POP MUSIC : Miami’s Sound Machine : By mixing pop and Latin rhythms, Emilio Estefan hopes to make his fledging record label, Crescent Moon, the Motown of the Spanish-language set.

Emilio Estefan, husband of pop star Gloria Estefan and the creator of the Miami Sound Machine, is at the center of a world he has made, a combination of slick pop enterprise and family hacienda.

The reception area at the Crescent Moon complex looks like a Pedro Almodovar set gone tropically amok, with curlicued purple couches and silver walls, perhaps to complement the row of cases displaying his wife’s gold and platinum records. The receptionist, a high school friend of Gloria’s, is chatting to her on the phone in Spanish.

In one studio, Emilio, in baggy shorts, flip-flops and silver earring, is working with two engineers on a recording of a new song by Gloria that she’ll sing at the closing ceremonies of the Summer Olympics in Atlanta.

During an interview in Estefan’s huge, artfully decorated office, an employee serves thick, sweet Cuban coffee in tiny cups. Emilio’s cellular phone rings just once during the 90-minute conversation. It’s Gloria again, asking him to pick up some medicine for their baby, Emily, who is teething.

“Si, mi vida,” says Miami’s Cuban music mogul. “I’ll stop at Eckerd’s.”

Although Estefan has been promoting Latin music heavily lately, he says he doesn’t believe that pure Latin music will enter the mainstream. But that doesn’t mean it can’t make major inroads.

“It can happen with someone like Gloria or Jon Secada because they grew up here. They don’t have an accent.”

He chuckles over the sound OF? his own thick vowels.

“Now, I have an accent. Gloria says it’s very sexy, don’t lose it. And I say BS, there’s no way I can lose it.”

And if you can’t lose it, use it.

“At the time Berry Gordy did Motown, it was a new sound,” Estefan says. “In the ‘90s, the world is discovering a lot of new music. I think what I’m doing is fresh because I grew up in two cultures. I have the best of Latin music, and the best of pop music.

“Growing up in Miami we listened to [Cuban salsa singer] Celia Cruz and at the same time we listened to the Rolling Stones. If we’re going to be big, we should always come with our own sound.”

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It’s no accident that Estefan refers to Gordy. When he launched his Sony Music-backed label Crescent Moon in Miami in January 1994, Estefan said he wanted to do for Latin music what Gordy did for black music with Motown, and the Miami press and musical pundits immediately latched on to the comparison.

Estefan believes his background gives him a unique taste for both cultures. “We were first-generation immigrants. I call it the Miami sound because I saw that there’s going to be only one generation of this kind of fusion.”

Although few people outside Miami or the music industry know of him, it was Estefan who shaped the career and music of Gloria Estefan and, more recently, Secada. He’s an old-style star-maker involved in everything from songwriting to record production to helping choose the clothes his artists wear onstage.

He built his success on mainstream pop with a Latin flavor: the Latin percussion in early Miami Sound Machine hits such as “Dr. Beat” and “Conga” and Secada’s extravagantly emotional R&B; ballads in Spanish and English.

As Gloria’s success grew through the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, though, the Latin elements in her music diminished in favor of a smooth, mainstream pop sound. But then in 1993, with their commercial track record firmly established, the Estefans took the opportunity to return to their Cuban roots with the album “Mi Tierra” (My Land), which was followed last fall by “Abriendo Puertas” (Opening Doors), a melange of Latin American styles.

And while Emilio continues to insist that Crescent Moon will do all kinds of music, the label’s initial releases (after a salsa record from Puerto Rican singer Cheito) have been traditional Cuban, from 77-year-old mambo progenitor Cachao and the trendily androgynous guajira (country) singer Albita.

“He’s really making an effort to expose [Latin] music to a larger audience,” says John Lannert, Latin and Caribbean music editor for Billboard magazine. “He’s the main ambassador of Latin music for non-Latins.”

At 42, Estefan has built a musical mini-empire. Estefan Enterprises, which employs more than 45 people, includes the Crescent Moon Studios in the upscale Miami suburb of Coral Gables--a self-contained operation with its own songwriters (the Estefans prominent among them), engineers, producers, musicians and publishing company.

There are the new business offices in South Beach, where they run international concert tours and marketing campaigns in two languages. Also on South Beach is their retro-Cuban-chic restaurant, Lario’s on the Beach, plus an Art Deco hotel with another restaurant.

The couple are a sort of unofficial king and queen of Miami, the hometown Cuban kids made very, very good. They have used their success to be conscientious public figures and civic cheerleaders, producing such events as an enormous fund-raising concert after Hurricane Andrew, and a prayer vigil for raft-sailing Cuban refugees at the Orange Bowl with a world satellite uplink. Even last September’s accident in which a jet skier was killed in a collision with the Estefans’ boat (the fault was determined to be the skier’s) had no negative effect on the couple’s reputation in the community.

