Andy Kershaw returning to BBC Radio 3

Andy Kershaw is to return to BBC Radio 3 in the autumn for a new world music series linked to the BBC One programme Human Planet.

The DJ - who returns to the airwaves after a three-year gap due to some well-publicised personal problems - will present Music Planet, which Radio 3 describes as its "most significant and ambitious world music project ever".

Joined by co-host Lucy Duran, Kershaw will travel to the same locations as in the Human Planet anthropological series, which focuses on man's ingenuity as a species.

Music Planet will showcase the distinct music from destinations such as Switzerland, Peru, Madagascar, Kenya, Greenland, Mali and the Solomon Islands.

Highlights of the series will include voices of the shamans of Mongolia and Greenland's 'katajja', a contest between two women that involves throat singing and animal cry imitating.

In a statement, Kershaw said: "I am thrilled to be back on Radio 3 working again with a team of bright, imaginative, enthusiastic people who also happen to be dear friends.

"Nowhere on Earth is safe again from my attentions. So far, we have, literally, hacked through mountain jungles to bring Music Planet listeners extraordinary music from some of the world's most isolated locations. And I cheerily risked incineration at a rocket festival in Thailand to take our Radio 3 audience into the fiery thick of the action."

He added: "I have been even to Switzerland, the last country in which I expected to find myself. And, if listeners thought that yodelling was valuable only as a device to evict stragglers at the end of a party, or as a sure-fire way to secure an international novelty hit in 1956, the music we recorded in the Alps will - like so much to be heard in Music Planet - shatter such preconceptions and, simultaneously, delight and exhilarate."

Music Planet producer James Parkin said: "What makes Music Planet so exciting for me is that one minute you're listening to Cambodian hip-hop, and the next Swiss yodelling recorded in the Alps. And this is the music that people are making right now, all over the world, recorded especially for Radio 3."

Human Planet and Music Planet will be broadcast in the autumn on BBC One and BBC Radio 3 respectively.

Kershaw has not worked for the BBC since 2007 due to major upheavals in his private life, which led to him being jailed in 2008 for breaking a restraining order that prevented him from seeing Juliette Banner, the mother of his two children.