Midlake is a quintet from the talent-incubator town of Denton, Tex. Their newly released sophomore LP, The Trials of Van Occupanther (Bella Union), achieves a sophisticated balance of past and present. It boasts the kind of serious songwriting, arranging and instrumental chops that hark back to the heyday of the Eagles, Jackson Browne, Fleetwood Mac and Crosby, Stills & Nash—a mellow moment before punk made proficiency taboo. The album is full of lush, resonant acoustic guitars and warmly overdriven electrics, lilting pianos and vintage keyboards, soaring vocal melodies paired with honeyed harmony parts and orchestral touches.

Yet it never succumbs to the slickness or blandness that can plague the genre. That’s probably because the band adopted the indie-rock approach, playing virtually all of the instruments and producing the album themselves. With its complex arrangements and dense layers of overdubs, The Trials of Van Occupanther has a rich, organic ensemble feel.

Lead singer and songwriter Tim Smith’s supple, mellifluous tenor could easily be exploited for operatic gestures, but he’s careful not to hog the spotlight. There are wailing, honest-to-goodness, classic-rock drum fills and guitar solos, most notably in the infectious “Head Home,” but they fall in all the right places, supporting rather than overwhelming the songs. It all adds up to a generous rush of feeling, conjuring up a pleasant (sometimes gloomy) place to get lost.

Lyrically, it’s an eccentric vision. Mr. Smith evokes an invented past much more distant than the Me Decade, painting a landscape of hillsides and forests populated by villagers and hunters. “Roscoe,” the propulsive and hypnotic lead track, imagines rural life at the end of the 19th century; the first verse is about mountaineers traveling far to fix someone’s leaking roof (an odd motif that reoccurs later in the album).

Like many of the songs, “Bandits” doesn’t follow an easily identifiable verse-chorus structure, but it’s an immediately poignant and engaging mid-tempo ballad. Mr. Smith asks, “Did you ever want to roam around with bandits, / To see many places and hide in ditches?” Then he tempers that romantic image of the carefree outsider, singing, “It’s not always easy,” before invoking the need to find shelter when the winter comes.

These are fairy tales minus the happy ending (most just trail off without concluding at all). In “Van Occupanther,” the title character is a shy scientist who’s shunned by his neighbors. He seems on the brink of revealing an important discovery, but instead cries out (to gorgeous harmonies), “Let me not be too consumed with this world.” And in “Chasing After Deer,” an affectingly artless description of tragic, unrequited love, a deer, frightened of a pursuer who’s already given up the chase, runs headlong off a cliff into the sea. It’s that kind of mixed emotion—a compound of sadness and beauty—that Midlake captures on this quietly stunning record.

—I-Huei Go

LIKE JOHNNY CASH'S FIFTH VOLUME OF THE American series, another of this year’s finest albums, Ali Farka Touré’s Savane, was released posthumously (Touré, who was in his late 60’s, died in March). But if Cash’s last record is a collection of casket lullabies, the Malian guitarist’s final songs have a teeming lushness—a lively, organic beauty—that makes it difficult to imagine that he was suffering from bone cancer when he recorded them.

Touré’s crystalline guitar buoys his music, even on gluey, hot-sun hymns like “Ledi Coumbe,” or on the funereal title track. But nothing here floats by sadly: These songs knead together that pristine guitar with heart-grabbing harmonies, slender instrumental echo and bucolic percussion. This is an album of pure molasses melody. It’s intoxicating because of its wide landscape: The panorama created by Touré and his collaborators is verdant yet dignified and demure. Its yogic reiterations evoke the splendor of Lee (Scratch) Perry’s dub reggae, yet this album matches the dreamy lilt of dub without the nuisance of nonstop reverb or tyrannical bass lines.

Not a single note here oversteps its bounds, even when the tracks add a second guitar—or a choir of wiry n’goni lutes. By filling the spaces behind and beneath one another, these musicians build up limited alternations on slow themes into electric crescendos.

Touré has been memorialized as “the Bluesman of Africa”—but that nickname backwardly confuses which hemisphere the genre’s roots grew in. Savane is not the stuff of wannabe Delta barroom blues, and it’s not hard to hear why.

Touré is best known for 1994’s Talking Timbuktu, his Desert Island Disc–worthy collaboration with Ry Cooder, the Californian slide-guitar divinity. Like Mr. Cooder’s more popular international collaborations with Buena Vista Social Club, Timbuktu is immediately likeable for its swaggeringly pretty hooks.

