A Continental Search for New Sounds : Pop music: Record executive Chris Blackwell is hoping to do for African music what he did for reggae.

Chris Blackwell, the record executive whose championing of Bob Marley in the ‘70s helped bring reggae music to international prominence, is accustomed to taking the long view in developing pop artists.

Along with a line of major rock performers stretching from Traffic to U2 to PJ Harvey, Blackwell’s Island Records was the home for Marley and the first wave of Jamaican artists 20 years ago when reggae was virtually unknown outside the Caribbean.

Now he’s attempting to start the same process with African music, bankrolling “Africa Fete,” a 13-city U.S. concert tour that arrives at the House of Blues on Friday.

Blackwell, who is in his mid-50s, is aware that the obstacles confronting African music here will take time to overcome. Among them: a lack of commercial radio or MTV exposure, and the fact that the artists sing in African languages or Creole French.

“Reggae also was pretty much a foreign language when it first came on the scene, but the difference was that there was a large Jamaican population in England, where I started Island,” says Blackwell, who proposed “Africa Fete” to PolyGram N.V., then Island’s distributor, in 1992. “There is not that same base in African music.

“When I went to PolyGram with the idea, I said I didn’t think it would start to make sense financially for five years. But in four or five years, I felt it would be almost like a franchise situation, in a way how Reggae Sunsplash (an annual concert tour) became bigger than any particular reggae act.”

Following last year’s debut, this second edition of “Africa Fete” is headlined by Kassav, the Paris-based group whose sophisticated zouk sound conquered the Caribbean in the ‘80s and exerted a strong influence on many African musicians in the French capital.

Fete returnee Angelique Kidjo’s dance-floor-friendly style is grounded in the music of her native Benin, while Ziskakan, a group from Isle Reunion off the east coast of Africa, makes its U.S. debut with an atmospheric sound.

“Africa Fete’s” small-scale, grass-roots approach contrasts with the other package tour featuring world music artists that hit the United States this summer. The WOMAD (World of Music, Arts and Dance) Festival, a full-day event headlined by Peter Gabriel that includes workshops and two stages presenting more than a dozen artists from around the world, played a series of East Coast dates last month.

But two West Coast shows, with Gabriel replaced by Primus on the bill, were canceled. Founded by Gabriel in 1980, WOMAD is firmly established as a festival event throughout Europe, but its large scale apparently still requires an artist with Gabriel’s drawing power to be commercially viable in the United States (last year’s show, with Gabriel, drew 20,000 fans to Cal State Dominguez Hills).

Blackwell, who has met with Gabriel to explore ways of working together, intends to keep his focus on African music and avoid becoming dependent on an artist’s drawing power with “Africa Fete.”

“Peter Gabriel can do it every year because he’s Peter Gabriel and his name and his own performance will be able to pull people in and introduce them (to the music),” he says.

“I would have to look every year for another artist to head it and then everything hangs on who is the artist you find. My route is going to take longer but hopefully it will be more solid.”

Blackwell borrowed the name “Africa Fete” from a weeklong celebration of African music and culture in Paris founded by Mamadou Konte in 1978. He hired Konte as a consultant, and cites the annual New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival as an inspiration.

“Africa Fete” isn’t solely a vehicle for promoting Blackwell’s own artists. Kassav, for instance, records for Sony Music’s TriStar label. (The group’s presence also fulfilled another Blackwell goal--having a group from the Western Hemisphere on the bill.)

Island’s releases of African artists through its Mango subsidiary began with King Sunny Ade’s “Juju Music” album in 1982, but Blackwell only now feels the time is right for “Africa Fete.”

“I felt we now had on Island and Mango four or five real world-beating artists,” he explains. “There were also enough people on other labels now where one could put together an ‘Africa Fete’ and not perpetually have the same show going out every year.”

Blackwell isn’t expecting an immediate sales impact from “Africa Fete”--in fact, he doesn’t plan to measure the commercial success of African artists by the usual pop standards.

“I see it like an act, starting small, and I’m hoping it will build up,” Blackwell says. “My sense is that one would market African music much more the way you would aim to market jazz, because it’s really on a musicianship basis. I’m not saying we’re going to be selling millions of records of any individual artist, but I think we can reach the kind of market a very successful jazz artist can sell.”

* “Africa Fete” plays Friday at the House of Blues, 8430 Sunset Blvd., 9 p.m. $22.50 . (213) 650-1451 .