; not long after his death, she met Swami Satchidananda — the guru who opened the Woodstock festival — and became his disciple. Her own compositional language evolved during those years into an intoxicating, highly unusual blend of jazz, blues and Indian instruments and tonalities. Her life as a spiritual leader also grew during those years, and she founded The Vedanta Center in 1975.

Coltrane’s life took another sharp turn when, in 1982, their eldest son, John Jr., was killed in a car accident at age 18. With her religious beliefs for sustenance after that tragedy and with a growing following of her own, she founded the Sai Anantam Ashram the following year, which became a 48-acre compound in Agoura Hills, Calif.

Despite Coltrane’s withdrawal from her secular career, music was still at the heart of her religious practice. Even the Hindu name she took on — “Turiyasangitananda” — has music embedded in its core. Sangit, or sangeet, is “music” in Sanskrit; she translated her adopted name as “the transcendental lord’s highest song of bliss.” (Her followers and friends simply called her “Turiya” or “Swamini,” the title for a female teacher.)

It was a good match between spirit and spiritual path. In the Hindu tradition, the entire universe, the cycles of birth, life, destruction, silence and renewal are all encompassed with the sound of “aum” (or “om,” as it’s more commonly transliterated into English) — and there is a deep, long tradition of expressing love for the divine through songs, whether bhajans (individual songs of devotion), kirtans (call-and-response worship songs) or even in the classical tradition, in which ancient devotional songs are the texts for sung ragas.

In the music she created for her religious community, Coltrane – unsurprisingly – did not simply mimic Indian tradition when it came to singing praises to Hindu deities at her ashram’s mandir, or temple. She created something wholly new, and completely her own. The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda are a powerful and indelibly personal mix of the soulful gospel cadences that Coltrane had been steeped in since her church-going childhood in Detroit, and the brimming, collective energy of the call-and-response kirtans. At the ashram’s Sunday services, “She would start playing music and everyone else would join in and they might go two, three, four hours of doing that,” recalls Coltrane’s nephew, musician and producer Flying Lotus (birth name Steven Ellison), in this collection’s extensive liner notes.

The songs on this compilation are culled from four recordings Coltrane made in the 1980s and ’90s on a series of self-released cassettes that were meant primarily for an audience of her followers. (The label for this reissue, Luaka Bop, calls it the first volume in a series called World Spirituality Classics.) Texturally, these compositions exist on several planes simultaneously: they are grounded by Coltrane’s rich, darkly hued, deeply resonant voice (which she had never deployed on her secular recordings); swept along in the currents of her followers’ voices, their hand-held percussion, and her harp and organ; and lifted straight into the cosmic stratosphere by the synthesizers that she had come to love in her later years.

It’s already been argued that a new generation of listeners will be tempted to delve into these devotional songs as zone-out sounds, “ambient music with a purpose” that squares nicely with our era of yoga studios and pressed juices for sale on every block. But this is music that – just as in both the traditional gospel and Hindu devotional styles – demands participation: The particulars of what or who you believe in (or don’t) may not even matter. Either you’re going to be using your voice to sing along, or your heart.

Mzansi Beat Code is Spoek Mathambo’s fifth solo album, the latest salvo of a decade-plus-long career during which the rapper/producer has established himself as one of South Africa’s primary contributors to the global dance-music zeitgeist. It is also a far-flung, sociopolitical unification statement that, in one form or another, isn’t new to Spoek. But unlike prior attempts, Mzansi Beat Code doesn’t simply consider and curate the diverse sounds of South Africa’s nine provinces; it is a fully formed point of view that places the 34-year-old musician at the country’s creative center.

The focus, as it’s often been for Spoek (born Nthato Mokgata), is to “de-exoticize” South Africa’s post-Apartheid cultural history, its internal struggles, and its place in the global slipstream. In his music, such goals have rarely taken the form of straightforward political lyrics. Instead, as a product of the hip-hop/house era who in his teens created a music ‘zine that chronicled SA’s sonic networks, Mathambo has always been more focused on freeing and uniting posteriors. That’s appropriate, since in Mzansi, a widely adapted Xhosa word for the republic, there are more beat codes than tribal languages.

Throughout his career, Spoek has complemented his own recordings of rap-meets-dance music (“Township Tech” to some) with projects like 2009-10’s H.I.V.I.P. DJ mixes, 30-40-minute bursts of local kwaito/house/rap/electro from all over SA that became Internet sensations, and used the social paranoia of the country’s AIDS pandemic as its thematic jump-off point. Or there wasFuture Sound of Mzansi, the 2015 documentary Spoek directed with filmmaker Lebogang Rasethaba, profiling SA’s biggest electronic artists, DJs and dance-music styles, still segregated from one another 20 years after Apartheid’s end. The past two years found him partnering with musicians he met making Future Sound; in the bands/collectives Batuk and Fantasma, Mathambo brought together some of SA’s finest talents under the rhythmic ideals of the worldwide funkadelic.

