The age of innocence

Archive recordings are all the rage, as a host of musical styles fills the record shops

Even without the recent war, swooping round the globe to catch qawwali in Pakistan and nose-flutes in Tonga had begun to look like a pampered Nineties luxury, as swathes of the world turned hostile to Western gawpers. Moreover, the world's musical languages are under threat, and when a language dies, resuscitation is impossible. All this makes archive recordings of supreme importance, so it's nice to find them increasingly filling the shops.

The Rounder label now offers 20 CDs from the vast archive collected by world music's founding father, Alan Lomax, whose Mississippi recordings – launching Muddy Waters and Big Bill Broonzy – were just the tip of the iceberg. Lomax's Caribbean collection pre-dates the Seventies vogue and reflects a now-lost innocence; the lullabies and work songs he recorded in Franco's Spain – in the teeth of fierce opposition from local musicologists – can no longer be heard. In Galicia he found a group of stone-cutters singing as they worked. After trying their song in simulated conditions, they decided it would sounded right if they hoisted a big rock for real. On the recording you can virtually hear the sinews crack. A pan-piper he recorded nearby supplied the basis for one of Miles Davis's Sketches of Spain.

The Italian Treasury that Lomax amassed for Rounder is aptly named. You can still hear the trallaleri in Genoa, but not with the polyphonic brilliance of 1954. His Italy is galvanised by new-minted political ballads, and rings with the sound of bagpipe and accordion. In Sicily, he found work songs by almond-sorters and lemon-pickers.

In 1977 Lomax was invited to choose the music to be sent into the cosmos on board the Voyager satellite. One of the recordings he selected is reissued this month – Golden Rain, recorded by the British musicologist David Lewiston in Bali. This formed part of the Nonesuch Explorers, a massive project that put world music on the commercial map long before the term itself was dreamt up.

The 92 LPs that constituted this panoptic view of five continents are currently being reissued as CDs by Warner. The first 20, covering Africa and Indonesia, are an indispensable map of the musical past. It's a revelation to listen to the Nonesuch Explorer of 1969, its music uncontaminated by Western influences. In Nubia: The Water Wheel, Hamza El Din showed what magic he and his oud could extract from blended Egyptian and Sudanese elements. In South Pacific: Island Music, that intrepid Brit David Fanshawe found gospel chants from the Cook Islands, nose-flutes and skulling chants from Tonga, plus conch curfews and New Year bamboo guns.

Meanwhile, the Wergo label has produced a box of surprises entitled Echoes of Africa: early recordings 1930s-1950s. Thanks to the mélange of musical styles brought in by migrant workers from India and the Middle East, Africa was a musical melting-pot long before the styles that it gave to the Americas had come home transformed. Here is Sitti Binti Saad with her sweet miasma of accompanying strings. Here, too, is the bizarrely named Lagos Mozart Orchestra, with its slow march tunes led by trumpets and bass tubas. The contributions from South Africa are entrancing, notably the call-and-response stuff from the Darktown Strutters, whose lead singer was Johannesburg's more than adequate answer to Al Bowlly.