As usual, it’s never possible to cover everything in our year-end lists, as we attempted in last week’s edition of Fast Forward Weekly. Accordingly, plenty of our lists neglected world music, and as that scene — if you can call it that — goes, 2010 was another border-bending year, as big-name acts from America to Angola stormed the thresholds of gospel and ghetto-beat to claim the patchworked flag of intercontinental grooviness.

Embodying the melting-pot heat of NOLA’s indomitable music scene, power jazz ensemble Galactic answered the call and rose to the occasion, offering Ya-Ka-May, a rich audio-stew of hip hop, blues, funk, swing, rap, rock and electronica served up Cajun street-style with a plastic fork. Meanwhile, Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy produced Mavis Staples’s watermark album You Are Not Alone and elevating the spiritual singer’s already legendary status to that of divine entity.

The rhythms of Africa carry on in the heartbeat of Bassekou Youkate and Ngoni Ba, whose I Speak Fula (Sub Pop) showcased superior guitar and choral arrangements that deserve the same attention as the soundtrack to the critically acclaimed Broadway production of Fela! Likewise, Konono No.1 and the Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars both produced highly entertaining and culturally compelling albums in the form of Assume Crash Position (Crammed Discs) and Rise & Shine. In contrast to Konono’s car alternator magnet microphones, a healthy dose of modernity was injected into the genre thanks to the tech-savvy beat-making of Vancouver’s Delhi 2 Dublin, whose Planet Electric makes a good case for introducing the likes of Infected Mushroom and Gogol Bordello into the genre.

Precedent-setting festivals such as the Festival International de Jazz de Montreal and our own Calgary Folk Music Festival confirm the increasing flexibility of the definition of a “world” or “jazz” musician, and evidently the audiences drawn by said musicians are just as unpredictable. Take, for instance, the nostalgia of Cumbia Beat Vol.1: Experimental Guitar-Driven Tropical Sounds From Peru 1966-1976 and compare it to The World Ends / Afro Rock Psychedelia in 1970s Nigeria (Soundway), both multi-artist compilations that sound as relevant today as a cassette carved from one of Kanye’s front teeth. Oh, you didn’t hear that one? I believe the MP3 is available on Wikileaks.

Anyway, consider the rest of the planet’s perspective on Woodpigeon. And wouldn’t it, too, qualify Die Stadt Muzikanten (Boompa) as Canadiana, and therefore “world” music, just as we revel in the exoticness of Balkan Beat Box and its Blue Eyed Black Boy (Nat. Geo./Crammed Discs)? Regardless of how you slice it, there’s something to be said for cracking a Red Stripe along with a dose of Dubmatix’s System Shakedown (Renegade Rocker), Darryl Jenifer’s In Search of a Black Judas (ROIR) or Capelton’s I-Ternal Fire (VP). As Peruvian-influenced Canucks Pacifika confirm on their muse-ical Supermagique (Six Degrees), world music is the kitchen party of the millennium — because if you’re standing at the centre of the universe you’re “Close to Everything.”