The prettiness of Savane is much less important than its lastingly beautiful craftwork: The caramelized growl of Little George Sueref’s harmonica on the opener, “Erdi,” melts into the quintuplet vocal harmonies of “Machengoidi” and “Soko Yhinka”; vintage James Brown bandleader Pee Wee Ellis plays a late-night barfly tenor sax on “Beto” to match the translucent flute of “Banga”; on “N’Jarou”, the album’s last and most magnetic track, Touré’s stately acoustic soloing hypnotizes the brass and African lutes beneath it.

His guitar—sometimes a crisp acoustic, sometimes a crisper electric—has often done the talking for him. But Touré’s languid charcoal vocals on Savane are a weighty addition. Though the lyrics are sung in Malian dialect, with a few gushes of French, only jealous Anglophones will be disappointed. The vocals are so melodious and percussive that it’s a pleasure listening to them merely as abstract expressions of emotion. At their core, Touré’s velvety moans and elderly grumbles are never unintelligible. Muddiness has never sounded clearer.

His singing is always eloquent, but the flickers of spoken incantation on “N’Jarou” are supreme. These vocals dance above an ebullient seven-note guitar riff, which eventually relaxes into free-flowing improvisation. Contrasted against the airy, paced breaths of Pee Wee Ellis’ tenor saxophone, the alternating outbursts of voice and guitar are cataclysmic.

To insist that any such piece of music has its own inherently global and globalizing voice is the stuff of colonialist choir teachers: Touré’s music isn’t fratty or gleeful enough to be universal. Nonetheless, he reportedly sang in all three dialects of northern Mali as a gesture of unity.

There’s something in Savane’s transcendent Malian songs that demands hyperbole: Its quiet jangle blossoms into pure elegance, getting richer and lovelier as it rolls along.

—Max Abelson

Midlake is a quintet from the talent-incubator town of Denton, Tex. Their newly released sophomore LP, The Trials of Van Occupanther (Bella Union), achieves a sophisticated balance of past and present. It boasts the kind of serious songwriting, arranging and instrumental chops that hark back to the heyday of the Eagles, Jackson Browne, Fleetwood Mac and Crosby, Stills & Nash—a mellow moment before punk made proficiency taboo. The album is full of lush, resonant acoustic guitars and warmly overdriven electrics, lilting pianos and vintage keyboards, soaring vocal melodies paired with honeyed harmony parts and orchestral touches.

Yet it never succumbs to the slickness or blandness that can plague the genre. That’s probably because the band adopted the indie-rock approach, playing virtually all of the instruments and producing the album themselves. With its complex arrangements and dense layers of overdubs, The Trials of Van Occupanther has a rich, organic ensemble feel.

Lead singer and songwriter Tim Smith’s supple, mellifluous tenor could easily be exploited for operatic gestures, but he’s careful not to hog the spotlight. There are wailing, honest-to-goodness, classic-rock drum fills and guitar solos, most notably in the infectious “Head Home,” but they fall in all the right places, supporting rather than overwhelming the songs. It all adds up to a generous rush of feeling, conjuring up a pleasant (sometimes gloomy) place to get lost.

Lyrically, it’s an eccentric vision. Mr. Smith evokes an invented past much more distant than the Me Decade, painting a landscape of hillsides and forests populated by villagers and hunters. “Roscoe,” the propulsive and hypnotic lead track, imagines rural life at the end of the 19th century; the first verse is about mountaineers traveling far to fix someone’s leaking roof (an odd motif that reoccurs later in the album).

Like many of the songs, “Bandits” doesn’t follow an easily identifiable verse-chorus structure, but it’s an immediately poignant and engaging mid-tempo ballad. Mr. Smith asks, “Did you ever want to roam around with bandits, / To see many places and hide in ditches?” Then he tempers that romantic image of the carefree outsider, singing, “It’s not always easy,” before invoking the need to find shelter when the winter comes.

These are fairy tales minus the happy ending (most just trail off without concluding at all). In “Van Occupanther,” the title character is a shy scientist who’s shunned by his neighbors. He seems on the brink of revealing an important discovery, but instead cries out (to gorgeous harmonies), “Let me not be too consumed with this world.” And in “Chasing After Deer,” an affectingly artless description of tragic, unrequited love, a deer, frightened of a pursuer who’s already given up the chase, runs headlong off a cliff into the sea. It’s that kind of mixed emotion—a compound of sadness and beauty—that Midlake captures on this quietly stunning record.

