“Je veux.” I want. In this song, which became a huge summer hit in France in 2010, Zaz shares a wishlist that’s anything but materialistic. All she wants is “some love, some joy, some good cheer/It’s not your money that will make me happy,” she sings in French, after turning down jewels, mansions and limousines. “What would I do with all that stuff?” she asks, sauntering in the video through a flea market. That image only underscores the cute-retro Parisian feel that can’t help but attach to the 31-year-old singer. It’s inevitable: Zaz covers Edith Piaf and Serge Gainsbourg along with singing originals, and she even used to busk in the Metro and Montmartre, plus she’s kind of bubbly, so the whole gamine thing comes pretty much built in.

But there’s plenty more to Zaz, born Isabelle Geffroy, than that cliché’d image. She’s a thoughtful and energetic woman from a Paris scene where traditional chanson is just one in a brew of influences that includes African, Gypsy, electronica and jazz elements, among others, swirling around in the clubs and taverns of the Latin Quarter or the Halles district. In her own pathway to an entirely unexpected stardom she picked up a lot of those strands, layered them atop a provincial upbringing and came out with this sassy but lucid artistic persona, a little wide-eyed maybe, but far from naïve.

Recently Zaz came through New York City for a few shows, including one at the Globalfest international music showcase, attended by an industry crowd of concert promoters, managers, media and the like. The next day, in her hotel’s lobby lounge, Zaz chatted in French with MTV Iggy’s Siddhartha Mitter about her sudden burst to fame, her troubled early years, and making classic-sounding French songs in 2012.

READ THE INTERVIEW AT MTVIGGY.COM

He started in doo-wop, then went psychedelic. Throughout the 1970s, his bands Parliament and Funkadelic carved out bold, crazy new spaces in rock and funk, deploying a cast of loopy, absurdist characters fresh off the Mothership – the UFO that for many years throned above their concerts.

Samples of their music saturate hip-hop, and you don’t have to master the whole catalog to have danced a few times to classics like “Aqua Boogie,’’ “One Nation Under A Groove,’’ or the perennial “Flashlight.’’

What’s more, George Clinton is still at it, delivering at age 70 on a busy tour schedule with his P-Funk All-Stars, funking it up for audiences that invariably blend all generations and backgrounds.

But apparently not. By the funk grandee’s own recollection, no university has seen fit to confer such an honor upon him. None, that is, until the Berklee College of Music, which receives him for a four-day visit that culminates Thursday with a concert featuring Clinton with members of the P-Funk horn section and Berklee’s own P-Funk Ensemble.

“I really don’t know how it came together, but I’m really glad they did it,’’ Clinton says in a phone interview. It’s not his first visit to Berklee, however. He made a quick stop at the school in 2006, walking into the student ensemble’s rehearsal to gasps of surprise, and jamming with them for a little while.

This week’s visit is a more lavish and organized affair, with rehearsals, class visits, and workshops for Berklee students planned along with the public concert, where Berklee president Roger Brown will bestow the honorary degree. And the concert will feature songs from different phases of Clinton’s career in new arrangements that the ensemble’s faculty leader, bassist Lenny Stallworth, has sent Clinton in advance.

The master is already impressed.

“I was surprised to find out that they thought so much of our music,’’ Clinton says. “I learned that you can actually orchestrate it, write the music down, and note it. They had all the rhythms noted, and even some of the hip-hop stuff that we did, they were able to note it.’’

If Clinton professes surprise, it may be because the P-Funk sound is famously sprawling, with the performers’ free-wheeling attitude seeming to extend into the music itself. But don’t get fooled, says Stallworth. There’s plenty of method to the madness.

“His music is more like organized chaos,’’ Stallworth says. “It looks like it’s not organized, but it’s very organized.’’

Stallworth says that when he teaches P-Funk material, his students discover the musical depth and through it, a little bit of cultural history.

“The music is attractive on the surface,’’ Stallworth says. “Then we get into the class, and they realize he divided his music into three sections: horn, rhythm, and choir. I think George Clinton was a frustrated doo-wop singer. The students don’t realize he had that much lineage. They’re thinking it’s just these fun grooves. But even in the funk moment, he brought the roots. That’s why he has lots of people on stage; he had to have a choir.’’

