World Beat Gives Respite From Fossilized Rock : Pop music: The eclectic blend of international music is attracting a growing number of fans who want to expand their musical horizons.

It’s Sunday night at the Kennel Club, and a couple hundred people are dancing their feet off to a song written 300 years ago by a Yemenite rabbi.

The song is “I’m Nin’ Alu,” written by Rabbi Shalom Shabazy and resurrected in 1988 by Israeli pop singer Ofra Haza, daughter of Yemenite immigrants.

Disc jockey Doug Wendt then delights the crowd with the latest hits from the French group Les Negresses Vertes, the South African mixed-race group Johnny Clegg and Savuka, reggae-funk music from the Bronx, Lambada from Brazil’s Kaoma, Algerian Rai music from Cheb Khaled, and a variety of other tunes from around the world.

This is world beat, the rephrasing of traditional folk music in a dance-pop mode. A music without geographic bounds, it is attracting a growing audience of people who are tired of fossilized American and British rock ‘n’ roll and who are hungry for music which stretches their horizons.

“World beat is a dignified world pop. It’s pop music that crosses all race barriers and age barriers,” says Wendt, host of a nationally syndicated world beat radio show. On a typical night at the Kennel Club, he spins music from 40 different countries.

Peter Gabriel and Paul Simon have helped increase the popularity of world beat by recording and touring with groups like South Africa’s Ladysmith Black Mambazo and Senegal’s Youssou N’Dour.

Gabriel founded the Real World label, which specializes in world music, and former Talking Heads leader David Byrne fronts a 14-piece Latin orchestra for his latest album, “Rei Momo.”

Not to be left out of the stampede, record clubs are offering world beat categories, highlighting groups like the Gipsy Kings, a flamenco ensemble whose 1989 album of the same name has sold more than 500,000 copies. Billboard magazine inaugurated a world music chart earlier this year, currently topped by Clegg’s “Cruel, Crazy, Beautiful World.”

VH-1, the adult version of MTV, has a weekly show spotlighting world beat artists, and Radio Nova in Paris has become one of France’s top five stations with a world beat format.

“The world is getting smaller and people are adapting more universal values, and that’s reflected in music,” said Mike Simon, producer of VH-1’s New Visions program, which profiles a world beat artist once a week. “Borders are becoming less important, and music parallels that.”

Haza’s “I’m Nin’ Alu” has totally ignored geographical and musical borders.

The song was featured on “Fifty Gates of Wisdom,” a 1985 album of traditional Yemenite folk songs sung by Haza in biblical Hebrew, Arabic and ancient Aramaic. The percussion is produced on gasoline cans, which Yemenite Jews substituted for banned musical instruments.