WHEN JAZZ FLUTIST Herbie Mann died earlier this month, the New York Times ran an obituary that cast him as a runaway Jew who returned to his roots only three years before his death. Times critic Peter Keepnews explained that though Mann was born in Brooklyn as Herbert Jay Solomon, Mann spent his life elsewhere: melding jazz, blues, and soul with the music of Africa, Latin America, Japan, and the Middle East. It wasn't until 2000 that he finished recording Eastern European Roots, an album that featured the traditional music of Mann's Eastern European heritage.

"I wanted this to be my musical statement above all the rest," Mann is quoted as saying in his obituary's last lines. "I love 'Memphis Underground.' I loved the Brazilian music I played. But this is finally me. For the first time I think it's really me."

For Mann, there was apparently no balance between his own tradition and the music of the cultures he dedicated his life to. The "real" him could only be one without the other. As Keepnews put it, "After four decades of multicultural exploration, Mr. Mann finally got around to the music of his own Jewish heritage," as if the return was expected and inevitable, as if Mann's multicultural experiments with what the Times dubbed "exotic cultures" and the traditions of his own past were mutually (and obviously) exclusive. The true self, Mann's obit tried to tell us, is the original self; our true identities cannot be found in cross-cultural encounters, but in a return to pasts that, we are asked to believe, belong to us and to us alone.

Mann's sentiments stick out in today pop's landscape, where it's become increasingly hard to find musicians who cling to a notion of a true cultural self free of any trace of multicultural encounter. More and more, musicians may be joining Mann on a return to tradition, but they take the opposite route: they get traditional by engaging with other cultures. Take HipHopKhasene, the debut album from Solomon and Socalled, which offers a musical rendering of a traditional Jewish wedding (from vows to dance-floor celebration) by combining Sophie Solomon's klezmer violin with Socalled's breakbeats and samples from cantors and Jewish instructional wedding records. Yiddish vocalist Michael Alpert plays the role of the badchon – the tongue-twisting wedding jester that no old-school Jewish wedding is without (at one point he drops Hasidic chants over bouncing 2-step beats) – klezmer clarinetist David Krakauer sits in next to heavy metal guitar blasts, and there's a guest rapper who goofs as "The Real Slim Litvak."

There are moments of traditionalism – the mournful lullaby of "Dobriden," the improvised Turkish taksim "Electro Taxim" – but mostly HipHopKhasene has fun putting tradition into question. Beats skip beneath frailachs and loops of breaking glass get spliced with violin solos, all sounding like DJ Shadow set loose in a Hebrew school AV room. "The whole concept of the project was to raise a lot of postmodern questions about what is authenticity in music," Solomon said in a recent BBC interview. Indeed, hip-hop's culture of sampling and beat collage is the very thing that makes this return to an ancient Jewish ritual possible (and a blast to listen to). HipHopKhasene is proudly, and playfully, authentic to its subject: the Jewish wedding in the age of hip-hop. The album's cover collage preps you the best with its cutouts of four Hasidic men holding the wedding chuppah pasted next to graffiti spray cans, samplers, mixers, and keyboards.

The cover of Akwid's Proyecto Akwid uses the same cultures-collide approach, but instead of hip-hop and the hora, it's hip-hop and Mexico's Pacific coast. Sporting shaved heads and football jerseys, brothers Francisco and Sergio Gomez sit on the hood of a convertible Porsche between the two worlds they straddle: the tubas, beer, cacti, and Mexican flags of Michoacan, and the palm trees and office buildings of downtown Los Angeles. The Gomez brothers left Michoacan for South Central L.A. when they were young kids, and their music is L.A. hip-hop done Mexican-migrant style, "tipo Hollywooood": clapping g-funk beats and Spanish-language rhymes built on top of the brassy horns of traditional Mexican regional music, especially the marching oompah of banda sinaloense. They even throw in Juan Gabriel choruses and team up with two of Mexican L.A.'s most beloved regional icons: Jenni Rivera and Adan Sanchez.

Akwid haven't always known how to fuse their Mexican regional affiliations with the DJ Quik they grew up with in South Central. In their previous incarnation as Juvenile Style, the Gomez's rapped in English without nodding to the Chalino Sanchez tapes they were listening to at home. "When you're young and you're growing up in an environment that is totally different than your culture, you find yourself being forced to adapt and assimilate," Sergio Gomez explains in the band's press release. "Only to later evolve and reunite with your own roots."

Like Mann's Eastern European odyssey, then, Proyecto is also a roots reunion, but Akwid refuse to sacrifice one world for the other. As Mexican immigrants raised in working-class South Central – where banda and hip-hop compete for radio dominance – the "really me" could never be just banda or just hip-hop, but both, at once.