—I-Huei Go

LIKE JOHNNY CASH'S FIFTH VOLUME OF THE American series, another of this year’s finest albums, Ali Farka Touré’s Savane, was released posthumously (Touré, who was in his late 60’s, died in March). But if Cash’s last record is a collection of casket lullabies, the Malian guitarist’s final songs have a teeming lushness—a lively, organic beauty—that makes it difficult to imagine that he was suffering from bone cancer when he recorded them.

Touré’s crystalline guitar buoys his music, even on gluey, hot-sun hymns like “Ledi Coumbe,” or on the funereal title track. But nothing here floats by sadly: These songs knead together that pristine guitar with heart-grabbing harmonies, slender instrumental echo and bucolic percussion. This is an album of pure molasses melody. It’s intoxicating because of its wide landscape: The panorama created by Touré and his collaborators is verdant yet dignified and demure. Its yogic reiterations evoke the splendor of Lee (Scratch) Perry’s dub reggae, yet this album matches the dreamy lilt of dub without the nuisance of nonstop reverb or tyrannical bass lines.

Not a single note here oversteps its bounds, even when the tracks add a second guitar—or a choir of wiry n’goni lutes. By filling the spaces behind and beneath one another, these musicians build up limited alternations on slow themes into electric crescendos.

Touré has been memorialized as “the Bluesman of Africa”—but that nickname backwardly confuses which hemisphere the genre’s roots grew in. Savane is not the stuff of wannabe Delta barroom blues, and it’s not hard to hear why.

Touré is best known for 1994’s Talking Timbuktu, his Desert Island Disc–worthy collaboration with Ry Cooder, the Californian slide-guitar divinity. Like Mr. Cooder’s more popular international collaborations with Buena Vista Social Club, Timbuktu is immediately likeable for its swaggeringly pretty hooks.

The prettiness of Savane is much less important than its lastingly beautiful craftwork: The caramelized growl of Little George Sueref’s harmonica on the opener, “Erdi,” melts into the quintuplet vocal harmonies of “Machengoidi” and “Soko Yhinka”; vintage James Brown bandleader Pee Wee Ellis plays a late-night barfly tenor sax on “Beto” to match the translucent flute of “Banga”; on “N’Jarou”, the album’s last and most magnetic track, Touré’s stately acoustic soloing hypnotizes the brass and African lutes beneath it.

His guitar—sometimes a crisp acoustic, sometimes a crisper electric—has often done the talking for him. But Touré’s languid charcoal vocals on Savane are a weighty addition. Though the lyrics are sung in Malian dialect, with a few gushes of French, only jealous Anglophones will be disappointed. The vocals are so melodious and percussive that it’s a pleasure listening to them merely as abstract expressions of emotion. At their core, Touré’s velvety moans and elderly grumbles are never unintelligible. Muddiness has never sounded clearer.

His singing is always eloquent, but the flickers of spoken incantation on “N’Jarou” are supreme. These vocals dance above an ebullient seven-note guitar riff, which eventually relaxes into free-flowing improvisation. Contrasted against the airy, paced breaths of Pee Wee Ellis’ tenor saxophone, the alternating outbursts of voice and guitar are cataclysmic.

To insist that any such piece of music has its own inherently global and globalizing voice is the stuff of colonialist choir teachers: Touré’s music isn’t fratty or gleeful enough to be universal. Nonetheless, he reportedly sang in all three dialects of northern Mali as a gesture of unity.

There’s something in Savane’s transcendent Malian songs that demands hyperbole: Its quiet jangle blossoms into pure elegance, getting richer and lovelier as it rolls along.

—Max Abelson

album approximation of the world. "Specialist in All Styles," indeed.

The laboratory for this honest-to-God one-world music was not, happily, Peter Gabriel's garden studio or Paul Simon's travel diary, but rather Senegal's port city of Dakar in the 1970's. Beginning in the 40's, Cuban music had made the reverse migration back to West Africa, whence had come the slaves and rhythmic sensibility that had helped give rise to the son and the rumba in the first place. The Africans not only "got" the Cuban style, they recognized it as kin. Owing to the vicissitudes of European imperialism, the Senegalese spoke French; Spanish was just a bunch of syllables to be sung phonetically, but that proved no great obstacle.

Soon enough, Senegal boasted its own roster of crackerjack Cuban-style combos, with the Orchestra Baobab-an all-star group that came together at Dakar's Baobab Club in 1970-first among them. In a postcolonial Africa increasingly in love with the ideals of African-ness and Negritude, the Orchestra Baobab were able to modify the Cuban template, adding percussion elements from the Casamance region in the south and "praise songs" from the Wolof country in the north. These tribal tales of moral advice and uplift were voiced in eerie, impassioned timbres that had never graced Cuba's Orquesta Aragon or the Beny Moré band.

