The latticework of percussion could hold up a bridge. The warm pulse of congas and bongos, the multihued rapping of the cajón, the creepy rattle of teeth in a burro's jaw -- the strands of rhythm all interlock into a flexible weave, swaying at a tempo brisk enough to get the hips twitching, slow enough so the rivets glisten.

Then the voice comes in, winding between the beats. If it belongs to Eva Ayllón, it's smoky, mature and full of carnal energy. If it's Susana Baca's, it's an elegant, sandy murmur. If Pepe Vasquez is singing, it's at a James Brown boil, juiced enough to beam me instantly to a place I've never been: a hot, weathered nightclub in Lima, Peru.

Every so often, an intensely local corner of culture jumps a border and goes global. It happened to risotto, which comes from the rice-rich plains of the Italian north. It happened to hip-hop, born in the streets of the Bronx. And it's happening, fitfully, to the kitchen music that accompanied black families' Sunday lunches in the coastal lowlands of Peru.

I came to Afro-Peruvian music through the recordings of Susana Baca, who has infused the tradition with an intimate, patrician refinement, slipping her supple voice through the ever-changing net of drums, sometimes gliding into a beat long after everyone else has moved on. But it didn't take me long to work my way back to the music's populist roots in homes and restaurants. It is a form of music closely linked with food. "In my house when I was little, people sang as they cooked," Baca recalls. "The family danced, tossing a doll around. There were no instruments: People played on the trunk they kept clothes in, or on the tabletop, and they clapped. The main threads were voices and slapping palms."

From Lima to SoHo

It's a long way from the impoverished outskirts of Lima, where Baca grew up, to the SoHo loft where she spent a week recently planning a multimedia installation with an expatriate Peruvian artist. Her trajectory mirrors that of the music she sings. Born in 1944, she was a teenager when a few of Lima's white intellectuals and the odd North American scholar ventured into black townships with notepads and tape recorders, trying to preserve a largely undocumented tradition.

These days, Baca is one of a cohort of artists propagating that heritage abroad. On March 5, the folk music and dance troupe Peru Negro makes its second New York appearance, at the Rose Theatre in the Time Warner Center. Baca, having attracted the attention of David Byrne (who featured her in his 1995 anthology, "The Soul of Black Peru") and jazz musicians such as Marc Ribot, is holed up in a Woodstock studio recording her fourth international release.

If Baca appeals more to aficionados abroad, Ayllón has enough star power in Peru after a 30-year career to fill stadiums there. She, too, is making a play for international recognition: She recently moved to her husband's home state of New Jersey and released her first U.S. recording, "Eva! Leyenda Peruana" (Times Square Records), a raucous album thick with brass and bass that can make a stereo smoke but doesn't quite do justice to her presence onstage.

Then there is Pepe Vasquez, the ebullient and phenomenally talented scion of a musical dynasty. A local celebrity in Lima, he records sporadically and almost never tours, a fact his colleagues attribute to a lack of rigor and ambition. One CD, "Ritmo de negros," is available in the United States, and it's a high-octane humdinger.

The music of black Peru is actually neither purely black nor entirely Peruvian. The (mostly white) researcher-impresarios who taped village musicians in the 1950s and '60s were eager to distill a national culture out of local ones, and they repackaged the music they unearthed for the concert stage. Theirs was an eminently practical kind of scholarship in which the effort to preserve ancient memory merged with the pursuit of cultural pride and the desire to entertain.

Founded in 1969

Percussionist and choreographer Ronaldo Campos founded the group Peru Negro in 1969 as a living archive of folk dances, such as the raunchy alcatraz, which involves trying to light a partner's paper tail on fire. The left-wing military government that came to power in 1968 promoted indigenous culture, and Peru Negro and other groups benefited from state support for the dozen years until the political climate changed again. (Campos died in 2001; his son, Rony, now runs the group.)

Campos, along with poet Nicomedes Santa Cruz, composer Porfirio Vasquez (Pepe's father) and others, stitched scraps of remembered melody together with assorted contemporary techniques. The black pride movement of the late '60s and the '70s supplied ideological fuel to the revival, and musicians made much of the practices that survived the slave-ship passage and the overlords' attempts to eradicate them. Legend has it that when the Spaniards banned instruments, slaves simply took to slapping packing crates, from which was born the box drum called the cajón.

According to San Diego-based ethnomusicologist Heidi Feldman, Campos & Co. got a lot of help "Africanizing" their sound from other Latin-American musicians. "You can't say that any of it is a holdover from Yoruba music," Feldman says. "Much of what makes it sound African is really Afro-Cuban."

Trying to nail down the racial lineage of an amalgamated tradition is a hopeless task, especially in a country of mixtures. "En el Perú, quien no tiene de Inga, tiene de Mandinga," the saying goes. "In Peru, everyone has either Indian or African blood" -- and many people have both. So, for example, the line between the style of black musicians and the guitar-based urban waltzes of white creoles has always been hazy.

The late legend Chabuca Granda, whose CDs are sometimes bundled with newspapers as a way to boost circulation, was the grande dame of both. Today, Ayllón and Peruvian-born pop star Tania Libertad dip into white and black traditions with equal ease.

The distinction between the lowlands music of Baca, Ayllón, Vasquez and Peru Negro, and the pan-pipe-and-guitar numbers played by poncho-clad Andean Indians is less about race than geography. The towns of Chincha and Cañete, in the coastal desert south of Lima, are to the Afro-Peruvian landó what Memphis is to the blues and New Orleans is to jazz: holy towns where the musical oligarchies trace their roots. It's no coincidence that Baca, Campos and Vasquez are all members of the same southern clan, de la Colina.

Tracing evolution

So, in the migration from the village to the city to the international festival circuit, how much of the original style remains? It's an unanswerable question, in part because the musicians who have the clearest memories -- or who have relatives with those memories -- are those who engineered the music's evolution.

"The only people who really know what is traditional and what isn't are the Vasquez family and the Campos family," says Juan Morillo, Peru Negro's Los Angeles-based manager.

I asked Baca what authenticity means to her, and she described her years of research and her collection of field recordings, for which she plans to build a museum and a digital archive. She talked about recording the ancient dance called "Caracunde" and about finding many different versions of "Toro Mata."

Then she interrupted herself: "My music is not folkloric," she said. "Others have sung authentically, and I don't need to repeat that. I'm already authentic."

-Justin Davidson