It’s difficult to describe the deep and enduring appeal of Pink Martini, a group of highly literate musicians performing a decidedly popular repertoire with absolute sincerity.

The band hails from Portland, Oregon – a city with more than its fair share of oddballs – but it could claim to be from everywhere, with songs in languages as diverse as Arabic, Chinese, French, Italian, Japanese and Spanish.

The Pink Martini sound is rich, mature and accomplished, yet somehow kitsch and even fetishistic.

It’s a curiosity shop of old brasileiro records mixed in amongst recordings of forgotten music hall revues and Japanese softcore soundtracks. It’s Chopin dancing the tango with Doris Day.

There really is something for everyone. And it’s all heart-on-your-sleeve stuff. This is probably what first attracted me to Pink Martini. I’d be listening to a brassy, rather loungecore take on a tempestuous Italian love affair and all of a sudden my eyes would fill up at the sheer candour of it. Pink Martini defies you to be cynical, while reminding you that it’s probably far more worldly and grown-up than you.

With singer China Forbes out on long-term sick leave, the band has recruited a reality-TV rock singer. And of course such an unpredictable move is classic Pink Martini: the brash, imposing Storm Large applies her own considerable vocal capabilities to the material while maintaining just a soupçon of vulnerability.

It’s Thursday evening at the Botanique. The early summer sun is starting to set over Brussels. Nights are longer now and come eight o’clock there’s still plenty of light. People are standing or sitting around, most of them smoking cigarettes or drinking beer out of plastic glasses.

Inside the Orangerie, British musician Matt Elliott has just thrown his audience in at the deep end. No windows in this room and almost no stage lights to compensate for it.

Only Elliott’s head is illuminated, thrown back and singing the same line over and over. There’s something oddly foetal about the shape of his head. His voice is quiet and modest but the expression on his face says he’s putting everything into delivering it.

He shuffled on a few moments ago, mumbled about not having much time and picked up his guitar. The crowd took a moment just to notice he had started. Soon the chatter faded away and the hypnotic, barely-plucked strings took over.

We listen and Elliott sings. In his mind perhaps he’s wandered off and we’re no longer there. His sound, it sounds folky. Jewish, Russian, ladino, Spanish, Tom Waits, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, who knows … but impossibly dark. Everything in a minor key.

I look around. I want to know if it’s only me. Some of those that I can make out, they look like they’re feeling uneasy too. But there’s no question of walking away from this.

Then something happens. Elliott stops playing the rhythm part. But the music goes on. Elliott now plays lead while what must be a ghost takes over on rhythm.

Then as Elliott sings on, he’s now joined by a high, disembodied voice – or it could just be a theremin – and a storm of sound starts to build with the musician himself now far, far away.

Later, as the crowd files out for a breather before the next artist on the billing, many seem grateful to find it still light outside.

In my early teens, during the obligatory antisocial period, I used to listen intently to DJ tapes and collect flyers folk handed out at the doors of nightclubs all over the north of England. The flyers promoted fantastic nights to which I was much too young to go. The tapes were usually very poor quality recordings made at a rave here or a club there, featuring a DJ spinning electronic music.

Back then I wondered how these DJs could cut and scratch records as well as they did. Now I wonder how many of them ever paid tax.

At the end of their sets they unplugged their headphones and their flunky picked up their record boxes. They left the club having shaken a lot of hands and they got into the back of a car and sped off home or to other gigs. Out into the yellowy orange night. Until they faded out of the scene.

Laurent Garnier was at the Haçienda before they knocked it down. He played Ibiza before all the Creams and the Manumissions turned Mecca into Disneyland. Unlike many of those DJs however, Laurent Garnier is still around today. And he’s almost certainly paying tax.

Having been at his live gig with Stéphane Driaux (Scan X) and Benjamin Rippert, I’m unable decide whether or not the Garnier sound has mellowed. Or maybe it’s me. I was too young for that scene and now I feel too old for today’s scene.

Certainly the crowd reflected that split. For every fortysomething ex-raver dropping in for a bit of nostalgia, there was some Abercrombie & Fitch kid with his pants round his knees. Lots of people nodding politely but otherwise pretty uninvolved. Not so many giving total commitment to the sound. Nobody at all with E face on.

Even so, I did enjoy the ‘live machines’ experience. Indeed the flattest moments of the night seemed to be when Rippert or Driaux skulked off for a piss, leaving Garnier to his decks and headphones for a bit too long.

