It's been awhile since we've surfed around the old blogosphere to see what some of my fellow world music writers are up to, so let's get to it!

Over at SoundRoots, S.A. Stevens has me cracking up with a few haiku-style world music CD reviews, inspired (in a roundabout, curmudgeonly sort of way) by Twitter.

At Spinner.com, Steve Hochman is talking with Norwegian composer John Balke, whose latest project, Siwan, combines musicians from roughly a gazillion different traditions into something that is, as Hochman puts it, "nearly describable. Nearly." They've provided a few sound clips, and I genuinely don't know what exactly I'm hearing (perhaps we can call it "world-jazz-plus" or something to that effect), but it does sound intriguing!

Rocking our way over to RootsWorld, we can take a look at another world-jazz visionary, Omar Sosa, who released a CD called Across the Divide: A Tale of Rhythm and Ancestry and simultaneously performed a week-long residency at New York City's legendary Blue Note jazz club. RootsWorld was there for both, and gives us an excellent look at this artist who really digs deeply into the music of the African diaspora in ways that not many have.

Lastly, let's make a stopover closer to home, at About.com's Children's Music site, where Warren Truitt has reviewed B is for Bob, an album of Bob Marley songs remixed and re-released for the younger set. Though it may be youthfully appropriate, Warren thinks that Ziggy Marley, who produced the album, may have done a bit too much tweaking in some places. From what I've heard of the record, I have to agree - you might be better off just finding the track listing and purchasing each of the songs individually, in order to burn your own mix CD, if for no other reason than to avoid the children's chorus that has been added to Small Axe. Yikes!

Disturbing news from zydeco country: Rosie Ledet, the reigning queen of zydeco, is under investigation for the death of a newborn baby. Allegedly, 37-year-old Ledet miscarried the baby, who was nearly full-term, and proceeded to hide the body in a shed behind her bandmate's house on July 1. The band then went on tour the next day to perform in Sioux City, Iowa. When they returned three days later, Ledet notified her bandmate about the infant's body, and he called police. Ledet has not been arrested, only questioned, according to the Baton Rouge Advocate.

Cheb Mami, the "Prince of Rai," was sentenced today in France to five years in prison, reports the New York Times. Cheb Mami, whose real name is Ahmed Khelifati Mohammed, along with three accomplices, abducted his former lover, whose name has been withheld, in 2005. Upon learning that she was pregnant, he and his accomplices attempted to perform an abortion on the woman, though they were unsuccessful and she later had the child, who is now three years old. Cheb Mami, who is best known in the Western world for his work with Sting on the song "Desert Rose," had been on the run in Algeria for two years before he voluntarily turned himself in for his trial in France earlier this week.

Image (c) Pascal Le Segretain / Getty Images, 2003

There's a certain kind of list-style memoir that seems to be pervasive on the internet, usually titled something like, "Things I wish I could go back in time to tell myself," where people, purportedly in their elder years (though realistically probably 22-year-old for-hire web writers) wax rhapsodic about how they wish they could tell their teenaged selves how beautiful they were, or to start saving money, or to spend as much time as possible rolling around in clover flowers, or things of that nature. What would I go back and tell my teenaged self? I was a totally unattractive and awkward-looking teenager, so I would never go back and tell myself how adorable I was (unless future-me is much kinder than present-me). I did save money, so no advice needed there, and my hay fever would've made rolling around in any kind of flowers ill-advised.

No, if I were to go back and give some advice to my 16-year-old self, it would've surely been "Put down the No Doubt record and go get yourself some Desmond Dekker. If you must listen to Reel Big Fish, please also listen to Prince Buster. And while you're at it, if you're going to play Bob Marley's Legend album on repeat for weeks on end, take a break for at least an hour a day and listen to some of The Wailers' early ska work. By the way, nice glasses."

Like many people my age, I was sort of ska-crazy in the early and mid-'90s, but I thought I was being really old-school if I delved into two-tone (second wave) ska. I think that 16-year-old me genuinely had almost no idea that first-wave ska even existed, let alone what it really sounded like. And that's okay - at least I got there eventually. But I'm thinkin' that if I were to go back and give myself a list of things that I "wish I'd known when I was younger," I'm thinking it would be a list of essential first-wave ska starter CDs. Oh, and also a bottle of hair gel, because I was like 22 before I got my frizzies under control, y'all, and I could've saved myself much anguish.