In recognition of that lineage, Stallworth says the concert program begins with a Clinton doo-wop song from 1960, “Lonely Island,’’ and moves on to “(I Wanna) Testify’’ (1967) before emerging in the more familiar terrain of the 1970s and 1980s. “I think it’s very important for young musicians to understand the history,’’ Stallworth says.

Nor is P-Funk’s legacy a kind of museum material, preserved in aspic. As important to the P-Funk spirit is the way Clinton and his acolytes – Bootsy Collins, Fred Wesley, Maceo Parker, Garry Shider, Bernie Worrell, and the many other greats who came through the band – always embraced new sounds and made them part of their own.

“Every new music that came along where people said, ‘That ain’t music,’ I know that that’s the new music,’’ Clinton says. “And we’re open to that. We’re up to date no matter what we’re playing.’’

It’s in the nature of the funk to be capacious, after all. “If you’re open to what the new music is, you’re funky.’’

Clinton’s visit to a college does raise a crucial question, though. Can the funk – not just the music, but the whole attitude and spirit that underlies it – actually be taught?

“Yes!’’ Clinton says emphatically. “As you learn the technical part, you get to be able to, as they say in ‘Star Wars,’ to let go and use the force. And you’ve got that in your mind. The funk that you were born with; all that education, but you don’t know that you have it.’’

That advice recalls the title of a 1970 Funkadelic album, which, gently paraphrased for polite conversation, says “Free your mind. . . and your rear end will follow.’’

But Clinton says he’ll be giving the students some practical advice as well, especially on the business front; he is involved in some highly complex litigation over song rights and sample credits, and he wants young musicians to be extra careful to safeguard what’s theirs.

And for the rest of us? Clinton has apt advice for the general public as we navigate today’s troubled times.

“Be the best that you can,’’ he says. “And funk it!’’

The tremendous swirl of color and rhythm; the rich layering of djembe drums with the kora lute and marimba-like balafon; storytelling theater that starts as gentle conversation and escalates into a dance party that pulls the audience out of their seats: Nimbaya!, the dance and drumming troupe from Guinea, delivers all you expect from a top-notch African dance event.

Plus something more.

In an unusual departure from tradition, Nimbaya! consists of only women – not just the dancers, but also the musicians. The troupe’s very existence stands as a rebuke to the ancient custom that reserves drumming for men, and regards a woman on djembe as nearly taboo.

The most advanced join the traveling troupe, which has crisscrossed the world on concert and workshop tours, and which visits Sanders Theatre Sunday.

“Nimbaya! has changed my life,’’ says Seregbè Conde, a current troupe member, in French on the phone from Conakry. The women, drawn from all of Guinea’s major ethnic groups and regions, come from traditional backgrounds. To become a professional drummer is daring enough; to make a globe-trotting career of it, all the more extraordinary.

But with multiple years in the group – Conde joined in 2001 – she and her colleagues take the experience in stride. The focus is on the performance, and on the messages that it aims to deliver. Part is a general message of cultural identity and empowerment. Part is specific to a theme – this year, eradicating female genital mutilation (FGM), the practice also known as genital cutting, which is widespread in Guinea and many countries, not just in Africa.

“Our message is that we want to tell Guinean women, all African women, that we can’t just stay as we are,’’ Conde says. “Women need to do everything men do, fight for everything like men. For you, overseas, we want to give a true image of Guinea, and of our culture. And we have a message against cutting.’’

The current performance starts with a story about cutting, says Mamoudou Conde, the group’s (male) artistic director. (Though Conde is a common last name in Guinea, he is also related to Seregbè and a few other members.)

“The show starts with a young girl who is afraid to go through this,’’ Mamoudou Conde says. “She runs from the village but is kidnapped by one of her relatives and taken to the forest.’’ After the procedure, the girl falls ill with an infection and dies.

Mamoudou Conde says all this is presented in a stylized way, so no one in the audience is uncomfortable. But addressing FGM head-on is essential, he says.

“Each of the group members went through this. They do not want to see this happening anymore. They want to speak out through the music, the artistic program and the choreography to fight and eradicate this archaic thing.’’

