Using rumba rhythms, touching up songs with harmonies out of Monk and Mozart, this is an always clean and ruminating pair.

In the 20th century, African musicians heard their trans-Atlantic kin, and they reappropriated elements like rumba rhythm and gospel harmony.

Its songs mix crisply defined sections with salsa's extended vamps (or montunos); some also put a smooth, romantic veneer on the danceable rumba rhythms.

Foxtrot, Charleston and rumba rhythms dominated.

Yerba Buena meshes rumba rhythms, and other Afro-Cuban and Caribbean styles, with gutsy, distorted guitars to create pan-American party music with deep roots.

Senegal Cuban music swept across Africa from the 1940's through the 60's as guitar bands from Congo and elsewhere mixed rolling, swaying rumba rhythms with their African analogues.

Congo gave the world some of the most exuberant guitar music anywhere: soukous, built on reclaimed rumba rhythms and twinkling intertwined guitar lines.

In Cuba, however, the oldest rumba rhythms - particularly the popping fusillades that add up to the vintage rumba beat called guaguanco - are ubiquitous.

While she's a passable singer, she leads a superb soukous band that backs up her hip-swiveling action with buoyant rumba rhythms and endless, gleaming strings of intertwined guitar lines.

Yondo Sister, from Congo, is one of the leading female singers in soukous, with its twining guitars and repatriated rumba rhythms.