In 1975, I was a freshman at Wesleyan University, which had recently begun offering post-graduate studies in ethnomusicology. Although the marketing term "world music" had yet to be "invented" by a cabal of globally-minded London trend setters, we at Wesleyan already had a World Music Hall and a small world music library. I used to take vinyl LPs out and copy the best tracks onto cassettes, which I listened to obsessively. This is how I discovered African music, in large measure thanks to the Nonesuch Explorer Series, whose volumes were accumulating year after year on the shelves of Wesleyan's music library. The entire series, some 91 CDs, is now being re-released, starting with the twelve original Africa volumes, and a new Africa compilation.

I named my African cassette compilation "African Non-Drumming," an expression of my enthusiasm at discovering African flutes, xylophones, harps, lutes and especially, the iron-pronged mbira of Zimbabwe, which fills three Nonesuch volumes. I was a guitar player, not a percussionist, and although I loved a good African drum blowout as much as the next 70s college kid, I derived a deeper pleasure from the polyphony of a reed flute ensemble in Burundi (from Nonesuch's Music from the Heart of Africa), a funky, lone lute thrumming away on the savannah of Niger (from West Africa: Drum, Chant & Instrumental Music), or the intertwining, polyrhythmic melodies of the mbiras on what remains my favorite Nonesuch volume, The Soul of Mbira: Traditions of the Shona People, recorded by ethnomusicologist Paul Berliner in 1972.

"In those days," Berliner told me in a recent interview, "the mbira was largely regarded as a toy in this country. The small, Hugh Tracey kalimba had made it here, but it was initially sold by Creative Playthings." With his book, The Soul of Mbira (University of Chicago Press), and his two Nonesuch releases--the other being Shona Mbira Music--Berliner revealed the stunning subtlety and complexity of Shona music, and also the mbira's use in possession ceremonies. Far from a plaything, this was one of the most spiritually charged instruments anywhere, and along with many other Americans, I fell under its spell. Nothing so dramatizes the impact of the seminal Nonesuch recordings as the worldwide network of mbira and marimba players that has grown up since the early 1970s. On the west coast, there are now popular mbira camps, Shona music retreats, and lots of ensembles and bands playing some hybrid of Zimbabwean traditional music. Check out the website www.mbiraboston.org for a glance at the movement's local chapter. Other factors are important in the mbira success story too, but ask any veteran American mbira player where he or she first heard Shona music, and you'll likely hear about the Nonesuch Explorer Series.

The Africa volumes were released between 1969 and 1983. It was a year later, in 1984, that I first saw a concert by King Sunny Ade and his Nigerian juju orchestra. That experience triggered the fascination with contemporary African music that has largely determined the direction of my life and work ever since. Today, listening back to the Nonesuch recordings, I am struck by how many of my later pop discoveries were predetermined by listening to traditional music. I've devoted years of my life to studying and writing about Thomas Mapfumo of Zimbabwe, an artist whose music grows directly out of the mbira tradition that Berliner documented. Stephen Jay's grooving recording of an 8-year old Djerma boy playing one-string kountougi lute on Drum, Chant & Instrumental Music has all the key characteristics of the desert blues music later popularized by Ali Farka Toure of Mali, and by my new favorite West African roots band, Mamar Kassey of Niger. The snap of fingertips on skin making a staggered rhythmic figure under the racing, cyclic, pentatonic melodies of that thin, buzzing, high-pitched string is one of the most rocking sounds in world music, and there it was, on vinyl in 1976. Hamza El Din's 21-minute oud and vocal extravaganza on Escalay (The Water Wheel): Oud Music delivers the essential magic of North Africa's soothing, meditative music, so often marketed these days using the buzz word "trance."

Not all of the Nonesuch recordings stand the test of time so well. Some suffer from the virtual impossibility of capturing legions of drums and voices with just one or two microphones. On the lead track from David Fanshawe's 1975 release, East Africa: Ceremonial & Folk Music, we move through a ceremony in Uganda, focusing now on this singer, now on these drums, and so on in an intriguing but not altogether satisfying aural meander. On the other hand, Fanshawe's recording of 60 men playing one note Aluar horns in wavering synchrony is overwhelming. The first Nonesuch release, Ghana: High-Life & Other Popular Music, focuses on a 1960s art band, Saka Acquaye and His African Ensemble. Acquaye studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts before returning to Ghana to combine traditional music from various parts of Africa with jazzy vibes, calypso and highlife rhythms, and Western arranging techniques. The band is interesting, but compared with the truly influential Ghanaian and Nigerian highlife acts of that era, it seems like a novelty, perhaps given misleading importance by its inclusion in the Nonesuch series.

