INTERNATIONAL BANDSTAND : From Afro-Beat to Zouk, Third-World Rhythms Are Creating a Revolution in Pop Music

EACH WEEKDAY around 12:30, after finishing my radio show, I spend an hour or so opening packages of albums sent to me by record companies. It seems a bit like Christmas, and I am overwhelmed by the variety of music pouring in from Africa, Latin America, Asia, the Middle East. Colorful jackets announce recordings of rai , zouk , bhangra , soukous , juju , qawwali and sounds from all over the world.

Good local record stores these days are filled with the music of faraway places, and more and more of us seem to be accepting the invitation to become armchair travelers. Listeners who might otherwise mistake lambada for some kind of disease won’t hesitate to buy pop star David Byrne’s new album, “Rei Momo,” and to discover the hottest new Brazilian dance style.

It wasn’t always like this. I remember, years ago, playing hooky from UCLA classes and heading over to the Ethnomusicology Library in Schoenberg Hall. At that time, a paltry array of “world music” was available, and only through tiny labels such as Ethnic Folkways, Smithsonian, Library of Congress, Ocora and Nonesuch Explorer. It was decidedly lo-fi stuff, wrapped in stiff jackets with liner notes that read like scholarly tomes. I sat quietly among serious, somewhat nerdish students listening through cheap headphones to field recordings swarming with insect and birds.

But in the past several years, pop artists have begun to explore ethnic music with a feverish intensity, and increasing numbers of listeners, seeking a more eclectic diet than straight-ahead rock ‘n’ roll, have become fans of so-called World Beat music.

The terms World Music and World Beat were coined in the early 1980s, when record-company executives met in London to figure out how to market the musical melange. “We were getting a lot of letters from people who, after hearing the music on the radio, were wondering where to find it,” recalls Roger Armstrong, co-director of Globestyle Records in London. “So we decided to call it World Music to indicate to both retailers and consumers where you could find it in shops.”

Globestyle has been a leader in the World Music movement, and among the 50 albums in its current catalogue are Sudanese pop, Colombian cumbias and tarab music from Madagascar. The company launched the career of Israeli superstar Ofra Haza, whose hit “Im Nin Alu,” a seductive rendition of a Yemenite prayer in Hebrew topped the German pop charts for nine weeks last summer--proof that music transcends political boundaries.

Yemenite songs sung in Hebrew on German radio? That gives you an idea of the range of World Music, which, if you need a loose definition, is simply that comes to us from other cultures. And World Beat? It’s a modern version of the same music, studio-produced and rhythmically inclined. Unlike the recordings made by ethnomusicologists who wandered into rural villages, microphones in hand, these are citified sounds, filtered through several decades of urbanization in the Third World. Much of this music is made in recording studios, often in London and Paris, reflecting the cities’ growing multiethnic populations. World Music has several important subtexts, too: It is about the planet getting smaller, the rise of global communication and the introduction of technology to Third World cultures.

World Beat reflects decades of cultural interweaving. During the 1950s, for example, about 200 Cuban 78 r.p.m. recordings made their way to Africa, greatly influencing music there. And the spread of audio cassettes throughout the world sent American rock and soul music--James Brown, Little Richard and Elvis Presley--to Africa. “We’re talking about a gigantic melting pot and not only James Brown, Santana, Stevie Wonder and other groups that made American R & B popular in Africa,” says Armstrong. “On the east coast of Africa--in Mombasa, Zanzibar and Madagascar--you’ll find that Egyptians and Indian film sound tracks have had a strong influence on the music.”

Then, in the 1980s, native musics began flowing back to America as a number of Western superstars started playing with and fusing foreign music with rock. The group Talking Heads, currently on sabbatical, used African rhythms on their 1980 album “Remain in Light,” before most Americans had heard any African music. Paul Simon helped popularize South African music on his Grammy-winning “Graceland.” And the range of influences keeps widening. British rock star Kate Bush uses Bulgarian songs on her new record, “The Sensual World.” Peter Gabriel, who spurred the trend, used source music from Pakistan, Senegal, Egypt, Ethiopia, Armenia and elsewhere in his score for Martin Scorcese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ.” Simon is working with South American musicians for his new record, which is likely to bring a larger audience to Latin American music.

Byrne deserves a good deal of credit for the recent wave of Brazilian music seducing America, surpassing the popularity of ‘60s bossa nova. He has produced two fine collections of Brazilian music for Warner’s Sire label, Brazil Classics Volume I and II, and says he’s fascinated by the musical hybrids he’s discovered. “On the first Brazilian compilation I did,” he says, “you have Brazilians who grew up listening to Brazilian music and the Beatles.” That kind of cultural mixing, he says, produces a vitality much American music lacks.