By the mid-80's, it was over: The Orchestra Baobab was "old school," replaced by a new generation of Afro-Pop superstars like Youssou N'Dour and Baaba Maal playing a jumpy six-beat Wolof-rock hybrid called mbalax . Though as heavily indebted to Western pop and rock as Baobab was to

Cuba, Messrs. N'Dour and Maal nevertheless captured the imagination of Senegal, as well as a large and emerging Western world-music audience. They were, and are, revered as latter-day griots -traditional storytellers-in a way that was beyond the Baobab group in their chinos and sport shirts.

In this story, musical evolution never proceeds in a straight line; everything bends back to the starting point. Nick Gold, the World Circuit records chief who did his part to usher in the 80's craze for West African world music, fell in love with traditional Cuban music through some old recordings of the Orchestra Baobab.

Suitably inspired, he rounded up a bunch of overlooked, long-in-the-tooth Cuban musicians, came up with a fictional pedigree (in some parallel universe, they might have played together in a real but long-defunct Havana nightclub), and launched what became the Buena Vista Social Club juggernaut, ushering in a second, Cuba-centric world-music wave.

The Orchestra Baobab made for an ideal follow-up. Its members, after all, had actually lived the Buena Vista story line-i.e., the brilliant, discarded band whose fortunes rose and fell with a legendary nightclub that gave them their name. Last year's reissue of some choice '82 tracks, the double-CD Pirates Choice (World Circuit/Nonesuch), found an audience, paving the way for Specialist in All Styles , a full-dress rehabilitation and reintroduction of the band which, after having fallen apart completely in 1987, is now up and running as a touring unit-a shockingly good one, based on the evidence of this record. Key members of the original band are back, among them Wolof praise singer Ndiouga Dieng and two other vocalists, Balla Sidibe and Rudy Gomis, who bring a harmonic sensibility peculiar to their Casamance region.

Or so the ethno-musicologists tell me. But even the innocent Western ear will pick out Issa Cissoko, a saxophonist from the James Brown school of muscular funk, and the revelatory electric guitarist Barthelemy Attisso, who emerged from a 15-year musical retirement to offer up immaculate single-note solo runs that, depending on the tune, can recall Django Reinhardt, Charlie Christian or the Ventures.

And just in case you missed the Buena Vista connection, World Circuit saw fit to drop B.V. crooner Ibrahim Ferrer into one improvised tune, dubbed "Hommage à Tonton Ferrer." Such is the relaxed, men-of-a-certain-age swagger of the Orchestra Baobab that he sounds right at home.

With all its tony production values, Specialist in All Styles , like the Buena Vista Social Club album, sounds almost too good-closer to a memory or a dream than a slice of musical history. I'm not complaining. A similar artful perfectionism runs through Nothing's in Vain (Coono du Réér) (Nonesuch), the new album by Youssou N'Dour-who served as a co-producer on the Orchestra Baobab album, just in case any dots remain unconnected. If Specialist in All Styles is a testament to the pleasures of a resourceful collective, Nothing's in Vain speaks to the ravishing power of the solo virtuoso. He sings in three languages-Wolof, French and English-and he seems to contain within him at least that many voices, from the suave baritone heard on the French love meditations to the pinched, slightly hysterical tenor he uses to exhort his people to better themselves. Here, Mr. N'Dour has toned down the pop elements from his earlier work, the synth lines and sax solos, in favor of a highly produced, self-consciously folkloric sound.

It suits him. Mr. N'Dour has been a savvy world traveler for some time now, and unlike the Orchestra Baobab, he didn't have to wait 15 years to be reinvented by a Western record label. He built a studio in Dakar and did it himself.

When you open the door, however, it's like walking into a gag from an old movie. The wall of noise hits you like a tidal wave.

Buena Vista Social Club was belting away on the loudspeaker one evening, and a Prada party was under way at tables that had been pushed together in front of the bar, which was thronged with pretty women in strapless tops and guys in leather jackets. My friends were standing there, looking a bit dazed. One of them was hanging on to a glowing pink drink. "It's a kamikaze!" she shouted, so I ordered one. It tasted like one of those sneaky tropical juice drinks they used to serve at Trader Vic.

We barely had time to feel the effect of our cocktails before a dark-haired beauty, dressed in what fashion magazines in the 50's used to call "a crisp white blouse," told us our table was ready. "It's the best one in the house," she said sweetly, leading us into the dining room to a horseshoe banquette in the corner.