It is intriguing to learn how some of these recordings were made. Paul Berliner told me, "I think the Nonesuch recordings were done by people with very different backgrounds and goals. There were some who considered themselves explorers with a microphone, who were interested in sampling music and bringing it back. My interest overlapped with those people's, but I was there not as a recording engineer, rather as a student of the music, and an aspiring ethnomusiciologist."

Stephen Jay went to Africa specifically to learn to play music, and only made his two Nonesuch albums as an afterthought. Jay had studied composition with John Cage and been inspired by the Nonesuch Burundi release, Music from the Heart of Africa. In West Africa, his goal was to make and play local drums. "It took about six months for anybody to take me seriously in any of the countries I went to," Jay said in a recent interview. "Once you're in there with your hands on the instrument and they can see you have some ability and sensitivity about it, and that you're playing the music for sort of the same reasons they do--to be part of that energy, that life force that is the music--all of a sudden you become like one of them. Once they saw this machine that I had, and what it could do, they would be constantly rounding up players who wanted to hear themselves."

When Jay got his tapes home and hooked up with Theresa Sterne, coordinator of the Explorer Series, the real work begun. "She was incredible," recalled Jay, "an absolutely amazing woman. She would hear a cut and say, 'That sounds like a third cut,' or 'That sounds like something that would come near the end.' Then she got into it to the N'th degree, where we'd go over and over and over these sequences, and if we changed one thing, we'd have to rework the whole sequence again."

Jay went on to create his own African-inspired solo works, and to play bass with everyone from Wayne Shorter and Joe Higgs to Weird Al Yankovic. He has long since lost touch with the musicians he recorded for Nonesuch. "Most of the people I recorded were so far out in the boonies," he said. "They had very little contact with the cities. I think they just kind of went on with their lives as farmers and casual musicians."

This is probably true for most of the artists on the Nonesuch Africa recordings. Here again, the Hamza El Din's volume and Zimbabwe releases stand apart. El Din went on to live, teach and record in San Francisco, making a career of his entrancing nostalgia for his lost homeland, Nubia. Dumisani Maraire, who leads the ensemble on The African Mbira: Music of the Shona People (1971), became an important educator and performer in Seattle, presiding over a cross-continental musical dynasty that has survived his death in 1999. And many of the musicians Paul Berliner recorded a year later, later had international careers, including virtuoso mbira players Ephat Mujuru and Cosmas Magaya, and singer Mude Hakurotwi, who was a major influence on Thomas Mapfumo. An educator, composer and performer, Magaya was recently on tour here, and he told me what it was like to be a young mbira player, son of a spirit medium in a country at war with its white colonial rulers, and to have a white American show up with a tape recorder.

"We were fighting for our liberation," Magaya recalled. "So to see a white man coming who wanted to be associated with us, and wanted to learn something from us, I just thought, 'Maybe this is again another somebody. Like, you know, Rhodes came to Rhodesia wanting to do some things and wound up taking the whole country." Magaya described how he and his fellow musicians tested Berliner, waking him in the middle of the night to go and play at a ceremony, forcing him to stay awake, and to play until his fingers bled. "Sometimes we felt pity for him after seeing him bandaging his thumbs with tape."

Eventually, Berliner was allowed to record a spirit possession ceremony for The Soul of Mbira. The exuberant, otherworldly track, "Nhemamusasa," is among the jewels of the entire Explorer Series. Magaya says it is still played at special sessions of the Zimbabwe parliament, and was even featured at the funeral of the country's late vice-president, Joshua Nkoma. Magaya says that the subsequent international interest in mbira music greatly impressed young Zimbabweans, encouraging them to give traditions they had been taught to dismiss as primitive, a second look. So the Nonesuch Explorer legacy is bigger than a creative jumpstart to rock musicians, pop producers, and music writers. Africans too had their lives changed by these recordings.