As for the music and dances, they are not traditional in the sense of belonging to one ethnic group. They merge elements from across Guinea as well as modern themes. This is fitting, considering that Nimbaya has had support from the government of Guinea, which helped give the venture legitimacy.

Even so, Mamoudou Conde says, the group had considerable turnover, especially early, when performers were pressured to withdraw by husbands or relatives. More recently those pressures have abated, he says, as the troupe’s success has earned its members steady incomes.

A sculptor and entrepreneur who has split time between Guinea and the United States for two decades, Mamoudou Conde has served as producer for other troupes, including Les Ballets Africains and Les Percussions de Guinée. But he credits the spread of African drumming in the West for sparking the idea of Nimbaya!

“I could see on tour in other countries that many women would come and take classes,’’ he says. “I heard a discussion in a workshop where a drummer was advising a female that women don’t play the djembe. He said, ‘We don’t know why you guys want to play the drum.’ ’’

Now, the women in Nimbaya play not only drums but also kora, balafon, and even the Malinké flute, another instrument that women almost never perform publicly.

Aicha Conde, another troupe member reached in Conakry, says she plays djembe, balafon and guitar. She reminisces fondly about the warm welcome they have had in such places as Dubai, South Korea, and no less a center of percussion culture than Salvador de Bahia, Brazil.

Those encomiums are a fitting reward for the troupe’s innovation and perseverance in the face of entrenched customs – to say nothing of the logistical difficulties of running a school and launching complex international tours from one of the world’s poorest countries.

“We were never discouraged,’’ Aicha Conde says. “When you truly love something, you will always be able to achieve it.’’

In 1959, Thelonious Monk played a concert at Town Hall, a prestigious New York venue. This was a special occasion. It was the first time that the great pianist performed with an orchestra, a 10-person group led by arranger Hall Overton. Monk was already famous, of course, in the jazz world. But this concert brought him out from the underground and put his music, until then played solo or in small groups, in a whole new context.

Fifty years later, in 2009, Jason Moran, one of today’s most innovative jazz pianists, addressed the Town Hall concert with his own eight-piece band at the same venue. It was not a reenactment (which a different band did the night before) but a multimedia experiment involving narration, graphic art, video, and still photography. Moran titled it “In My Mind.’’

The show took the 1959 program but modified and interwove it with new elements. Moran improvised while listening to Monk through headphones; later, the whole band donned headphones, playing Monk while hearing him. Moran took song snippets and sounds from an archival cache of Monk rehearsal tapes and looped them into the music.

Video showed the North Carolina hamlet where Monk was raised and where his forebears worked the fields as slaves. Incidents from Monk’s life, and Moran’s own musings, put the music in historical context but made it part of a completely modern art piece.

A critical success, “In My Mind’’ was made into a documentary but has been performed just a few times since its 2009 premiere. On Thursday the project comes to Jordan Hall with a twist: alongside Moran and his rhythm section, bassist Tarus Mateen and drummer Nasheet Waits, the balance of the band are Moran’s students at the New England Conservatory.

In the last two years, the hyper-achieving Moran has received a MacArthur “genius grant’’ and been named jazz adviser to the Kennedy Center in Washington, along with a full slate leading his own bands and playing with Charles Lloyd and others. But the Monk project feels special to him.

“Just spending an evening playing Monk’s music brings things back to the root,’’ Moran says. “And this is the first time we’re playing this music with – I shouldn’t call them students, but young musicians – so they get a taste of what it is to play Monk with a contemporary edge.’’

When Moran was first invited to take on the 1959 concert, the idea of simply re-creating it flashed through his mind for a second, and was instantly dismissed.

“I wanted to share more about what I felt about Monk, rather than just play his music,’’ he says. “Because I didn’t know if that was going to be enough for me; it wasn’t going to satisfy the therapy that I needed surrounding Monk.’’

It’s not that Monk traumatized Moran; rather it’s that his presence in Moran’s mind was at once so influential and so daunting. “Monk kind of posed a wall for me as a pianist, because his music demands that you have some style beyond his style,’’ Moran says. “And it’s very difficult to play his music and separate his pianistic style from his composition.’’

