by Don SnowdenFirst off, Rumba 'Round Africa is pretty tremendous musically, full of simple but catchy African rhumba variants recorded in the '60s and featuring endlessly inventive guitarist Jerry Malekani. Secondly, Gary Stewart's excellent liner notes describe another little-known phase in the odyssey of how Congolese music derived from Cuban rhumba rhythms became a pan-African sound. Ry-Co Jazz spent much of the late '50s and early '60s playing throughout West Africa with a home base in Senegal, but the story doesn't stop there. The eye-opener is that the group spent four years in the French Antilles starting in 1968, recording a lot with early zouk producer Henri Debs and thus sowing influential seeds among a musical generation that grew up to play zouk (Kassav'\u002FPeter Gabriel keyboard player Jean-Claude Naimro even played on a Ry-Co Jazz LP then). Zouk, of course, came to have an enormous influence on West African music in the late '80s, so that circle of music influences across the Middle Passage remains unbroken. The fact that Malekani went on to become Manu Dibango's guitar player for 20 years (he could still be now, actually) after Ry-Co Jazz split up in 1972 merely rates as a footnote in this context. ...