As seven-year-veteran A&R head for Putumayo Records, the world's leader in global-music coffeehouse compilations, and something of its own musical genre, Jacob Edgar has seen so-called "world music" go from a niche-marketed extravagance for the adult-alternative set to an integrated part of the Western music business. So it's little surprise he's launching Cumbancha, a record label that seems, at least from its initial effort, intent on releasing music from around the world without that ever-stigmatizing marketing phrase.

In other words, Ska Cubano's ¡Ay Caramba! is music rooted at once in Cuba, Jamaica and London, but rather than dwell on its worldliness, Ska Cubano chooses to just get on with making great music.

At Ska Cubano's forefront are South London ska veteran Natty Bo (presumably not named for Maryland's finest beer), and Cuba-raised Jamaican Beny Billy, who claims through-and-through to be the reincarnation of Cuban singer Beny Moré. For good measure, the band employs legendary Jamaican-ska trumpeter Eddie "Tan Tan" Thornton and Cuban bassist Rey Crespo, once bassist for Omara Portuondo, amongst others.

¡Ay Caramba! effortlessly melds the shuffling ska beat with mambo rhythms and the bold, nearly operatic bombast of Cuban son. “Cachita,” for example, could be the Skatalites, with its ringing cymbal rides and punctuating horn lines. But it could also be Ibrahim Ferrer, as Beny Billy’s voice rises and falls with such machismo, such a borderline-hammy '50s croon.

Of course, what Edgar's Cumbancha label knows now, German label Piranha has known for years: Take away confining "fusion" pigeonholes, stop lumping all non-Anglo-American music together, and good musicians will simply produce good music.

Thus, when Piranha's dime landed Algerian pianist and vocalist Maurice El Médioni in New York City to record under the watchful production and furious percussion of Cuban musician extraordinaire Roberto Rodriguez, there was little need to dirty the waters with talk of 'rai and son crossover or Francophonic African mournful mambo.

Descarga Oriental sounds as natural as could be El Médioni's sweetly sad rai melodies and swirling piano lines mesh with Rodriguez's insistent and dominating Cuban rhythms as though they’d always been linked. This seamless melding is especially apparent on the furiously percussive "Oran Oran" and the gracefully hypnotic Oh! Ma Belle (complete with darbuka hand drums lending to the subtle taste of the Orient).

Perhaps what we see most in Ska Cubano and the El Médioni-Rodriguez collaboration is a new era of Cuban music. An era in which that very Cuban-ness becomes less of a musical story; in which Cuba’s dominant musical gene is taken for granted, and can be set aside as merely another factor in the world’s musical progression. That 1950’s Cuba melds flavorfully with ska, calypso, rai and just about any other rhythm-based music comes as no surprise. That the music business is finally allowing that melting to happen, simply and subtly, is a joy.