Isla's décor evokes the 50's-Cuba in the heyday of the Battista regime, decadent nights at the Havana Yacht Club where sequins, mules and Merry Widow hats were more the order than crisp white blouses. The restaurant has been decorated with great style by the owner, Diane Ghioto, a former fashion editor at Elle , with architect Kate Webb. The floor is painted a brilliant cobalt blue, and orange globes are suspended from the ceiling on white nylon cords. The walls, blue-tiled or tobacco-brown, are hung with white light fixtures shaped like the petals of exotic tropical flowers, and lined with white leather banquettes and blue formica tables. By the bar-white Lucite, with white leather and chrome barstools-cocktail tables are set with orange plastic basket chairs from a poolside lounge in Miami.

You can imagine Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, on a romantic weekend, getting cheerfully plastered in this sort of setting-except for one thing. They probably liked to talk (at least, Burton certainly did), but in this room conversation is virtually impossible. The floor is poured concrete, the ceilings low, the walls tiled, the music high. I have never been to such a noisy restaurant in my life.

A loudspeaker above our table throbbed with Latin rhythms. The guy at the opposite table, who was wearing two pairs of glasses-one on his nose, the other on top of his bald head-seemed to be having a nice time, although he didn't say much to his friend, who had a rhinestone stuck in the center of his forehead. We asked the waitress, knowing it was futile, if she would turn the music down. She did, but it was not long before it was up to full volume again.

Isla's chef, Aarón Sanchez, says he uses "indigenous ingredients to demonstrate what contemporary Cuban cooking might have represented, had the country's recent history been different." He is well honed in pan-Latin cuisine, having worked at Patria, Erizo Latino and L-Ray, and he also happens to be the son of Zarela Martinez, the Mexican cooking authority and restaurant owner. His food is interesting and satisfying, and doesn't overreach in its effort to lighten and update Cuban food.

For 50 bucks, four people can start dinner by sharing a Latin version of a plateau de fruits de mer , a selection of ceviches and oysters. Our waitress brought over a platter and set it down in the middle of the table. "This one is …, that one is …,"she said, pointing to each one in turn. We couldn't hear a word of her explanation. "Would you like me to go over these again?" she asked. We just laughed.

There were four kinds of ceviche, and they were all delicious: slices of yellow tail in a soy sauce marinade; a creamy scallop dish; tender, lemony slices of squid; shrimp in a spicy cocktail sauce. The only disappointment was the oysters, Malpeques, which tasted muddy. Empanaditas, little stuffed pastry turnovers with salsa, were a trifle doughy as were the tostones rellenos, roulades made from plantains stuffed with beef picadillo.

But Mr. Sanchez uses Latin tubers to great effect, such as the wonderful mashed boniato which accompanies a grilled stuffed pork chop and tastes like a white sweet potato. Crisp yucca fries came with the charbroiled filet mignon (substituted on the current menu by the Angus strip steak), and a spicy picadillo of roasted squash beautifully complements the tamarind-glazed duck breast. "Drunken" chicken on the bone was given a jolt of flavor from a marinade of spices, rum and citrus, and it was excellent. One of my favorite dishes was the juicy head-on shrimp rolled in a crust of crushed fried plantain and served on a bed of peppery garbanzo rice. Mr. Sanchez is terrifically good at rice; it was the high point of his paella, the creamy grains lightly tinged with saffron and topped with tiny clams, chorizo, roasted peppers, mussels and shrimp. This was a better choice than the seasonal fish, a bland red snapper (since replaced with a wild striped bass). It came with scalloped potatoes perked up with a layer of salt cod (a play on brandade morue ), which gave it some zest; the mustard greens and a salsa verde made from tomatillos, green chilies and cilantro also helped.

While we were trying to enjoy our food, conversation became increasingly exhausting. It was like trying to make yourself understood to a foreigner who doesn't speak your language, where every shouted word assumes a significance out of all proportion.

By the time dessert arrived, we were ready to put on woolly pajamas and retire. But the dark, fudgy chocolate cake with guava sauce and a chocolate starfish, and the pineapple tarte Tatin with rich coconut ice cream, were both delicious homey desserts with a Latin twist. A butterscotch custard, with gingersnap crackers, was also great. But don't bother with the bread pudding, which tasted like raw dough and was so heavy it would send Castro to bed with his boots on.

With dessert, our waitress suggested we try one of their special teas, which cost $7.50 or $8 a cup. "It's an unusual experience. You have it, like, once in a lifetime," she said as she set down two glasses of hot water with something gray floating in them like children's paper flowers. "Let them steep."

