At the beginning of King Sunny Ade's record-making years, in 1967, he led his Green Spot Band in the sweet polyrhythmic Nigerian pop style called juju, and the songs were short: mostly three-minute lilts. By the early 1970s they'd stretched out, often up to fill an LP side, more reflective of the band's live performances. When his music was marketed to North America for three records in the early 1980s, the track lengths shrank again in hopes of radio play. By his last Western-market album, in 2000, some of the keyboard textures became Europop glossy, but the song lengths crept back up to nearly 10 minutes.

The longest track on the new double-disc album "Baba mo Tunde" runs past 31 minutes. The new, 16-piece version of his African Beats band recorded it recently in a Pennsylvania studio, with six chorus singers behind Ade's soft lead vocals, two players of the talking drum and the marvelous trap-set drummer Taiwo Sogo Ogunjimi-Oba. (The pedal-steel guitar, long an exotic mark in his band, is gone for now.)

And the music -- Yoruba praise-songs and parables with some English -- develops at its own pace. The longer songs shuttle through segments, cued at will by Ade, of vamping, solos, verses and chants. The epic title track changes key twice, each time in the middle of short, lovely guitar solos by Ade, after the 17- and 24-minute marks. Both the title track and "Baba Feran Mi" end almost abruptly after lengthy talking-drum solos -- expressions of vitality that our logic might put in the middle of a piece. These are strange and sometimes thrilling ways of bringing modulation and closure.

The hand-drumming through the album is light, precise and fixed, with the trap-set drums ebbing and flowing against it, constantly revising its patterns and stress beats. At 64, Ade is still a beguiling guitarist, making gestural, staccato phrases on top of the music, letting high notes sweep up or down and trail off, spiking the rhythm over the cyclic patterns of the band's other guitarist, Segun Kalajaiye.

The album sags on the second disc. After the high of the title song, the Philadelphia-based remixer King Britt put his hand to a remix of the track, using what sounds like a digital rhythm sequencer, and the 15-minute result chugs along rigidly, in contrast to with what Ade's band can generate in real time: music that feels like repetition but never actually does the same thing twice.

-- Ben Ratliff