Soul Music.

As a teenager, I dug Duran Duran, Prince, the Specials, the Ohio Players, the Buzzcocks, the Jam, the Beatles, the Who, Cool and the Gang, George Clinton, even George Jones. And I coveted my father's collection of jazz, blues, and early 1960s lounge.

Now, twenty years later, I still base my musical tastes on what makes me bop my head. On a recent trip to my hometown of St. Louis, as I was traveling through central Illinois, where the radio landscape is as flat as the state's topography, the great Cuban bassist Israel "Cachao" Lopez and the Jamaican legends the Skatalites saved my wife and me from going nuts.

But this musical trip also caused me to revisit the notion of black music. When we talk about black music, we have a tendency to start in the Delta or Motown, or Philly, Compton, and Harlem. We don't usually mention Havana, Kingston, or Port-au-Prince. What attracted me to Cachao was mostly his music, but also that he looked like my dad's Uncle Lemuel. The brothers in the Skatalites looked like folks on my mom's side of the family. In essence, they all looked like family. The music industry needs to get away from the parochial indexes it has created to divide music and come up with something more substantial, worldly, and honest.

So, as the kids say, let's kick it old school for a little while, because these artists are, for lack of a better word, gods. While leaving Chicago, which is a frighteningly long ride through miles of traffic jams and suburban tract housing, I listened to Cachao Y Su Ritmo Caliente from Havana to New York. The music made me long for a place I've never been and a time several years before my birth.

This fifty-minute CD is split between two studio descargas, or jam sessions--the first in Havana in 1957, the other in New York in 1961. These descargas feature jazz legends from Cuba and the United States. But the central feature is Cachao and his double bass.

While every track on this CD rocks the house, it is the throbbing beat of "Caballos Locos," the last song on the album, that will touch your soul. Cachao is joined by Marcelino Valdes on timbales, Frank Anderson handling the piano, and trumpeters Clark Terry and Jimmy Nottingham in a beat that is as cool as it is kinetic. The CD highlights the fusion of Cuban and American jazz influences. It is clean without being antiseptic, soulful without being sentimental. If your head ain't rockin' when you listen to this tune, then you are seriously devoid of funk.

But this masterpiece shouldn't be that big of a surprise. Cachao was born in 1918 to a great musical tradition, with more than fifty bass players in his extended family. He began playing bongos, then learned to play trumpet, piano, and the double bass. At the age of twelve, he became a member of the Havana Symphony Orchestra.

While he is widely loved and honored by fellow jazz artists in Cuba and around the world, it wasn't until the 1992 documentary Cachao ... Como Su Ritmo No Hay Dos, produced and directed by actor Andy Garcia, that Cachao began to earn the well-deserved star status in the United States that has come to him in recent years. Through Cachao, the world is blessed with the Mambo and Afro-Cuban jazz styles.

Two other Cuban musicians have fused a musical style rooted in the island of Jamaica.

Saxophonists Rolando Alphonso and Thomas "Tommy" McCook were both born in Cuba--Alphonso, in 1931, to a Jamaican mother and Cuban father, and McCook, in 1927, to Jamaican parents. Together, they helped form the Skatalites. Alphonso and McCook died last year while the band was on the road.

Stretching Out is a twenty-two-song tour de force along the long and winding road of Skaville. All the old boys were out to play. The CD is taken from tracks recorded on two summer nights in 1983 at the Blue Monk Gallery in Kingston, Jamaica. It was the summer between high school and college for me. I was in St. Louis, breaking up and making up and breaking up with my girlfriend and playing soccer with West Indians in Forest Park.

I wish I had been at the Blue Monk Gallery.

From "Freedom Sound," the first track--which in this version has an ominous, heavy, screw Britannia feeling--to the last track, "Welcome Back Home," the Skatalites do it up right. The Skatalites for this session were led by Alphonso and McCook, and featured Johnnie Moore (trumpet), Lester Sterling (alto sax), Jah Jerry Hinds (guitar), Lord Tanamo (vocals), Cedric "Baba" Brooks (tenor sax), Jackie Mittoo (piano), Lloyd Knibbs (drums), and Lloyd Brevett (acoustic bass).

This was a descarga in every sense of the word, with a natural flow from track to track and musical elements from Kingston, Havana, and West Africa. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the track "Latin Goes Ska."

Cachao and the Skatalites are a tribute to a proud Caribbean heritage that takes its musical roots from all over the place and blends them into what is best described as soul music.

Fred McKissack is a writer based in Chicago.