When I used to listen to all those tapes, I longed for the day when I could get down the front and have it large, so to speak. I certainly don’t anymore.

World Circuit’s Nick Gold didn’t get to make his Afro-Cuban project at Havana’s Egrem studios in 1996 due to visa problems encountered by the African contingent. What he ended up with instead was the Buena Vista Social Club.

Fourteen years on, the original show is back on the road: a band of Cubans led by BVSC veteran Eliades Ochoa joins forces with Toumani Diabaté and several of Mali’s best musicians for that long-postponed soundclash.

Any doubts that the traditional music of two continents might not gel were dispelled within just a few bars of the opening track. Those who already knew Toumani’s work with Danny Thompson and Ketama (1991′s delirious Songhai album) found themselves immediately on familiar ground.

The acoustics in the concert hall of the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels were rather poor we felt, but that did nothing to put off the crowd. Many were quickly out of their seats and dancing in the aisles.

Due consideration was given to the solos of the respective musicians. Bassekou Kouyate’s trilling n’goni featured high in the mix, together with Toumani’s unique, dual-tone kora playing and Ochoa’s hard-picked guitar. Djelimady Tounkara added body to the ensemble with his warm electric guitar and Kasse Mady Diabaté’s famously strong and true vocals made several important contributions.

While Buena Vista fever swept the world, there was probably little time to reflect on what might have been with the Afro-Cuban project. Fortunately, this combination of timeless music can afford to be patient. And now it’s time has finally come.

The story goes that Rodrigo Sánchez and Gabriela Quintero played in a thrash metal band in their native Mexico. Presumably having failed to thrash the charts the band split, jettisoning our nimble-fingered duo to Dublin, the buskers’ paradise. There they were spotted and snagged by the festival circuit. Massive success followed, with an album produced by none other than John Leckie.

At times it seems as if Rodrigo and Gabriela pick and strum faster than a hummingbird’s wing action. So given that tonight’s the last date on their world tour, their overworked digits must be pretty sore by now. Heedless, they tear through their set with an engaging gusto.

Personally, I prefer these guys in small doses. Something of the miracle of how they coax an extraordinary, polyphonic array of sound from two simple guitars tends to get lost after half an hour of driving rhythms. Every track’s got the same high energy – they cite Megadeth and Slayer as influences after all – but that perhaps removes some of the focus on musicianship that should give them the longevity they deserve.

At the time of writing, the Cuban singer is seventy eight years old and when she wants to, she can still belt them out. There just wasn’t much cause to do so this evening.

Before a rather small crowd in Brussels’ crummy Cirque Royale, which these days shares more in common with Morley Con Club than it does with the Big Top, Portuondo tried to raise the temperature to lukewarm and more or less succeeded to the relief of many slightly embarassed spectators.

Her band, which might as well have done a residency at Morley Con Club, was very patchy and seemed unrehearsed. Consistently incapable of matching Portuondo’s improvisational approach to standards, they struggled to pull together. The pianist bashed away at his Steinway, not without skill, but hopelessly out of context, the guitarist and percussionist did no more than keep time while the double-bassist was a swan surrounded by ducks. The gum-chewing drummer, plucked from Ipanema and probably handy with a beach ball if not a drumkit, was so self-absorbed that he may as well have been drumming elsewhere.

Portuondo, wearing what looked like a pink dressing gown and pyjama combo, seemed so disconnected that at times the gig felt like a visit with a slightly mad granny. Either the star of Buena Vista Social Club was coasting through a tough night and a wooden crowd, or else she needs to sack that band and take a well-earned holiday. And I for one wouldn’t blame her. We all deserved better.

Before I saw the band in concert, I would never have called the music of Lambchop romantic. Somehow, within a couple of tracks from their new release OH (Ohio), I found myself feeling the lurve. It could have been the semicute gaucheness of singer/guitarist Kurt Wagner, though he is rather an acquired taste. It could have been the rather bizarre album cover, on which is reproduced a painting by Wagner’s old professor depicting a couple of folks making whoopee.

It probably has more to do with the gentler pace of Lambchop’s odd little curio shop songs, the lyrics to which are usually about the simpler things in life. Like love, for example. Shaded by the peak of his trademark cap, Wagner puts a lot of effort into his performance yet in a charming sort of way, everything comes out softly.