An archive of images and tapes made in the loft of New York photographer W. Eugene Smith, where Monk, Overton, and the band rehearsed, gave Moran a way into his own Town Hall project. Hearing Monk direct and discuss ideas was a revelation.

“What he was saying in those tapes, how to rehearse a piece of music, what is the intention of how to play it, the ideas that come out of him listening to his own music – people don’t get to hear this!’’ Moran says. “You don’t get to hear John Coltrane rehearsing ‘A Love Supreme.’ There’s no tape of that. But here there’s tape.’’

It showed how deliberate and specific Monk was, even more than Moran imagined. “And I’m a diehard fan,’’ he says.

“Everyone has their sonic vision of Monk, how he falls into their ears and minds. How he paints silence and uses space. He has these extremely corrupt lines – corrupt because no hand should move like that except his. But he intended all these things, he spent hours in the lab figuring out these structures. He was really like a chemist.’’

Moran’s own methods have something of the chemist to them as well, of course. That’s what NEC student Cale Israel, who plays trombone in the upcoming concert, discovered working through the material with the band.

“The way Jason’s music works is cutting and pasting different sections and tweaking things you wouldn’t think to tweak,’’ Israel says. “He cuts up parts of three or four tunes, you have multiple rhythms going and you have to play with them. I had to think, what the heck do I do with this?’’

Moran says it’s important to him to share with his students Monk’s Southern musical roots, all the way to evangelical and slave songs. At the same time, he hopes the multimedia nature of the project will remind them that music is just one part of contemporary art, and most of all, encourage them to innovate in their own work.

Israel, for one, is absorbing the message. “I think the concert is going to be a commentary on a lot of things,’’ he says. “On improvising, on being ourselves, and also about the way that we listen to music. Hopefully it will be kind of a humorous concert. It’s going to be Monkish.’’

NEW YORK – The drummer Sunny Jain tells the story of a time when he auditioned before Wynton Marsalis, the great trumpeter and consummate arbiter of all things jazz in general, and particularly New Orleans.

In lieu of a bass drum, Jain had substituted a dhol – the two-sided drum from India’s Punjab region that typically hangs from a strap slung over the drummer’s shoulder, and is played with bamboo sticks.

Using the dhol, Jain beat out a series of Punjabi rhythms, the kind that are played in the region’s energetic (and increasingly exported) folk music called bhangra. Hearing this, Jain says, Marsalis felt something quite familiar.

As an up-and-coming jazz drummer with numerous awards and commissions over the past decade, Jain has had plenty of chances to swing behind the drum set. But it’s in his role as a dholi, or dhol player, that Jain swings the hardest, leading Red Baraat, the unique and highly funky hybrid of a marching band that he founded four years ago in Brooklyn.

A nine-piece outfit as diverse in ethnic origins as in musical affinities – bhangra, Bollywood, funk, go-go, and hip-hop are a few ingredients – Red Baraat has made a joyous and sweaty mess of small dance floors and prestigious stages from its New York base to big-time national and European festivals. Its Boston debut comes Wednesday at T.T. the Bear’s.

Its energy is captured on the group’s first CD, 2010’s “Chaal Baby,’’ and even better, on the live set “Bootleg Bhangra,’’ recorded at the Brooklyn club Southpaw. A take on the Punjabi hit “Hey Jamalo’’ features a passage of Spanish vocals. On “Baraat to Nowhere,’’ the MC urges the crowd to strip, “nakedness bumping on the dance floor.’’ At times the horn section sounds positively avant-garde. A honking sousaphone holds up the bottom.

The lineup expands on that of a baraat band, the brass and drum band that escorts a Punjabi groom to his wedding. But the natural US reference, if for the sheer verve alone, is indeed New Orleans and its brass bands such as the Soul Rebels, Rebirth or Hot 8.

Red Baraat has performed, in fact, at the city’s Jazz Fest and at some of its clubs. “It’s deep,’’ Jain says. “This group never was necessarily borrowing from New Orleans music. But we were welcomed instantly. There’s a kinship. It was almost like a stamp of approval.’’

Not that one was needed; but recognition is something that Jain, who was raised in upstate New York, appreciates. “Growing up playing jazz you’re already marginalized, and even more as an Indian,’’ he says. In a response to the tug of two worlds, he devoted some of his first jazz arrangements to Punjabi and Bollywood songs he heard at home.

