- By Ed Ward

Andy Palacio's story started sometime in the 17th century, when a ship filled with Africans bound for slavery was wrecked off the Honduran coast and the survivors were taken in by the Arawak Indians. Or maybe it started even earlier than that, when local legend has it that some African explorers arrived and decided not to go home. Either way, the 46-year-old was born a Garifuna, a member of a unique Afro-Amerindian people with a rich heritage of music and song who have long lived in Guatemala, Honduras and Belize.

And Nicaragua, too, as Mr. Palacio discovered in college, when he went there from Belize to train as a teacher and ran into an old man who couldn't restrain his excitement at hearing a youngster speak the Garifuna language. That man had long ago resigned himself to the fact that, thanks to assimilation, his generation would be the last in Nicaragua to know and use it. "This established a certain consciousness in me, that there was the frightening prospect that we could wind up in Belize like the Garifuna in Nicaragua," Mr. Palacio says while waiting to go on stage with his band, the Garifuna Collective, in Berlin's Quasimodo Club. "I did want to be a teacher. But this seemed important, and I'd already been composing songs for my own amusement."

When in his mid-20s, after a spell of teaching, Mr. Palacio became a star performing punta, Belize's home-grown Garifuna pop music. "Punta is similar to merengue or soca," he explains, "in that there's a catch phrase with call-and-response. It's very up-tempo, not very sophisticated." It was at this point that he turned things around. "I made a shift to establish to the nation that Garifuna music wasn't limited to this form. Having been in the public eye gave me a great deal of credibility."

Traditional Garifuna music is percussion-based, with beautifully harmonized vocals. The language used in some song-forms is particular to that kind of music. Furthermore, there are separate vocabularies for men and women, each of which contains long words denoting complex ideas. It's no wonder that in 2001 Unesco declared Garifuna culture and language a "Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity."

Mr. Palacio had set himself a serious challenge, but not an impossible one. In Louisiana, Cajun and Creole culture was dying out in the 1970s, and traditional Irish music was similarly endangered in the 1960s; but in both cases a younger generation came to the rescue, carefully balancing tradition and modernity. Nobody thinks of Irish music as endangered any more, and one has only to look at the many music festivals in Louisiana to see how things are flourishing there.

Gathering together a number of talented musicians from Belize and Honduras, Mr. Palacio formed the Garifuna All-Stars in 2001 and made the rounds of world music festivals. The response was good enough that he realized he was onto something, and the group morphed into the Garifuna Collective, which started recording five years ago with Belizean producer Ivan Duran in Hopkins Village, Belize. The group quickly discarded the electronic keyboards the All-Stars had used in favor of acoustic and electric guitars to support both the rhythmic elements and the melodies, a task overseen by the talented Rolando "Chichi" Sosa.

The results were released in February by the Vermont-based Cumbancha label as Wátina, and the Collective has been on tour since then, delighting audiences in America and Europe. (A major U.S. tour kicks off in Chicago on June 27 in Millennium Park, continuing to New York on the 28th for two shows, one at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Rhythm and Blues Fest, and the other in Manhattan at the club S.O.B.'s. Further tour dates are available at www.cumbancha.com.)

If the show at the Quasimodo is anything to go by, Americans are in for a serious treat. The complex rhythms demand attention, and quickly resolve themselves into a completely irresistible groove. When the melodies kick in on top of them, the lushness is overwhelming. One of the most attractive rhythms the band uses is called paranda -- a rhythm both loping and up-tempo, thanks to the eccentric placement of its accents. And when it makes its appearance, so does the Garifuna Collective's secret weapon.

During the sound-check at the Quasimodo, I'd noticed a little old man sitting quietly drinking a beer, and at dinner afterward, he sat across from me, not saying a word. Back at the club, after I'd talked to Mr. Palacio, I was waiting for the show to start when the man appeared from backstage and made his way to the men's room. He stopped at my table and said, very quietly, "Soon you will hear me sing." Something of an understatement: Paul Nabor is 79 years old, and a master of paranda song. He stands, hands spread wide, opens his mouth, and a reedy voice issues forth with such power you're afraid he's going to keel over. He vibrates intensely and commands total attention, and the more he sings, the stronger he gets. With all due respect to Mr. Palacio's stage presence, Mr. Nabor is a show-stealer. It's no wonder they use him to close the performance.

As attractive as the Garifuna Collective is, though, the question of whether they're being effective in their rescue mission remains. "Right after the record came out, we played the Bliss Center for Performing Arts in Belize City," Mr. Palacio said. "It brought tears to my eyes: Belizean people don't come out for Belizean artists in those numbers! And then there's Dangriga, the biggest Garifuna community in Belize. Some of my musicians are from there, and one of them told me that when the CD came out, he stopped by a rehearsal studio and heard a young band trying to work some of the songs out with keyboards." A second record, with the Collective backing a group of women singers, is about to be released.

Mr. Palacio, who is also deputy administrator of the National Institute of Culture and History, ruefully speculated that in five years he'd probably be at his desk. But then he corrected himself. "This is what I want to be doing. If we can keep this momentum for a couple of years . . ."