Mzansi Beat Code reunites many of these collaborators back at Spoek’s house, building on his lifelong pursuit of a pan-Mzansi aesthetic while also widening the garden of SA’s delights to incorporate global vibes. House music being SA’s hometown sound, it is the album’s cornerstone. Yet in Mzansi, house is less a genre than an assortment of adjacent galaxies — and it’s the variety encompassed in this universe that provides the album’s best thrills.

At times, the music is extraordinarily catchy, direct without being obvious. “Want Ur Love” and “I Found U,” a pair of tracks that feature Kajama (the singing sisters, Nandi and Nongoma Ndlovu) and members of Fantasma (guitarist Andre Geldenhuys, multi-instrumentalist Bhekisenzo Cele and Bacardi house mastermind, DJ Spoko) are easily understood, popular attractions — deep house grooves, by turns ribald and soulful. Yet the former is a loud, sometimes coarse, proclamation in favor of same-sex love, while the latter is steeped in sexual melancholy that is almost spiritual.

More often, the fusion of sounds speaks directly to SA’s growing reputation as a prime electronic music melting pot, with Spoek as one of its most forward-thinking chefs. The tracks with Johannesburg singer/songwriter Loui Lvndon include a slice of over-sexed industrial soul (“Landed”) and a break-up pop-soul confection that sounds like an alternate-world R. Kelly production (“Nothing’s Ever Perfect”). “Volcan,” a Spanish-language collaboration with Mexican singer Ceci Bastida, spotlights the hyperactive kinship of punk rock, soca and shangaan electro. And then there’s “The Mountain,” with Mathambo orchestrating a meeting of rhythm giants — Spoko, Pretoria DJ Mujava (whose 2008 track “Township Funk” was one of SA dance-music’s biggest hits) and American jazz drummer Guillermo Brown in his soul-singing Pegasus Warning guise — into a martial-beat, Bacardi house stormer.

After all the hybrid futurism, it’s extraordinary and appropriate that “Pula,” the track which ends Mzansi Beat Code, opens with a groove that discerning Western listeners of a certain age will find quite familiar: the jaiva, or township jive, that was lifted for both Malcolm McLaren’s “Double Dutch” and much of Paul Simon’s Graceland. It is a reminder that Anglo artists have been biting parts of this beat code for quite a while, without unlocking it. Of course in Spoek’s house, such obvious reminders are only a gateway. By the end of its five minutes, “Pula” has brought back Spoko, but also added the young producer Mash.O, the chanting kids of the rural community of Platfontein, and contemporized that jive.

Mzansi Beat Code is out April 14 on Teka Records.

To prepare for his appearances on weekends on All Things Considered, DJ Betto Arcos travels the world looking for new music to bring back to our studios. This time, he shares several songs from his recent trip to Cuba.

Betto says the island nation might not have been prepared for the massive numbers of American tourists who’ve visited since the Obama administration announced a thaw in U.S.-Cuba relations in 2014. “Yet it’s prepared in its vibrancy and its excitement,” he says. “And music and food are two elements that are absolutely essential to visiting Cuba.”

Hear the conversation at the audio link, and listen to Betto’s picks below.

One of West Africa’s most charming bands is back — again. Almost a decade after the group’s last album and nearly 50 years since its founding, Senegal’s Orchestra Baobab is swaggering back onto international dance floors with its silk, sultry songs, layering Afro-Cuban sounds with local traditions and pop styles from across Senegal and elsewhere in West Africa.

First, a little back story. Orchestra Baobab was founded in 1970 as the house band for a venue in Dakar called Club Baobab, an elegant nightclub owned by the country’s minister of finance (who was also the younger brother of Senegal’s president at the time). Club Baobab soon became one of the city’s main see-and-be-seen spots for politicians, businessmen and the city’s elite – and it needed its own band to keep its patrons dancing. Culling some of its members from the competing nightclub act Star Band, Orchestra Baobab played at its new home five nights a week, five hours at a time, with one half-hour break each evening. With that kind of schedule comes a finesse and tightness that can’t be replicated.

Orchestra Baobab called itself “specialists in all styles” – which meant playing a highly danceable blend of the Cuban sounds that already had become a smash across much of the African continent, local griot traditions, and influences from the many countries Baobab’s original players hailed from, including Senegal, Togo, Guinea and Morocco.

But eventually, Orchestra Baobab’s sleek, smooth sound fell out of favor. It was edged out by mbalax, the high-flying, drum-heavy and fast-paced style made popular by other artists, most notably singer Youssou N’Dour (a Star Band alumnus himself) — and Orchestra Baobab disbanded in 1987. Its members splintered off: Bandleader and guitarist Barthelemy Attisso, for example, went back to his other career as a lawyer working in his native Togo. (He’s since rejoined the band for big tours and several recording projects, but his legal work kept him away from this album.)