Alongside his jazz career, Jain toured with the Broadway show “Bombay Dreams’’ and gigged with Sufi-rock group Junoon, among others. But Red Baraat has provided his most fulfilling expression thus far. The group’s success is leaving him less time for jazz, he says, and he doesn’t mind.

A big part of the pleasure, Jain says, is simply getting out from behind the drum set and playing at the front of the stage. At first, he played both roles, but now with Tomas Fujiwara on drum set and Rohin Khemani on percussion, Jain focuses on dhol and emceeing.

“After a while, I was like, I just need to be up front with the dhol,’’ he says. “And the great thing about having Tomas and Rohin is I can stop playing, and the band is still cooking. I can conduct, and cue things. It’s very liberating.’’

Red Baraat also involves more singing and rapping than at the beginning, whether by Jain, trumpeter Sonny Singh (who came up playing ska and reggae), bass trumpeter MiWi La Lupa or sousaphone player John Altieri.

“There’s more vocal stuff going on, more interaction with the crowd,’’ Jain says. “This is not a quiet band, and we’re not going to have audiences that are quiet.’’

For Fujiwara, who grew up in Cambridge and is a highly regarded jazz drummer in his own right, the presence of multiple percussionists only adds to the good vibes. “There’s space to share,’’ he says. “It’s a lot of fun for us to throw around ideas.’’

From the Indian roots of nearly half the band and much of its sound, Fujiwara says he’s picked up not just music, but also cultural references and inside jokes. “We spend a lot of time together, being friends, goofing around,’’ he says. “The jokes are both highbrow and lowbrow.’’

India, meanwhile, is one place where Red Baraat has yet to perform. When they do, Jain says, it will make for an interesting experiment. Unlike, for instance, sitar or vocal classical music, brass bands and dhol do not enjoy high-culture cachet in India.

“There’s this idea that anyone can pick up a drum and just bang it,’’ Jain says. A dhol-led band, let alone one as eclectic as Red Baraat, might blow a few minds. “That’s why I want to go there,’’ Jain says, formulating a challenge to the Indian crowd: “See how you take us now!’’

NEW YORK – It happened one evening last March during an acoustic set at a Spanish tavern in Greenwich Village, one of those restaurant gigs that are the bread-and-butter for many striving Latin musicians in this town. It was one of those small moments of audience connection that make all the effort feel worthwhile.

Looking up from his guitar, Gregorio Uribe noticed a gentleman intently scribbling some kind of sketch at the bar. At the set break, the man approached Uribe and offered him the picture. He had taken a cloth napkin and produced a charming portrait of the musician, drawn in pen with carefully applied splotches of red wine.

The picture would become the cover art, and “Pluma y Vino’’ – pen and wine – the title, of Uribe’s debut album, which the Colombian singer and multi-instrumentalist was recording at the time.

Indeed, “Pluma y Vino,’’ whose release Uribe celebrates tonight in a quartet at Regattabar, displays the songwriter’s deft pen and red wine’s mellow, nocturnal feel.

But it opens up as well, revealing structure and a fair bit of spice. The opening bolero, “Una Excusa,’’ is pure romance. But soon come vivid Afro-Caribbean rhythms, strains of clarinet and accordion, the sway of cumbia. And the words, which Uribe sings with plenty of articulation and space, so that even Spanish-language beginners should readily grasp their general meaning, don’t lack for social and cultural message.

“La Toma,’’ for example, addresses a remote Afro-Colombian community who face the threat of displacement from their mineral-bearing land by mining companies and paramilitaries.

“The song says, after 300 years of slavery and 200 years of neglect, all of a sudden now you’re interested,’’ Uribe says. He composed it for a documentary that was made recently about this situation. Another song, “Los Niños del Alma,’’ was written as a hymn for a foundation with which Uribe is involved, and which makes music and art education available to low-income children in several Latin American countries.

And Uribe’s usually soothing voice surges with anger during a passage of “Diga Usted Coronel,’’ a song he wrote about a controversial trial of a military officer in Colombia, Alfonso Plazas Vega. It’s a complicated case, Uribe says, but the song is about “a person who has been judged without any hard evidence.’’