My friend looked at her glass. It appeared to have a small fright wig at the bottom, which was actually a green sea anemone.

"I'm not drinking it," she said, pushing it away. "It looks like a spider. I hate spiders."

So I drank it. It had a faint, flowery aroma, and I found it a warm, soothing antidote to all the noise.

ISLA

*

39 Downing Street

between Bedford and Varick streets

352-2822

Dress: Downtown chic

Noise level: Ear-splitting

Wine list: Moderately priced, including Spanish and South American selections

Credit cards: All major

Price range: Dinner main courses $14 to $24

Dinner: Sunday 6 P.M. to 11 p.m., Monday to Thursday 6 P.M. to midnight, Friday and Saturday to 1 a.m

* Good

* * Very good

* * * Excellent

* * * * Outstanding

No star: Poor

But for the vast majority of us shut out from live Buena Vista (the usual shorthand for the original albums and musicians), we'll always have the movie, Buena Vista Social Club , Wim Wenders' engaging documentary of Mr. Cooder's exploits, which has settled in for extended runs at both the Angelika and Lincoln Plaza theaters. In fact, in this film, we may have a more incisive introduction to the peculiar world of Buena Vista than any live performance could provide.

In the opening scene, Mr. Segundo, at 92 the oldest and most charismatic of the Cuban musicians enshrined in the film, looks around the outskirts of Havana for the site of the actual, historical Social Club. No one seems quite sure where it is, or where it was, and judging by the smile on the guitarist's face, the place could have been cooked up by World Circuit Records in London, for all that he cares. Buena Vista, we come to understand, is a state of mind, a musical balm for United States-Cuban relations (the 90's version of 70's United States-China "ping-pong diplomacy") and a spectacularly lucrative recording industry-within-an-industry.

But how, you might ask, did Buena Vista become World Music's answer to Beatlemania? For starters, North American fascination with Latin rhythm is old hat. The habanera rhythm was an important element in early New Orleans jazz, underlined by Jelly Roll Morton's endlessly cited dictum that good jazz should have "a Spanish tinge." Later, in the early 30's, a tune by Don Azpiazú's Havana Casino Orchestra, "El Manicero," or "The Peanut Vendor," excited the first bona fide Latin craze in the United States, to be followed by the mambo mania of the 50's and the Latin jazz boom in the 70's. So perhaps we were due for another Latin wave, only this time it was intensified by our current passion for musical rootsiness-as long as they sound authentic-bound up in the catch-all label, World Music. All that, and the records were terrific.

Abetted by the slow twang of his own slide guitar, Mr. Cooder managed to turn back the clock, and the metronome, on Latin music. His assembled cast of graybeards, and middle-aged throwbacks like singer and guitarist Eliades Ochoa and lutist Barbarito Torres, covered a range of the older styles, from the bedrock of son , Cuba's original Afro-European fusion, to guajiros , or peasant songs, to the romantic ballads, or boleros . Gringo ears with only passing familiarity with Latin music could perhaps for the first time latch on to those rhythms that had whizzed by them in brassy and somewhat frantic salsa music. With Mr. Cooder at the dials, the urban dance element gives way to a brilliant, bumptious country music, where guitarists and singers rule and the (lone) trumpeter knows his place.

As Mr. Wenders signals at the beginning of his movie, this isn't musical history; this mixing and matching of eras and styles is sheer invention. In a later scene, Joachim Cooder, Mr. Cooder's son, who plays percussion on the Buena Vista albums, describes the group as "a bizarre band that never existed in the 60's, or something." And "Chan Chan" is its perfectly pitched, bawdy anthem (in translation, "How her bottom shook and/ Chan Chan was aroused!"), a son written by one of the early masters of the form, Compay Segundo, but only just recently.

Alas, Mr. Segundo (real name: Francisco Repilado) won't be playing on the upcoming Beacon Theater concerts. The Buena Vistans have been reinvented on such a grand commercial scale, they now comprise too much star power to fit under one roof. Mr. Segundo, who was actually rediscovered in Europe a couple years before Buena Vista, goes his own way with a heavy European touring schedule and a stream of new albums, last fall's Lo Mejor de la Vida and, out on Nov. 2, Calle Salud (both on Nonesuch). In the Buena Vista movie, Mr. Segundo comes across like a genial and lecherous great-uncle; musically, he is no less insinuating. While his guitar playing is undiminished (he plays a cross between a guitar and the traditional Cuban tres ), his singing is now little more than a baritone croak. But paired with strong lead singers, he can sound like the voice of the son itself, a dark rumble from the music's birthplace in the eastern hill country of Cuba.

