Olu Dara's been a jazz musician for over 30 years -- a noted avant-garde trumpet player with an achingly pure tone -- but he never released any records under his own name until 1998's In the World: From Natchez to New York. That record was startling for its almost total lack of trumpet; Dara instead concentrated on guitar and singing.

In the World was an amazing recording, it blended elements of the African griot with music from around the world: delta blues, Caribbean rhythms and a whole lot of highlife and socca attitude. Yet, it also had a simplicity that spoke directly to the listener, or at least to this listener.

The only downside was that In the World was mastered on a defective HDCD encoder: If you didn't have an HDCD player, you'd have never noticed anything wrong, but on a player with the HDCD chip, it would swing in and out of HDCD sync (a 6dB volume difference), making it unlistenable. So I'm careful which machines I feed it to.

No worries on Neighborhoods, though -- it sounds good on everything I've played it on.

Neighborhoods continues the themes and sound of In the World, and it integrates them all even more closely together. First off, it's relentlessly danceable -- there's a gentle, moving vibe that starts with the opening number, "Massamba" -- pure Afro-pop that Fela would have immediately appropriated -- and continues through "Tree Blues," where Dara emulates an mbira with his guitar.

Throughout the album, Dara sings lines that are deceptively simple, yet speak of universal truths. (It's hard to write that way, just try it sometime.) Lyrically and structurally, these songs have a looseness that demands listener participation -- and I take this as a sign of great art. Dara's vision is big enough to allow you to enter it -- in fact, it almost demands you enter it.

One indication of how completely Dara inhabits these songs is the great Bahamian classic "Out on the Rolling Sea," which has become so closely associated as to be identified with Joseph Spence. Dara's version is so completely his own that references to Spence are meaningless.

Olu Dara's musical vision is unique, but it takes elements that are familiar and combines them in ways you haven't heard before. That means that, even as you're hearing something completely new, it feels recognizable and comfortable. This makes for a uniquely pleasurable listening experience -- one that doesn't pale with true familiarity as far as I can tell.