Whether waxing indignant, romantic, or endearing, as on “Mi Super Héroe’’ – my superhero – dedicated to his dad, Uribe’s personality on this record fleshes out the one he’s most known for in New York, as the leader of a 16-person Latin big band that plays well-regarded venues here, including a monthly residency at the Zinc Bar.

“The big band is like a dance band, there to have fun,’’ says Venezuelan guitarist Juancho Herrera, who plays with Uribe in both formats. “His acoustic record is much more thoughtful. It’s like a chronicle.’’

A regular on New York’s new Latin scene, where the jazz and salsa traditions have intersected with folk, rock, and electronic innovations by new arrivals from South America, Herrera has watched Uribe – who only graduated from Berklee College of Music in 2007 and arrived in the city a year later – quickly and confidently find a space for himself.

“He’s direct, sincere, and honest, and people feel that energy,’’ Herrera says.

It helps that Uribe is also highly talented: he earned summa cum laude honors at Berklee (“Hey, you gotta make the most of it,’’ he says, a little bashfully) and he plays guitar, accordion, and drums. He came to singing later, he says, and credits his progress to his friend and voice teacher, Argentine singer Sofia Rei Koutsovitis.

“Pluma y Vino’’ is something of a happy accident. At first Uribe had raised money, through an Internet campaign and fund-raiser concerts, for an album with the big band. But the cost of recording a 16-person outfit proved daunting, and with the blessing of his musicians and backers, Uribe fell back on the smaller project.

“I needed to have some music out there,’’ he says. “And everybody was very supportive and sweet, and that gave me the push.’’

Uribe says many of his funders are in the Boston area; between that and his Berklee connection, he expects this performance to have a family feel. Next is a New York release party, and soon, he hopes, a tour in Colombia, where he’s had the chance to perform a few times with local musicians but not yet to bring his own group.

“I want to create a bridge between the two places,’’ Uribe says. And he promises the next record will feature the big band and showcase innovations being made in the Big Apple to cumbia and other Colombian styles.

“There’s a bigger umbrella here,’’ he says. “Even Europeans and Americans are doing it. The second album will represent that New York cumbia.’

If you came for the severed pig’s head, you’re too late.

Ditto, possibly, for the blood-stained butcher’s apron — though Teri Gender Bender, the leader and frontwoman of the punk-inspired band Le Butcherettes, has not yet removed that trademark prop from her performance wardrobe. She may still, when she feels so moved, urinate onstage. Certainly, her rants and random pronouncements in Spanish and English and her daredevil dives into the crowd seem destined to carry on.

But by her own reckoning, a transformation is afoot for Teri Gender Bender, née Teresa Suarez. At 22, her music has (dare we say) matured and her creative personality fleshed out, having absorbed more than a little upheaval in the five hectic years since 2007, when she launched Le Butcherettes as a pissed-off teenager who was reading Simone de Beauvoir and feeling trapped by the stereotypical expectations placed on a young woman in Guadalajara, Mexico.

Along the way she’s overseen four total overhauls of the band’s line-up; released a brash, angry 2009 EP, Kiss & Kill; made the big move from Guadalajara to Los Angeles; and put out a stunning 2011 album, the still-raw but more melodic Sin Sin Sin, produced by the protean Omar Rodríguez-López, of The Mars Volta, At The Drive In, and countless other ventures.

EXCERPTED. READ THE WHOLE STORY AT MTVIGGY.COM

This week’s year-in-review special continues with Siddhartha Mitter, a music journalist who contributes to the Boston Globe, MTV Iggy, MTV Desi and other outlets.