“A lot of rock ‘n’ roll has become a kind of product, a business. You really have to wade through a lot to find something that seems to have soul to it,” says Byrne, who toured the United States and Europe with one of New York’s best Latin bands as well as the top Brazilian group Os Paralamas. But Africans and Latin Americans “are now making their own music with these Western influences inside. What we are getting back from them is a kind of rock ‘n’ roll that’s been changed into something else that’s fresher. It gives me the kind of charge that I got when I first heard rock ‘n’ roll years ago that I’m not getting any more.”

Byrne, in turn, is taking that new music and melding it with his own. His 1989 solo album, “Rei Momo”--”Carnival King”--is named after the person chosen to ride atop a principal float during Rio’s Carnaval Parade. It is a celebration of Latin dance music, blending Perez Prado-style cha-cha-chas, sambas, cumbias and meringue with Byrne’s funny and trenchant lyrics.

“It’s like the dance of chromosomes as they divide and recombine, creating new hybrid life forms,” Byrne says of the music he’s listening to and making. “What emerges will inevitably be the music and cultural forms of the ‘90s.”

Fueling the rise of this rich international fusion sound are some nonmusical trends. “People in the First World have more curiosity about what’s happening in the rest of the world now,” says Jumbo Vanrenen, label manager of Mango Records in London. “People are traveling more, and you see lots of things on TV. After reggae, it was African music, and now people want music from all over.”

When many major recording companies trimmed their budgets and artist rosters during the latter half of 1979 at the onset of the record-industry recession, independent labels took up the slack. They helped build a market for alternative music and often had A & R (artists and repertoire, that is, scouting) departments that had keener eyes than the major labels. They also started licensing foreign records for U.S. distribution--one way World Music could be brought here on limited budgets. Today the majors are scrambling to catch up.

Another factor that has helped World Music over the past decade has been public radio, which has exposed its listeners to music commercial radio would have ignored. Exposure helped spawn affection, and a relatively new show, “Afropop,” has become one of National Public Radio’s most popular programs.

Thinking back to my days in the UCLA library, several recordings stand out as precursors of sorts to what we are now hearing. “Drums of Passion,” on Columbia, recorded in New York in the late ‘60s by Nigerian drummer Michael Babatunde Olatunji, has powerful, hypnotic rhythms based on Nigerian folk songs. Its rhythms, based on Nigerian folk songs, are powerful and hypnotic. “Missa Luba,” on Phillips, features a Congolese choir organized by a Belgian missionary churns the forceful yet gracefully swaying native music of the time. “Music From the Morning of the World,” on Nonesuch Explorer, contains a ritual exorcistic Balinese dance called the Ketjak , or “Monkey Chant.” It’s no surprise that these epochal--and wonderful--records have remained in print for so many years. The surprise is in the hunger for such music that deepened in the past decade.

WHILE PINNING down the evolution of popular music is a slippery thing, I believe a breakthrough came in 1981 with a fascinating collection by Byrne and Brian Eno called “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts,” named after a novel by Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola. The two pop musicians combined rock rhythms, excerpts from radio broadcasts, songs by popular Egyptian singer Sara Tewfik and Lebanese mountain singer Dunya Yusin, creating unusual sound portraits that bridged many cultures. Byrne went on to use African rhythms in his music for Twyla Tharp’s dance production “The Catherine Wheel.” Eno, for his part, sought to use the recording studio like a painter’s palette and has since become one of pop music’s most sought-after producers, making recordings with Irish mega-stars U2 and, in Russian, with the oddball Soviet pop band Zvuki Mu (“Cow’s Milk”).

Although the Byrne-Eno collaboration was influential, undoubtedly the most dramatic release ushering in World Beat was King Sunny Ade’s “Juju Music,” released by Island Records’ Mango label in 1982. This was something different: African music, but pop as well, with lots of guitars--even lots of slide guitars--and very danceable. It was produced by Frenchman Martin Meissonnier, who recently produced a hit album of rai , pop music from Algeria, whose its hit single, “La Camel,” rode high on the French charts this past summer. Juju music fused rock, country-western twang and traditional apala rhythms of the Yoruba tribe of West Africa. (It’s no accident that the country-western twang of pedal steel guitars highlights King Sunny’s music: Country singer Jim Reeves, he says, is one of his heroes.) Island Records supported the album with a world tour that brought the band to the Hollywood Palladium in early 1983. To hear talking drums, pedal steel guitar and songs about peace, love and happiness sung in Yoruba was a heavenly delight, and the crowd lapped it up. Juju music had catchy vocals about peace, love and happiness, great rhythms and contained songs that weren’t too long for radio airplay. Other record companies took note when “Juju Music” sold hundreds of thousands of copies.

