by John Oseid

There once was a time when you might have plunked down a Jackson or two for a mega-sized music compilation only to discover it was filled with warmed-over tunes by minor artists. Thankfully, those days are mostly behind us music junkies. To wit, the producers of the new series A Night in Music selected their songs with curatorial eyes (or ears, as the case may be). The ten CDs, covering France, Italy, Spain, and seven Latin American nations, are crammed with prime cuts from epic artists. And as a bonus, the series' Web site features handy travel links and full-length samples from each nation.

I chose to start with A Night in Colombia and the 15 tracks are so terrific I haven't even gotten to the next dics. For the first time I'm hearing original recordings of the country's rural genres that mix Afro, indigenous, and European influences and have made Colombia's Caribbean region one of the Western Hemisphere's great music hotbeds. The best-known genres, vallenato and especially cumbia, have now spread far and wide thanks to a new generation of homegrown stars like Shakira and multi-Grammy winner Juanes, who work traditional sounds into their pop and rock hits.

Above is a scratchy black-and-white clip of Emiliano Zuleta playing his trusty accordion and singing "La Gota Fria" (The Cold Drop), a hit he composed in 1929. By contrast, here's an early 1990s video of Carlos Vives performing a kick-ass version of the song that helped turn him from a telenovela star into a rock giant. Julio Iglesias and Gloria Estefan have covered the song as well.