Siddhartha Mitter’s list:

Three Great Songs:

• Frank Ocean, “Novacane”
• Musiq Soulchild, “Yes”
• SBTRKT featuring Sampha, “Hold On”

World Music that Isn’t “World Music”:

• Chamber Music (album) – Ballake Sissoko & Vincent Segal
• Tirtha (album) – Vijay Iyer, Prasanna, Nitin Mitta
• Zuciya Daya (song) – Bez
• Karibu Ya Bintou (song) – Baloji

Music for Upheaval:

• Rayes Le Bled (song) – El Général
• Into the Fire (song) – The Bant Singh Project
• Obama Nation Pt 2 (song) – Lowkey ft. Lupe Fiasco, M-1, Black the Ripper

Rest in Peace:

• Pandit Bhimsen Joshi
• Cesaria Evora
• Gil Scott-Heron

1. SUSANA BACA

“Afrodiaspora’’ Soulful pedagogy from the sublime-voiced Baca, who this year was named Peru’s culture minister, and here leads a grand tour of Africa-rooted music from Latin America and the Caribbean, including New Orleans, with her customary grace and serene mastery.

2. MAMANI KEITA

“Gagner l’argent français’’ A shimmering, just-right set from a Malian woman singer who deserves broader recognition. Also very much a producer’s album, as French arranger Nicolas Repac develops intricate layers of rock and electronic elements, but it’s Keita’s voice that does the transporting.

3. BEZ

“Super Sun’’ A superb alternative-soul singer who happens to come from Nigeria – and a male counterpart to that country’s new songstresses such as Asa, Nneka and Ayo. Watch for Bez to emerge in the United States in 2012, starting with a visit to SXSW in March.

4. BALLAKÉ SISSOKO + VINCENT SEGAL

“Chamber Music’’ Recorded deep in the night in Bamako, this exceptional Franco-Malian meeting of cello and kora, mostly duets with a few occasional guests, is austere yet never forbidding; rather, quietly joyous and entirely unexpected.

5. BLITZ THE AMBASSADOR

“Native Sun’’ Ghana-born, Brooklyn, N.Y.-based MC Blitz Bazawule had his breakout year behind this feisty album of socially-minded trans-Atlantic hip-hop, roaming across the funk, Afrobeat and highlife distilled by his excellent working band.

6. BALOJI

“Kinshasa Succursale’’ Gruff and full of fire, Congolese MC Baloji, who is based in Brussels and raps in French and local languages, returned to Kinshasa to record with Konono No. 1, soukous guitarists and other local luminaries. Urban and urgent.

7. KIRAN AHLUWALIA

“Aam Zameen’’ Ahluwalia’s far-reaching, cosmopolitan innovations on Indian ghazal and Punjabi folk songs keep getting better. On her fifth album she’s joined by Touareg superstars Tinariwen and Terakaft (both of which had fine new records this year as well, by the way).

8. AURELIO

“Laru Beya’’ Very much the anointed successor to the late Andy Palacio, who revived Garifuna music from Central America’s Caribbean coast, Aurelio delivers with a far-reaching set that folds in local pop and looks back across the ocean to Senegal, with Youssou N’Dour and others contributing.

9. KARSH KALE

“Cinema’’ The Bay Area producer has been scoring films in India lately, but his South Asian-infused electronic sound has always felt cinematic. Here he’s at his seamless best, melding contributions from Indian classical musicians and American rockers with no trace of any fusion awkwardness.

10. DJ JAMJAM

“Oyinbo Swagga Vol. 2’’ (mixtape, available online) Nigeria is a rich new frontier for hip-hop and R&B, plenty of it hyper-commercial; many current top stars (P-Square, M.I., Wizkid, Tiwa Savage, and more) appear on this chock-full mix by a London DJ. Not all the music is great, but the crash-course immersion is frenetic and vital.

BIGGEST SURPRISE

EL GÉNÉRAL

“Rayes Le Bled’’ The year’s big surprise in world events was the Arab Spring. Local hip-hop played a part, expressing popular discontent and documenting the uprisings, beginning with this protest song by El General, from Tunisia, where it all began. Be sure to watch the video as well.

It shouldn’t be this way, but it’s still the case that when a jazz group forms in which all the players are women, that fact attracts at least as much notice as the music they perform. It’s unavoidable: all-women groups remain rare in a jazz world where most performers, listeners, and critics are male. It’s also annoying, not least for female artists who have worked their way to the music’s heights only to find their work with one another treated as a novelty.

That is why it is tempting to see the trio of drummer Terri Lyne Carrington, pianist Geri Allen, and bassist Esperanza Spalding, who appear at Scullers tonight through Sunday, as simply a dynamite combination of virtuosos with amazing combined breadth and experience, gathered together in a piano trio, one of the music’s classic formats.