That wasn’t quite the end of Orchestra Baobab. In 2001, British producer Nick Gold — the mastermind behind the wildly popular resurrection of Cuba’s Buena Vista Social Club a few years earlier — reissued an old Orchestra Baobab album, 1982’s Pirate’s Choice. The reissue, plus some coaxing from both Gold and Youssou N’Dour, fueled a reuniting of the band, whose membership has evolved greatly over the years.

Tribute to Ndiouga Dieng is named after one of the group’s original vocalists, who died last November after a prolonged illness. For Tribute, Baobab has added a kora player from Mali named Abdouleye Cissoko, who contributes a sparkling, filigreed overlay to the band’s horn, guitar and drum-driven heft. And there are a couple of guest vocalists — both stars in their own rights — who add extra punch to this project: Cheikh Lô, who appears on the song “Magno Kouto” and Thione Seck, who left Baobab in 1979 to launch his solo career and returns on this album to revisit one of his early hits, “Sey.”

Even with all the changes in lineup, Baobab’s buttery-smooth sound remains. Tribute to Ndiouga Dieng is full of charm and easy grace, from the high-spirited opening track called “Foulo” to the sinuous “Woulinewa.” (If you want to check out the songs’ lyrics, they’re available in English translation.) Long live Orchestra Baobab — for another 50 years, at least.

There is something going on in Cuba that is, quite simply, raising the bar on music of all kinds. An incredibly talented and visionary group of Cuban millennials are reimagining their African roots through a lens that filters, jazz, soul and funk. And Daymé Arocena is literally giving voice to this movement.

Her new album, Cubafonía, is yet another offering from a singer who sounds like a magical mash up of The Queen of Latin Music, Celia Cruz, and The Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin. Her voice and the music defy expectations, drawing on the power of Afro-Cuban traditions, the nimble athleticism of jazz, and catchy pop melodies.

“Mambo Na’ Ma” is the perfect example. It reminds us that New Orleans was once considered the northern most port of Cuba (back in the 19^th century when Cuban sailors visited the city). It’s an explosion of Crescent City horns and Cuban clave, with Arocena’s Spanglish vocals scatting across the top of it all with the power of a brass band march.

There is not a dull moment on Cubafonía. It is a major statement on the progress of Daymé Arocena as an artist for the ages. And it reminds us that the best music moves the body and the spirit.

Cubafonía is out March 10 on Brownswood Recordings.

Eno Williams, the lead singer and spiritual force behind Ibibio Sound Machine, was born in London, but she relocated to her mother’s native Nigeria as a girl. It’s a move that, years, later, would make a profound impact on musical career. In 2014, Ibibio Sound Machine’s eponymous debut album skillfully combined London electronic club music with Nigerian funk and pop, making for a compelling, ear-popping experience. The band’s follow-up album, Uyai, strengthens and deepens that cross-cultural alchemy.

“Uyai” means “beauty” in the Nigerian language of Ibibio, and it’s a fitting title for this beautiful record. Awash in exultation and infused with melody, Uyai is a gorgeous vision of international pop. “The Chant (Iquo Isang)” starts out with a punch of clipped, stabbing electro, but it settles into a jazzy haze by song’s end — tied together, as its title implies, by Williams’ infectious chanting. Swaying and gently syncopated, “One That Lights Up (Andi Domo Ikang Uwem Mi)” evokes African countryside and urban jungles alike. And on “The Pot Is On Fire,” the song’s incendiary catchiness bubbles brightly, a workout of jittery percussion and kinetic joy.

That celebratory mood simmers down on tracks like “Quiet” and “Cry (Eyed),” which creep along with a haunting, dreamy atmosphere. The hush doesn’t last long: From the lively call-and-response of “Guide You (Edu Kpeme)” to the fizzing disco of “Sunray (Eyio),” the album retains a minimalist, horn-punctuated vibe while undertaking a dynamic journey across continents of sound and feeling. Williams sings largely in Ibibio with a sprinkling of English; her use of language, like the band’s use of musical genres, is fluid. Supple and soulful, her voice scales dizzying heights one moment and dips into sultry snarls the next. “Trance Dance” makes no bones about its dancefloor aspirations: With stuttering polyrhythms and vast slabs of synth, the song builds and releases in a frenzy of Afro-futurist ecstasy.

For all her unrestrained uplift, Williams gets serious on one of the album’s most arresting cuts, “Give Me A Reason.” Beneath the dark, propulsive bass and bursts of brass, she tells the story of 276 Nigerian girls, yet to be found, who were kidnapped by Boko Harum in 2014. But she turns this tragedy into an impassioned call for empowerment, as the band slathers the groove in sleek, Prince-worthy hooks. With Uyai, Ibibio Sound Machine has crafted a collection of irresistible, multidimensional anthems that reach far beyond the borders of geography, music and emotion.