Jerrold Northrop Moore, who has died aged 90, was an American academic who devoted much of his career to the British composer Sir Edward Elgar (1857-1934), sweeping up the biographical facts in the illuminating Elgar:
Reading the correspondence pages from the early 1940s is to be genuinely moved by not only the absolutely essential nature of music in the lives of so many soldiers, sailors and airmen, but how The Gramophone had created its own tight-knit community
Interest in recorded music, led by DJs and "crate-diggers", has shone a light on some fascinating popular music genres over the past 20-odd years. Soundway Records, set up by Miles Claret in the UK, released its first compilation in 2002 on Afrobeat, funk and fusion from Ghana in the 1970s, and since then has released compilations on African, Caribbean, Latin and Asian music (mainly focusing on the period from 1950s to 1980s, when popular genres were being created by newly independent countries).