But that would be leaving out part of the story. That’s because Carrington, who initiated this trio (although it’s the buzzed-about Spalding, Grammy winner and featured performer at the White House, who gets the attention in the club’s listing), recently set aside her deep reluctance to highlight gender in her music. And to spectacular effect: “The Mosaic Project,” her new record featuring 21 top women in jazz (with a dash of soul and funk) is a grand celebration, as well as one of this year’s most appealing releases.

With a strong vocal component (including Dianne Reeves, Cassandra Wilson, Gretchen Parlato, Nona Hendryx, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Carmen Lundy) it has received a Grammy nomination for best jazz vocal recording. But with trumpeter Ingrid Jensen, saxophonist Tineke Postma, clarinetist Anat Cohen, guitarist Linda Taylor, and more, including Sheila E. on percussion and Patrice Rushen on keyboards, it sparkles as much for its instrumental range as for its lyrics of love, politics, yearning, and transformation.

And with Carrington on every track and Allen and Spalding on many, this weekend’s trio represents the backbone of the larger project. It is also, Carrington says, the group that inspired her to develop the Mosaic Project in the first place.

“I thought it’s really time to do a female-driven record,” Carrington says. Three years ago, the three and Postma played as a quartet at the Red Sea Jazz Festival in Israel. Last year, the trio made its debut at Bowdoin College in Maine. A seed was planted, Carrington says: “When I started thinking about a project that would be recorded, immediately my thoughts expanded.”

The result is a recording that is all-women, not by accident, but also not as its sole raison d’etre. It is as much, Carrington says, a chance to bring together friends.

“People look at it like an all-female record, I understand that, and the point was to celebrate women’s artistry,” Carrington says. “But it’s really a documentation of where I am in my life. I have been playing with these musicians on and off for 20 years.”

Or longer: Carrington, 46, was a teenager when she first met Allen. Spalding, 27, is a newer acquaintance, but the two were brought together as colleagues on the faculty of the Berklee College of Music. (Carrington, a Medford native, returned from the West Coast six years ago and lives in the Boston area.)

Allen says it makes sense that Carrington assembled this project. “She has a wonderful way of bringing people together,” Allen says. “It represents her being kind of a visionary. She has a good sense of timing in a lot of different ways.”

Allen, 54, has a long discography ranging from avant-garde work in the tradition of Ornette Coleman and John and Alice Coltrane to sacred music (her Christmas album, “A Child Is Born,” came out recently). But she says Carrington, an avid hip-hop and rock listener, pushes her to new places, whether in the open, accessible funk that characterizes much of Mosaic, or in their work together with Angelique Kidjo and Lizz Wright on the “Sing the Truth” project.

“She kind of throws me in a lot of different fun, organic challenging experiences,” Allen says of Carrington.

Carrington cautions that the trio will differ from Mosaic’s lush, produced texture, even if they revisit a few of its songs. She says Spalding, who has become known not just for her bass playing but also as a vocalist, “might sing a little” as she does on “Mosaic.” Each woman will contribute new compositions. But the emphasis will be on standards, in arrangements that allow the three to stretch out and improvise.

In that respect, this gathering is as classic as jazz gets. It echoes important trios past and present: Carrington cites those led by Keith Jarrett and Brad Mehldau, for example, and even Medeski Martin & Wood. “I’ve always loved great jazz trios,” she says. “It’s cool to figure out how much you can do in that setting.”

Allen concurs: “I’m really just looking forward to the opportunity to find what our place is in that history,” she says. And in a further nod to the tradition, Carrington says the trio -which she hopes will turn into a long-term venture -will appear next month at New York’s hallowed Village Vanguard.

All this makes the trio and the larger Mosaic Project significant both because they are all-female and for reasons that have nothing to do with that fact. That’s why Carrington isn’t wrong when she says, “I don’t deal with gender at all” – even though Mosaic plainly does.

“When I play with great musicians, I play with great musicians,” Carrington says. “All great musicians listen. They are sensitive and compassionate. You can’t go in with an agenda. When you’re open is when the magic happens.”