The band’s rapport is familiar and well-rehearsed, though their number has been somewhat reduced over the last few years, arriving at an evidently natural balance. For much of the gig, they ambled through the new material and their audience was genial and patient: it always takes a few listens to get into a new Lambchop album anyway, so there weren’t really any big expectations.

Rounding off with a few comparatively rousing numbers from the back catalogue, I almost felt like I wanted to see Wagner and co stretch themselves a bit more, but it would be wrong to impose on them. People who love each other need to give each other room to grow.

Seun is the youngest son of the late Fela Kuti, the politically active leading light of Afrobeat. Having grown up in the thick of that scene, Seun now heads Africa 80, the second incarnation of his father’s band, playing the same energetic mix of funk, jazz, rock and highlife that electrified West African music in the 1970s.

Cheerfully arriving onstage after a characteristically long prelude, it becomes rapidly clear that the tall, young Kuti has every bit of his father’s innate cool. The band, taut and heavy on syncopated percussion, rattles along effortlessly and from the get go, no-one in the audience is left standing still. Kuti is comfortable as a frontman, swapping between voice and sax parts, contorting his body and throwing shapes during the solos of his colleagues.

The music ebbs and flows and there are no gaps between tracks. The rhythm of a hot, dry African evening descends upon the Ancienne Belgique, a special sense of time and place that can be felt, indistinct yet insistent, in the spirit of the rhythms and the brass punctuations.

Kuti’s socially aware lyrics, often delivered in mantra-like repetitions, remind us of the family legacy: to effect change through music. “Let me tell you something about the financial crisis,” admonishes Kuti during a brief interlude, as the band continues its incessant rhythm at half volume in the background, “the rich tell us that if we don’t save their banks, we’ll all be poor. Well, most of us have already been poor for a long time.”

All too quickly, it was over. Even if the pace was admirably hectic throughout, with its appetite piqued the crowd was still expecting more than a single, one-track encore. Indeed as the house lights went up, there was a palpable feeling that the climax of the night had still to be reached but the damp streets of Brussels were all that was left to us.

H, the son and nephew respectively of eccentric singers Jacques Higelin and Brigitte Fontaine, is something of a musical lacuna himself. Throughout the course of thirteen albums, the Frenchman has pinballed between jazz, rock, pop and disco and on L’Homme du Monde his latest effort he’s done all of them.

Looking like a cross between Joe Strummer and Lieutenant Columbo, H gangled onto the stage in a shiny gold jacket several sizes too small. He was the instantly recognisable comic book kid who dances at school discos with neither care nor co-ordination, looping through uncool and winding up cool. His rasping, chalky voice interrupted itself with a rabid, cartoon falsetto; his musical sense of humour often strayed into serious funk.

Despite occasional minor slips, H’s band was game enough to rise to the occasion. The bassist (as in double and guitar) and drummer were tight, keyboard and electric were inventive and effective. Though many in the crowd took time to “get” H, he managed to get two encores out of them.

And he was comfortable in his monologues, joking about Belgian liquidity, singing the Marseillaise and reentering the stage midway through the set in the superhero suit from his video for the shameless I Wanna Dance With Madonna. Arthur H clearly has the balls to experiment with pop, even if his costume shows them off a bit too much.

After an awkward warm-up from studenty noodlers Wixel, who might be the Flemish answer to Sigur Rós, the stage of Brussels’ Ancienne Belgique was quickly cleared and rearranged for the main event of the evening. Matthew Herbert, renowned for the idiosyncratic music he records under a schizophrenic array of monikers, led on his jazz band and calmly started to work his electronic equipment.

Herbert comes across live as something like a cross between Charlie Chaplin, John Cazale and Doctor Frankenstein. At times, he tricks his audience into thinking he has little control over the output of his machines, but this is pure modesty, given the extraordinary task he sets himself. For, as his band hops smoothly through jazz numbers led by quirky singer Eska, Herbert limits himself to sampling only what is played by them.

The contrast between buzzing, grating feedback and rich brass ought to have been more than a little painful, but the odds between these two unusual bedfellows were evened by Eska’s marvellous voice. Herbert’s past work with Björk is analogous.

So if some spectators seemed rather bemused at first by Herbert’s noisy and very occasionally jarring trickery, the obvious bonhomie among the players was endearing and the head of steam gathered by each track could have left no-one in any doubt that this had been a fascinating display of twenty-first century cabaret.