With apologies to Mr. Segundo, Ibrahim Ferrer and Rubén González are, for me, the most compelling singer and instrumentalist to have emerged from Buena Vista. Mr. Ferrer was the one out-of-the-blue discovery, a onetime second-billing singer in the 50's who had descended into complete obscurity. At the time of the Buena Vista sessions, he was supporting himself and his family as a shoeshine man in the streets of Havana. As the story goes, someone yanked Mr. Ferrer into the recording session, he warmed up by launching into the classic bolero "Dos Gardenias," and Mr. Cooder had the good sense to turn on the tape recorder. To my ears, there is nothing on Mr. Ferrer's recent debut album, Buena Vista Social Club Presents Ibrahim Ferrer , quite so perfect as "Dos Gardenias," but his sweet, slightly wavy voice invests a handful of romantic tunes with memorable anguish.

For pianist Rubén González, 80 years old, Buena Vista represents the triumph of the sideman. Unlike Mr. Ferrer, Mr. González has had a long and distinguished musical career but always in a star band leader's shadow, first with Arsenio Rodríguez, the father of the mambo, and then with Enrique Jorrin, the father of the cha-cha-cha. From the glimpse we get in the Wenders film, it's easy enough to picture Mr. González at the time of the Buena Vista sessions, an abstracted, white-bearded figure, unable to afford his own piano, haunting the piano bars and restaurants of Havana just to have a place to play. By all accounts, during the two weeks he served as the pianist on the two scheduled Buena Vista album sessions, he visibly, audibly came alive and Mr. Cooder had the inspired idea to devote a third album to him. If Buena Vista Social Club is a masterpiece by a band that never really existed, Introducing … Rubén González is, by contrast, the document of a man who has waited his entire life to set down what he knows. The album is a small encyclopedia of Cuban musical forms- cha-cha-chá , guaracha , danzón , son montuno -interpreted with a harmonic sophistication that he and a handful of Cuban pianist peers, most now deceased, absorbed from American jazz in the 50's. (Mr. González's follow-up album is expected in February.)

The Ferrer-González concerts promise much but I would be surprised if they match the intensity of the full Buena Vista Club's one and only North American performance at Carnegie Hall in the summer of '98. That concert provided Mr. Wenders' film with its single most indelible moment, Ibrahim Ferrer frozen on stage, looking out at the wildly cheering audience. We'd seen Mr. Ferrer earlier in the movie attending to his personal shrine of St. Lazarus in his shabby little Havana apartment. At Carnegie Hall, Mr. Ferrer is struck dumb by his own resurrection.

That the mainstream albums have generally been getting better hasn't changed the equation. Hard-core jazz fans of various stylistic persuasions tend to find their particular catnip on the little labels, and everybody snaps up the classic reissues. But no one seems to get overly excited by the official product. I mean, saxophonist Joshua Redman is a media phenom so delicious that Stephen Glass would have thought twice before making him up. A handsome Harvard summa , son of an avant-garde legend, a masterful sax technician and a tireless tourer, Mr. Redman will sell maybe 25,000 albums in a good year. About nearly everyone else ... well, don't ask.

The major labels seem to have labored under the Wynton Marsalis-inspired misapprehension that jazz could be mass-marketed as a kind of super-sophisticated folk music. Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker did the heavy lifting and now the youngsters need only master the tradition. But with a respectful nod to the repertory jazz movement, I think jazz makes lousy folk music. Simple and soulful is how people take their folk music (and increasingly, other people's folk music), that much is clear from the boggling response to three albums by a bunch of Havana graybeards masterminded by Ry Cooder for World Circuit/Nonesuch records. The Buena Vista Social Club sold out Carnegie Hall in three days this past June; their record sales in the United States are moving toward the half-million mark.

All of which is to say I'm getting that postmodern feeling. "Postmodern" is an academic conceit of surpassing vagueness, but it does suggest a world in which historical rummaging, pastiche, humor and a total obliteration of "high" and "low" cultural distinctions are the order of the day. "Postmodernism" has always been an article of faith for the Downtown set, but now it looks like the instinctively conservative major labels, faced with a nasty market correction, are going po-mo in spite of themselves.

