It must be hard sometimes for Luciana Souza to keep track of who she is night to night, musically speaking.

The tour she's on right now has already seen her in an intimate jazz/bossa nova residency at San Francisco Performances, working in a trio format at New York's Jazz at Lincoln Center and teaming in her mezzo-soprano persona with dancer Rosa Collantes for three shows with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, sandwiched around a brief Spain tour. Still to come are another dance/orchestra program in Chicago's Millennium Park series with the Luna Negra company, more shows in the San Francisco gig and, next April, two Easter performances in the lead vocal role of Argentine composer Osvaldo Golijov's St. Mark Passion with the La Pasion Orchestra at the Walt Disney Hall in Los Angeles.

On recordings she's explored her Brazilian bossa nova roots, the poetry of Pablo Neruda and Elizabeth Bishop, and the songwriting of Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon and other greats of her adopted home in the U.S. She's been featured on several ambitious works by Around the World alumnus Golijov, collaborated with Herbie Hancock, Simon and many others, sung in various film soundtracks including with her friend (and another Around the World alumma) Rebecca Pidgeon for David Mamet's 'Redbelt.' And so on.

Did Bo know?

That'd be Bo as in Diddley, of course. AKA Ellas McDaniel, the rock 'n' roll architect who passed away last year. And did he know that the famous beat that came to have his name on it -- clap along: duh-duh-duh DUH DUH ... the engine driving 'Hey, Bo Diddley,' 'Bo Diddley Was a Gunslinger,' 'Who Do You Love?' ... perpetuated by Buddy Holly in 'Not Fade Away,' Johnny Otis with 'Willie and the Hand Jive,' Bruce Springsteen with 'She's the One,' U2 with 'Desire' (just to touch on a very long list) -- originated in West Africa?

Sure, that's old news. As well-documented in various musicological explorations such as Ned Sublette's fascinating music-and-so-much-more book 'The World That Made New Orleans,' the beat moved with the slave trade from Africa through Haiti and then New Orleans' Congo Square and out as the "juba" through the Mississippi Delta and, eventually, up to Chess Studios in Chicago.

But did Bo know?

"I don't know," says English guitarist Justin Adams, on the phone from his London home. "That's a question for the history of culture. These are fascinating questions."

After doing a Middle East tour as official cultural ambassadors for the U.S. State Department a few years ago, Ozomatli found their already wide-ranging, multicultural musical and thematic scope being expanded by the experience, as evidenced in the 2004 album 'Street Signs.'

It's hard to say how a just-completed trip to Myanmar, Vietnam and Thailand under the same auspices will impact the Los Angeles-based group's music. But impressions were definitely made.

"We actually were super-interested in Middle Eastern and North African music before we went there," says Ulises (Uli) Bella, Ozo's sax and clarinet man. "I was listening to a lot of classical Arabic singers like Oum Kalthoum, Algerian rai, Egyptian music. And when we were there, a big thing for us was the villainization of the Arabic world after 9/11. My father's from Spain and my mother from Mexico, and Arabic culture and music is a huge influence in Spain. The country and people wouldn't be what we are if the Moors weren't there. To feel that up close was a treat.

Inbar Bakal is a little nervous about the trip to Israel she's making this month. Sure, it's been three years since she's been there. But it's where the Tel Aviv native grew up, where she learned and performed music both in classical choirs and folk contexts, and where she served in the military -- two years as an intelligence officer in the anti-aircraft division (the first female to hold that position) and two doing international relations.

Six years living in the U.S., though, has brought some changes, she says. To her perspective on her identity. And to her music.

On the former, she returns with some deeper appreciation and a sense that maybe she needed to be outside Israeli life for a bit to realize how much a part of her it is.

"Being a Jewish person in Israel, I was taking it for granted," she says, even with coming from a mixed heritage of an Iraqi-born father and a Yemenite mother. "You're not really thinking about your identity. Holidays are holidays. You're with your family. Everyone around you is Jewish. Coming here it was very much, 'OK, I'm without my family, without my friends. How do I fit in my identity?' And finding that was important to me."

Svetlana and Zoran and their kids, Emilija and Lazar, live in New Jersey. But we met them a couple of years ago on a flight from London to Belgrade as they were heading for the holidays back to where they were born and raised, the small city of Cacak.

They requested -- no, insisted -- we alter our plans to join them there for Orthodox Christmas, which led to one of our best travel adventures ever, with a day trip up to ancient monasteries, through a Muslim town on the edge of Kosovo, all capped off with a fabulous feast of a home-smoked pig, enough sides and sweets to have killed the pig in the first place, and coffee strong enough to bring the pig back to life.

It's the place of their roots, but it's been changing -- at least on the map in the wake of devastating wars and at-times uneasy peace. On this trip they were going to Serbia. The last time they had visited, the country was the dual nation of Serbia and Montenegro before the latter broke off as an independent nation. And, of course, when they were growing up it was all part of Yugoslavia, along with what is now Bosnia, Croatia and Slovenia.

As Luaka Bop celebrates 21 years of bringing crucial music from far-flung locales to mainstream global attention -- sounds from Brazil to Bollywood, from Africa to Okinawa -- with a compilation CD, 'Twenty First Century Twenty First Year,' label president Yale Evelev wants to get a jump on the next 21. To that end, he's been out in the field tracking down fresh, undiscovered sounds from intriguing cultures. On one trek not long ago, he found himself having to navigate some odd circumstances just to experience the music at all. It was an event shrouded in mystery.

"We were supposed to see all these bands playing at a school," he says. "But there weren't any bands playing. We kept going in and out of the room where it was supposed to be. There was a poster announcing it with the names of the bands. Tara, my associate who was with me, at some point says, 'There's a noise coming from behind that door.' So we went in and there were all these people there, singing along, dancing. And it was so great! An experience that was so positive. And we signed the band."

The seeds for the Kronos Quartet's new album, 'Floodplain,' an exploration of the rips and seams of Middle Eastern, North African, Balkan and Central Asian cultures through the distinct Kronos artistic lens, started to sprout a decade ago in a Beirut marketplace. The group was there to perform concerts, and founder-violinist David Harrington asked friend and sometime collaborator Ali Jihad Racy, who was joining Kronos for these shows, to take him music shopping.

"He took me to a record store," Harrington reminisces. "I just wanted to get a sense of Lebanese music and basically he helped me pick out 30 or 40 representative albums. And in going through these later, I heard this incredible son sung by Fairuz, when she was a very young woman. It blew me away."

The song, 'Wa Habibi,' (a video of a later Fairuz performance is here) tantalized and mystified Harrington with repeated listening.