Various Artists

Read the works of underground comic illustrator Robert Crumb -- or see Crumb, the 1994 biographical film about him -- and you'll notice that the guy's obsessed with both strong women and obscure early-20th-century 78 rpm records. He's combined those passions to create the compilation Hot Women, which samples from his collection of '20s and '30s recordings by female singers from Latin America, the Caribbean, the Pacific Islands, southern Europe, northern and eastern Africa, and even the American South. In the album's subtitle, he designates those areas as "torrid regions," which in early-century parlance was a patronizing term for places seen as passionate and primitive. Whether or not he's being campy matters less than the fact that he's put together a unique global assemblage without indulging today's conventional, politically correct, and often condescending "world music" agenda.

At its worst, that agenda allows for mediocre compilations under an obligatory pretense that we're all culturally connected enough to enjoy all music. Refreshingly, Crumb makes no such claim -- he seems to have picked the tunes based simply on what he has and what he likes. In his well-researched, handwritten liner notes -- which, along with Hot Women's gatefold packaging, he illustrated with portraits of the artists -- Crumb admits that he'd previously been pretty ignorant about the compilation's singers themselves. He says that shouldn't matter to the listener, and he's right. Hot Women offers up two dozen pieces of raw, ardent, and diverse folk music sung by potent voices. Tunes like French Caribbean Leona Gabriel's sly proto-calypso "Liva," Brazilian Araci Côrtes' frenetic samba "Quero Sossego," and Cajun Cleoma Falcon's gorgeous "Blues Negres" stand both on their own and together, not as "world music," but as great music of the world, recorded in a bygone age and presented aurally and visually by a true expert.