Rough Guide to Women of the World
Various Artists
(World Music Network)

THE ROUGH Guide series has cornered the market for well-thumbed travel books for gap-year students and compilation albums for those interested in exploring world music from the comfort of their living room.

Previous well-compiled volumes have been dedicated to Cambodian psychedelia and Tex Mex but the remit of Women of the World is arguably too wide to be meaningful.

Though promoted as “a celebration of some of the world's great female musicians” — a rationale for their greatness is never provided — it lacks the thematic unity that provides context to compilations.

The result is a rather disorientating pick-and-mix approach to geography and style, with the classically trained Turkish singer Olcay Bayir rubbing alongside the Afrobeat of the Cameroon-born, Paris-based Sally Nyolo.

There are a number of other artists who, like Nyolo, cross borders and these provide some of the most arresting examples of contemporary fusion. Saba Anglana melds her Somali-Italian identity in the slinky pop-funk of I Sogni, while African-Nordic jazz outfit Monoswezi bring hypnotic chants and handclaps to Nyuchi, which features Zimbabwe singer Hope Masike.

Closer to home are Sheffield-based Rafiki Jazz, who rework a traditional Qawaali song with help from Manchester's Sarah Yaseen’on Jhooli Laal Qalandar and Bulgarian-born, London-based folk singer Eugenia Georgieva, who adds fiddle and vocal yips to Po Drum Mome (A Girl on the Road).

Traditional music is well represented throughout, from the wholesome Celtic Americana of New Hampshire’s Kyle Carey on Tillie Sage to the Saharan blues of Tartit — who formed in a refugee camp — on Afous Dafous.

The quality of the material dictates that many of the artists, whose biographies are detailed in succinct liner notes, should have a wider platform. But the one being offered, which groups them together on the basis on having XX chromosomes, fails to do them justice.