Album: Various Artists, Cumbia Cumbia 1 & 2 (World Circuit)

When these CD compilations of Colombian music from the Sixties through the Eighties were first issued in 1989 and 1993, they introduced the wider world to the infectious sound of the cumbia and its accordion cousin the vallenato.

Laidback but insistent, it's as close to reggae as to samba or mambo – a cantering lope edged with a gentle but persuasive rock-steady twitch courtesy of the rasping percussive scrape of the guiro and its metal cousin the guacharaca, a sound that goes straight to the hips. Atop these slinky, sinuous grooves, trombones and clarinets describe warm, spiralling figures – nowhere more persuasively employed than on Guillermo Gonzalez's whirling "Lupita" – that extend pan-cultural tentacles even further out, to salsa and klezmer music too. Irresistible.

DOWNLOAD THIS Lupita; La Pollera Colora; Se Me Perdió La Cadenita; Cumbia del Monte; Soledad