Marc Ribot is a talented guitarist with a prototypically ecumenical Downtown résumé–gigs with the Lounge Lizards, Elvis Costello, Tom Waits and the like. Recently he began to fool around with some tunes by the mambo master Arsenio Rodriguez and, to his professed horror, he found himself on a major label. "I thought I'd get a couple of my friends together and get a gig playing old Cuban tunes," he said. "On our third gig, we got signed to Atlantic." No one is going to confuse Marc Ribot y Los Cubanos Postizos (Atlantic) with the Buena Vista Social Club in this lifetime–but now its deadpan hipster attitude is suddenly fungible. The title, which translates as Marc Ribot and the Prosthetic (read: "fake") Cubans, seems like a nod to Mr. Ribot's old boss, Lounge Lizard John Lurie, who coined the term "fake jazz" and in a just world would be regarded as the Charlie Parker of po-mo jazz.

Marc Ribot y Los Cubanos Postizos is also a swell album. Mr. Ribot has found the analog to Rodriguez's tres guitar lines in reverb-heavy American surf-guitar licks and has packed the enterprise with plenty of special moments: a girl chorus chanting "postizo" on the flagship tune, the guitarist reciting the world-weary lyric to "La Vida Es Un Sueño" in determinedly dreadful Spanish. In Mr. Ribot's hands, not only Cuban rhythms but the Spanish language itself becomes a new lingua franca of sublime bad taste.

What Mr. Ribot has done to the traditional Cuban son and mambo, clarinetist Don Byron does to black pop. A conceptual chameleon by temperament, his brand new major-label debut, Nu Blaxploitation (Blue Note), is an homage to his favorite 70's funk band Mandrill, to old-school rap (Biz Markie is a special guest) and to Jimi Hendrix. The whole business is tied together by the sly "spoken-word" recitations of the poet Sadiq Bey who, in one of his more unlikely moments, anoints Dodi Fayed as a victimized race brother. ("You, who built the Pyramids … were just a rich camel jockey.") I don't know what it all adds up to, but in the words of Blue Note president Bruce Lundvall, lifted from the press release, it's "an extraordinary cutting edge statement." That will likely be replacing "in the tradition" as the jazz marketing buzz phrase for the next century.

Actually, nothing in jazz could be more "in the tradition" than the old po-mo spirit. Ever since it left the safe harbor of New Orleans, jazz has been co-opting (or "appropriating," to use the jargon) elements of the larger popular culture to ensure its survival, be it in the form of Swing Era big bands or 70's jazz-rock. The notion of a jazz "standard," an abstraction of the chords of a Tin Pan Alley tune, is as fine an example of inscribing the past into the present as any Cindy Sherman photograph. While I think that jazz's bout of stand-alone purism in the 1980's and early 90's served its purpose, it's been clear for a few years now that the music has been looking around for some new hosts to feed on.

Most players have delved into music that's more commercial and rhythm-driven than post-bop jazz, though few have the po-mo élan of Don Byron or Marc Ribot. Mr. Byron's estimable pianist, Uri Caine, has been working the other side of the street, bringing a renegade improviser's sensibility to the classical music world–which evidently is even more desperate than jazz for something new, or something old interestingly refurbished. (Uri Caine and group play the Internet Cafe on Aug. 13.)

An accomplished classical pianist and arranger, Mr. Caine has teamed up with German "new music" impresario Stefan Winter to record what will probably be a series of conceptual reworkings of the classics. The first album, Mahler/Caine: Primal Light (Winter & Winter), just became available in the States; in Europe, it has sold big, profitably tapping into both the ennui of the classical music world and German collective guilt. In concert, a deejay samples bits and pieces of Mahler recordings which Mr. Caine's band of Downtown irregulars respond to in their virtuoso fashion. It's a rather radical, fractal approach, but what really moves the Germans is the pointed incongruity of the Moroccan Jewish cantor, Aaron Bensoussan, singing the "Funeral March" from the Fifth Symphony.

"Afterward, the Germans get in my face and say, 'The Jewish thing–it's so important,'" Mr. Caine said. "They're more into it than I am." Even if you're less personally invested in the conundrum of Gustav Mahler, an Austrian Jew who expediently converted to Christianity, Primal Light is a pleasure, sometimes not the case with postmodern projects that read better than they play.

With his Wagner album already out in Europe and Bach's "Goldberg Variations" in the works, Mr. Caine's main worry is that he'll become prisoner to the postmodern High Concept. He had to plead with Mr. Winter to let him do his jazz trio album, the excellent Blue Wail (Winter & Winter), which won't be available in this country for some months. "I told Stefan, 'I just want to make a jazz record,'" Mr. Caine recalls. "He said, 'That's so normal.' I said, 'That's the concept. People playing. That's it.'"