In 1975, I was a freshman at Wesleyan University, which had recently begun offering postgraduate 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 12 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 though 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 from Burundi (on the Music from the Heart of Africa Explorer Series volume), a funky, lone lute thrumming away on the savanna of Niger (on West Africa: Drum, Chant & Instrumental Music), or the intertwining, polyrhythmic melodies of the mbiras on what remains my favorite volume, The Soul of Mbira: Traditions of the Shona People, which was recorded by ethnomusicologist Paul Berliner in 1972.

"In those days," Berliner told me recently, "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." In his book The Soul of Mbira (University of Chicago Press) and on his two Nonesuch Explorer reissues — the other being Shona Mbira Music — Berliner aims to introduce listeners to the stunning subtlety and surprising complexity of traditional Shona music made with the simple mbira. He also delves into the mbira’s ceremonial importance: far from being a plaything, it has deep spiritual value to the Shona. And as a college student, I fell under its spell. Indeed, nothing so dramatizes the impact these seminal Nonesuch recordings had in the West as the worldwide network of mbira and marimba players that began to emerge in the early ’70s. On the West Coast there are now mbira camps, Shona-music retreats, and popular ensembles who play hybrids of Zimbabwean traditional music. (There’s even local mbira action: www.mbiraboston.org details the activities of the movement’s Hub chapter.) When you ask veteran American mbira players where they first heard Shona music, the answer almost invariably includes Nonesuch’s Explorer Series.

The Africa volumes were initially released between 1969 and 1983. It was in 1984 that I first attended a concert by King Sunny Adé 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 as a critic and a musician. Today, listening to the reissued Nonesuch recordings, I’m struck by how many of my later pop discoveries were influenced by the traditional music on these seminal volumes. I’ve devoted years to studying and writing about Thomas Mapfumo of Zimbabwe, an artist whose music grows directly out of the mbira tradition that Berliner documented. The recording by Stephen Jay of an eight-year-old Djerma boy playing a one-string kountougi lute on West Africa: Drum, Chant & Instrumental Music has all the key characteristics of the desert blues later popularized by Ali Farka Touré of Mali, and by my current favorite West African roots band, Mamar Kassey of Niger. Hamza El Din’s 21-minute oud-and-vocal extravaganza on Explorer’s Escalay (The Water Wheel): Oud Music delivers the essential magic of North Africa’s soothing, meditative music, which is so often marketed these days with the buzz word "trance."

Not all the Nonesuch recordings stand up to the test of time. On the lead track of East Africa: Ceremonial & Folk Music, an Explorer Series album recorded by David Fanshawe in 1975, the problems inherent in trying to capture the various drums and voices of a ceremony in Uganda are patent: the recording focuses first on one singer, then on another, then on some drums, and so on in a meandering and not altogether satisfying fashion. Fanshawe’s field recording of 60 men playing one-note Aluar horns in wavering synchrony is, on the other hand, overwhelming.

With the benefit of hindsight, it’s also possible to question some of the choices made by the producers. The first Explorer 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 high-life rhythms, and Western arranging techniques. The result is interesting, but compared with the truly influential Ghanaian and Nigerian high-life groups who we now know were active in that era, Saka Acquaye and His African Ensemble are nothing more than a novelty act.

Nevertheless, it’s intriguing to learn how many of these recordings were made. Paul Berliner recalls, "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 but as a student of the music, and an aspiring ethnomusiciologist."

Stephen Jay had different motives: he was in Africa to learn how to play the music, and he made his two Nonesuch albums only as an afterthought. Jay had studied composition with John Cage and had 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. Once you’re in there with your hands on the instrument and they can see that 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 — suddenly you become like one of them. And once they saw this recording machine that I had, and what it could do, they would be constantly rounding up players who wanted to hear [recordings of] themselves."

When Jay got his tapes home and hooked up with Nonesuch’s Theresa Sterne, the coordinator of the Explorer Series, the real work began. "She was incredible, 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.’ We’d go over and over and over these sequences, and if we changed one thing, we’d have to rework the whole sequence."

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. 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 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 led the ensemble that in 1971 recorded The African Mbira: Music of the Shona People, became an important educator and performer in Seattle, presiding over a cross-continental musical dynasty that survived his death in 1999. And many of the musicians Paul Berliner recorded in 1972 went on to have international careers, including the 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 recently toured the US. When I caught up with him, he told me what it had been like to be a young mbira player, the 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. 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 describes 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. This exuberant, otherworldly track, "Nhemamusasa," is one of the true jewels of the Explorer Series. Magaya says that it is still played at special sessions of the Zimbabwe parliament and that it was even featured at the funeral of the country’s late vice-president, Joshua Nkoma. And he confirms that it wasn’t just young Westerners like myself whose lives were so greatly influenced by the music on the Explorer Series albums. The international interest in mbira music aroused by recordings like The Soul of Mbira encouraged young Zimbabweans to give traditions they had been taught to dismiss as primitive a second chance. Such is the legacy of the Nonesuch Explorer Series. And thanks to the ever-expanding market for world music, the cycle has begun all over again with the re-release of these now legendary recordings.