The recent surge in interest in World Music has revived some early ‘80s projects. Peter Gabriel, for instance, is once more championing WOMAD, or World of Music and Dance, a group he founded in 1980 after becoming fascinated with music from other cultures. “I was on a train one night listening to a cassette of some African music,” he recollects, “and I thought, ‘Well, I think this is some of the most exciting stuff I’ve ever heard. I’m sure there must be a lot of people out there who would feel as I do if they could hear this music.”

WOMAD held its first festival in Bristol, England, in 1981, featuring performances by Burundi drummers, Sufi vocalist Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Gambian kora player Alhaji Bai Konte, calypso singer Mighty Sparrow, German experimentalist Holger Czukay, Who member Pete Townshend and the rock group Simple Minds. The idea was to introduce a rock-oriented audience to music from other lands. WOMAD was a popular success but a financial disaster.

Gabriel used the money from his 1986 album “So”--which has sold more than 5 million copies--to back WOMAD and start a new label and production facility, Real World. So far Real World has produced several excellent albums, including a hot Cuban group called Orquesta Reve, an album of gawwali songs--the music of Sufism, the mystical Islamic sect--by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, as well as an album of soukous dance music by Zairean superstar Tabu Ley Rochereau. Gabriel also championed the career of Senegalese singer Youssou N’Dour, with whom he shared the spotlight on the 1988 Amnesty International Human Rights Now World tour.

“The audience,” says Gabriel, “is definitely on the increase. I remember when we started WOMAD you couldn’t find the records at all. Now all the good record stores have World Music racks.”

How big can World Music get? Globestyle’s Armstrong sees the past as prologue. “If you’d been in America in the early ‘50s, when rhythm-and-blues music was known as ‘race music,’ you’d have looked at the charts and seen Johnny Ray, Kay Starr, Perry Como. If you’d told someone then that this ‘race music’ was going to be the backbone of Western pop music, selling billions of records, that person would have said that you were crazy,” says Armstrong. “Black rhythm-and-blues music has been the biggest influence on American and European pop music. Likewise with World Music, you can see its influence begin to take hold.”

The most obvious obstacle facing World Music in the United States is the language barrier. While fans in the rest of the world dance and sing happily to American pop--in English--audiences here have traditionally been reluctant to accept music sung in other languages. Byrne, doesn’t believe this is insurmountable: “The audiences here will grow. It may take some time, but it’s probably going to work the same way as it has in Europe and Japan.”

Danny Kahn, director of artist development for Elektra/Nonesuch Records in New York, whose current roster includes Brazilian singer Caetano Veloso, the Icelandic group the Sugarcubes and folksinger Tracy Chapman, goes further. “People in America are starting to appreciate music on very musical terms, how music makes them feel,” he says. “You know right from the gut when you relate to music that way. In the past, people identified more with songwriting than with instrumental music. But lyrics are only a part of what music is. Part of the new interest in World Music involves people trusting their emotions more and not getting hung up on always having to understand the words. This new interest in other music reflects a maturing of our society and what music means to it.”

And there’s one nice dividend: surprise. Now, when I rifle through those stacks of records in the studio, I never know what will turn up. An Indian rap record showed up here the other day. Who knows what will be next.

A World Beat Glossary

Bhangra--Indian and Pakistani dance music with disco rhythms, sampling from Indian film sound tracks. Popular in London. Domestic releases include Ashwin Batish’s “Sitar Power” (Shanachie).

Juju--Fusion of Western and traditional Nigerian music from the Yoruba people. Best-known artists: King Sunny Ade, Chief Commander Ebeneezer Obey.

Lambada--Fusion of meringue and salsa from the Bahia area of Northeast Brazil. African and Caribbean influences. Recent hit in Europe: “Lambada” by the group Kaoma.

Qawwali--Vocal music of Sufism, the mystical sect of Islam. Intense and rhapsodic. Features tablas and harmoniums, but lead by vocal members. Best known singer: Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.

Rai--Algerian pop music voicing rebellion against moral restrictions of Islamic fundamentalism. Most top rai artists are based in Paris, where they have the freedom to record their hedonistic music. Two top-selling rai records: Chaba Fadela’s “You Are Mine” (Virgin) and Cheb Khaled/Safy Boutella’s “Kutche” (Capitol/Intuition).

Soukous--Contemporary dance music from Kinshasa, Zaire. Popular bands: Tabu Ley Rochereau, Papa Wemba, Kanda Bongo Man.

Zouk--Contemporary dance music from the islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe. Best-known group: Kassav.