When Baaba Maal takes the stage, you know you're in the presence of a master. He leaps and whirls and flickers like a flame, at the heart of a maelstrom of sound and color. His lucent voice pierces the dense air above the crowd. From the opening thunder of percussion to the evening's final fading note, Baaba exudes rare jubilance and fervor, and a palpable pride in the consummate musicians of his band, Daande Lenol.

Djam Leelii: The Adventurers is the iridescent, otherwordly album that introduced Americans to Baaba Maal and Mansour Seck. The recording was an outpouring of love for home by the two young Senegalese men living in Paris in 1982. Musically Djam Leelii is a joy and a revelation. Veiled in echoing nocturnal sounds of their homeland -- gurgling water, frog and insect choruses -- two voices and two guitars portrayed the life they had left behind. For some of us it was an early test of West African acoustic musi, a taste that would prove addictive.

Gorgeous as the album is, some of its potency derives from the yearning and passion that drench each song. The raw emotion of "Ko Wone Maayo," (recorded at the same sessions in Paris and included on Palm Pictures' re-release of the album in 1998), lingers long after the two young voices fade. "Mi yeew nii" (I miss you) they sing to their neighbors and families in the village of Podor, in northern Senegal...