Their family-oriented and down-to-earth demeanor endears them to Miami and its nearly 700,000 Cubans--who make up about half of the city’s population. Emilio rides a bike from their Star Island mansion to work in Miami Beach and gets his hair cut at the same Little Havana barber shop he has gone to for years. Gloria still goes grocery shopping. They pop into Lario’s for dinner.

But it was Emilio’s musical and business acumen that persuaded Sony to give him the Crescent Moon deal, which not only includes a six-figure salary, but also the title of president of Artist & Talent Development, giving him complete artistic authority.

“We believe in Emilio as a talent source,” says David Glew, chairman of Sony’s Epic Records, Gloria’s label. “We believe that a lot of music is going to come out of Miami in the ‘90s, and that he’s going to be an incredible A&R; [artists and repertoire] source for us.”

Control is sweet for Emilio Estefan. He enjoys telling stories like the one about the time he took Secada, whom he’d been grooming for years as back-up singer and songwriter for Gloria, to a Sony A&R; representative, who turned him down without even listening to the tape.

“So I went to EMI and we had a deal in six hours, and now I think Jon has sold something like 11 million albums all over the world.”

Or how, when the Estefans decided to do the Spanish-language “Mi Tierra” album, “Everyone said, ‘You’re crazy--Gloria’s a big pop artist, why do you want to take this chance?’ ”

“Mi Tierra” was not only an international hit, selling more than 3 million copies, but it also became the top Latin album in the U.S., and the only Spanish-language record in the last decade to sell more than a million copies here.

Then there was Cachao, the bassist and composer who’s revered by Cuban music and jazz aficionados--and unknown to almost everyone else.

“When I signed Cachao people told me, ‘Are you crazy? He’s 77, he’s not very handsome.’ And I said, ‘Cachao is the last living legend that we have in Cuban music.’ ”

Cachao’s “Master Sessions Volume I,” with a totally inexperienced but passionate fan as producer--actor Andy Garcia, also a Miami Cuban--won a Grammy last year. (Cachao, Gloria and Secada have each scored a nomination in this year’s Grammys as well.)

The pride Estefan takes in these stories, in Gloria’s sales figures and the wave of fashionable press on Albita, in being friendly with Sylvester Stallone and Madonna, has a tinge of naivete. Perhaps it is partly the pride of an immigrant made good, first on U.S. terms, and now, gradually, on those of his native culture.

After coming to Miami from Cuba at age 12, the teenage Estefan worked a day job and played the accordion in a restaurant for tips. He got $20,000 from a small Miami record label in 1976 to produce his first record (in Spanish) with his group the Miami Sound Machine, which Gloria had joined in 1975.

“They didn’t believe in music in Spanish then,” he says. “I told them it wasn’t enough, they said that’s your problem. But I learned that with a little bit of money you can still make a hit, if the song is good and it touches people’s hearts.”

And if there are Cuban music purists who complain that Estefan takes some of the power and propulsion out of the music, it’s also true that he has given it a smoothness and production quality that make it more accessible to a wider audience.

“What I’m doing is taking Latin music to the next quality level,” Estefan says. “I didn’t teach Cachao a thing. He’s teaching us. But I’m giving him and Albita a great operation, a great quality.”

Whether Albita, or the work of any other artist in Spanish, will really go over with mainstream audiences in the U.S. remains to be seen. She and Cachao have so far been successful on a limited scale, in cities such as New York and Los Angeles, as well as in Europe. Estefan’s attitude seems to be a mix of world-beat idealism and pop practicality.

“I think the future of music is world music,” he says. “The world is becoming smaller. And I think that is also happening in music. You want to listen to Latin music one day, R&B; the next, and rock the next.” He cites Gloria’s appeal in middle part of the U.S. and overseas, and the international success of the Gipsy Kings, a Spanish group on which he hopes to model Albita’s career.

There are certainly significant obstacles to even Emilio’s slick and well-marketed brand of Latin music breaking into the mainstream. One is language, and another is the more nebulous issue of identity.

“What does one mean by Latin music making the mainstream?” says Billboard’s Lannert. “You have to create the identity first. Is it the rhythm? It won’t be the language. Is it just Latin people singing pop music? There’s no definition of what it is. The idea of creating a ‘Latin sound’--that’s a very hard question.”

But it’s not something that seems to concern Estefan at this point.

Right now he’s working on Gloria’s next record, which he describes as Afro-Cuban music sung in English, and the next Crescent Moon release, from a Miami R&B; singer named Leygalia.

When he recently produced a mix of one of Madonna’s songs for the soundtrack of the upcoming film of “Evita,” he used acoustic guitars, congas and hand claps--for Andrew Lloyd Webber. He apparently sees no contradiction in producing both completely middle-of-the-road pop and hard-core Afro-Cuban rhythms.

“When I write a song I don’t think about whether it is a pop song or what it is, I just write it,” he says. “Music is music. If it touches you it doesn’t matter where it comes from.”