Songlines magazine has just posted its list of 50 Great Moments in World Music, updating a list originally printed in the March 2008 issue of the magazine, and included on the list are memorable moments from several artists familiar to readers of the Nonesuch Journal.

Coming in at No. 9 is the beginning of Buena Vista Social Club. In 1996, a group of Mali's finest musicians were due to fly into Havana for a speculative collaboration with some of Cuba's most brilliant singers and instrumentalists. For reasons that have never been made clear, the Malians never arrived. A very different album, co-produced by Nick Gold and Ry Cooder, was recorded and later released by World Circuit and Nonesuch Records: Buena Vista Social Club, featuring the likes of Compay Segundo, Rúben González, Ibrahim Ferrer, Eliades Ochoa, and Omara Portuondo. (The originally envisioned Malian-Cuban project was later revisited for the 2010 album AfroCubism.)

Also on the list is the 2009 launch of the Songlines Music Awards, whose inaugural class of winners included Amadou & Mariam for Best Group and Rokia Traoré for Best Artist. Later winners include Fatoumata Diawara (Newcomer of the Year, 2012), Kronos Quartet (Cross-Cultural Collaboration of the Year, 2015), and Toumani & Sidiki Diabaté (Best Group of the Year, 2015).

Taraf de Haïdouks, a band of Gypsy musicians from the small Romanian village of Clejani, southwest of Bucharest, and their discovery by Belgian music fans Stepháne Karo and Michel Winter after the fall of dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu in 1989, are on the list as well. The band would go on to sign with the European record label Crammed Discs and made their US recording debut a decade later with their 1999 self-titled Nonesuch album, featuring the best of three previous European releases, compiled in part by Kronos Quartet's David Harrington.

Speaking of Kronos Quartet, the group's seminal 1992 album Pieces of Africa is on the list too. The album, which Songlines describes as "one of the best examples of classical meets African music," would become a cross-cultural and commercial landmark as the first album to top both the classical and world music Billboard charts. Songlines pegs the moment to July 1984, when Harrington first heard music by Kevin Volans, who would soon write White Man Sleeps for the group. The piece, along with others written or arranged for the group by African composers in the succeeding years, would form the repertoire of Pieces of Africa.

The Gipsy Kings' hit song, "Bamboleo," off the group's self-titled debut album, makes the list. The song and the album, released on Nonesuch in 1988, was both a cultural phenomenon and a pop sensation for the band, whose members hail from the gypsy settlements in the south of France.

British DJ Andy Kershaw's discovery of a recording by legendary Malian guitarist Ali Farka Touré, in a Paris record shop in 1986, is on the list. Kershaw played the recording and other programs with Touré on the BBC, and World Circuit went on to make several albums with the guitarist, released in North America via Nonesuch, including Grammy winners In the Heart of the Moon and Ali and Toumani (both with kora master Toumani Diabaté).

Another World Circuit/Nonesuch Records release on the list is Orchestra Baobab's Pirates Choice—the 2001 reissue of the band's much sought-after 1982 debut—and the reformation of the then-defunct band that followed its release. Songlines places the Senegalese group among those "great bands from the golden age of African music" that fans discover after the band is no more. "This was the case with Orchestra Baobab who a new generation of African music fans discovered through ... Pirates Choice." Happily, the band was reformed, recorded two new albums, Specialist in All Styles and Made in Dakar, and continues to perform.

Youssou N'Dour, who produced Specialist in All Styles for the newly reformed Orchestra Baobab, is on the list himself for the live premiere of his 2004 Nonesuch album, Egypt, at the Festival of World Sacred Music in Fes. "It was a statement of a tolerant Muslim vision and a daring pan-African fusion of Arabic and West African music, a collaboration between Youssou and the eclectic and adventurous Egyptian composer Fathy Salama, on stage directing an eclectic collection of instruments," says Songlines, and of all of N'Dour's albums, "it’s his most beautiful and visionary."

Caetano Veloso and his fellow tropicalistas share a spot on the list reserved for the beginning of Tropicália at the MPB Festival in 1967. "As important and inflammatory as Bob Dylan going electric was a similar move by the tropicalistas in Brazil, a young generation including Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil and Os Mutantes," Songlines asserts. Veloso made his Nonesuch Records debut with the release of his self-titled album in the United States in 1986. Among his many succeeding releases is the 1994 album Tropicália 2 with Gil, which celebrated 25 years of their artistic/personal friendship.

The recording of Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares makes Songlines' list of Great Moments in World Music as well. Founded by Philip Koutev as the Bulgarian State Radio and Television Female Vocal Choir in 1952, the group began as a way to showcase the folk music of Bulgaria as well as commission new pieces by top Bulgarian composers. The group received much wider recognition with the Nonesuch release of two anthologies of the group in the late 1980s, with some tracks dating back to the group's earliest years. The group's second Nonesuch release, Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares, Vol. II, earned a Grammy Award for Best Traditional Folk Recording and led to an extensive world tour.

You can read much more in the complete list at songlines.co.uk.

To pick up a copy of any of these albums, head to iTunes, and, in the United States, the Nonesuch Store.