By Ed Ward

Once, there was no such thing as world music. The world made music, of course, but the term was actually invented a little over 15 years ago by a bunch of enthusiasts in London, a couple of whom I knew. What led them to coin the phrase was a shared love of a huge variety of mostly non-Western stuff, some of which you could call "folk," some "pop," and some "classical" within the traditions of its culture.

I knew these people because their journeys of exploration were similar to mine: from a strange piece of music heard on the radio or at a festival, to finding an album of it, usually on a folklore-specialist label or a pop label set up by expatriates, to going out and finding it in the wild and recording it. I never made that third step, but I was happy to buy the discoveries because as a teenager I had been opened up to the world's sounds by the Nonesuch Explorer series, issued between 1967 and 1984.

Now, Nonesuch is remastering and reissuing the Explorer series on CD, in thematic chunks of seven to 15 discs each, the last of which will hit the stores in February 2005. So far, the Africa and Indonesia/South Pacific bundles have come out, with Tibet/Kashmir due in June and Latin America/Caribbean in October of this year. As with the original LPs, these discs are offered at a discount price, to make it easier for impecunious adventurers to afford them.

The Explorer series was hardly the first attempt to document the world's music, but it was the best so far. There were the academic publications, dry field recordings, invariably excerpts because of the limitations of the recording equipment. Some of these, in the early 1950s, found their way to Moses Asch's legendary Folkways label in New York, where, as the Ethnic Folkways series, they came adorned with identical covers featuring a woodcut of a naked man playing a harp. Each had a thick booklet with fearsome academic prose that did little to elucidate what was in the grooves. On the other hand, they were often available at the public library.

The ethnomusicologists whose recordings wound up on Nonesuch, though, had some great advantages. They had amazing recording gear, usually stereo, as often as not one of those Swiss-made Nagra tape recorders whose reliability and sound quality are still unmatched. This enabled them to record entire ceremonies and classical pieces, since the only time constraint was the length of the tape. They also seem to have shed some of the is-it-really-folk-music prejudices of their predecessors, realizing that not only had the cultures they worked in developed their own popular musics in urban areas, but that their adoption of Western instruments and forms usually bent the foreigners' tools to their own indigenous scales and rhythms.

So you could walk into a record store and, for two bucks, pick up Hamza al-Din's "Escalay (The Water Wheel)," a recital of Nubian folk and semi-classical music on the oud, the lute's ancestor. Or "A Bell Ringing in the Empty Sky," stunning, quiet pieces for the Japanese bamboo flute, the shakuhachi. Or the first widely available recordings of Bulgarian women's choral music, classical Indian vina music, Persian music for the santur, or Balinese and Javanese gamelan music played on ringing bowls and drums. You could, it's also fair to say, also wind up with a dud like the fake Ghanaian highlife album, which sounds to me, now that I have some context, like music made by a friendly Socialist country for export, not the blazing dance music of highlife's E.T. Mensah, which is what Ghanaians were really dancing to.

The other thing Nonesuch did right was to deal with these things in depth without getting boring. If you bought, say, one of the Zimbabwean mbira records, recordings of the twangy little thumb piano with quavery vocals, and found its trance-like spell irresistible, there were a couple more for you, as there were seven more gamelan albums and a couple of other Bulgarian albums for those who wanted more.

For the merely curious, each of the geographic groups had a sampler album like "Africa: Music From the Nonesuch Explorer Series," from which you could perhaps discover that you liked the mbira much more than the drumming you'd expected to like. Wisely, Nonesuch is reissuing the samplers, too.

So far, the highlight for me has been the gamelan music, recorded on site, with the ambient sounds of birds dimly audible through the ringing, the squeaking of the fiddle-like rebabs, and the sometimes reedy singing. A recording like that invokes the space in which it was recorded, and getting into the cyclical forms of the music and the non-Western tonality is easy.

As for the worst aspect of the project, it was realizing that I'll have to wait exactly three years before the CD release of the 15 Indian classical records, which utterly changed the way I listened to music and made it possible for me to hear free jazz and electronic music with the right attitude. By then, the rest of the series will be out and thousands of people like me will have rediscovered similar life-changing recordings, and, with luck, many thousands more will be exposed to folk, pop and classical recordings of other cultures -- the original world music.

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Mr. Ward last wrote for the Journal on a digital-media festival in Linz, Austria.