(FORTUNE Magazine) – CESARIA EVORA Mar Azul Nonesuch Records

To be glib, the trouble with "world music" is that it's in a different language. Plenty of folks are perfectly happy to pick up a disk of African juju rave-ups or Bulgarian choral drones simply because it's a slick thing to drop into the stereo during a dinner party. It makes you look smart; it purrs, "I am a cosmopolite, adept in the ways of the global economy."

Honestly, though, the average American's taste for the exotic doesn't run much deeper than those ersatz Arabian riffs in Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir." World music makes a lovely brooch, but it rarely pierces the heart.

Cesaria Evora, on the other hand, performs world music that you don't have to pretend you understand. Evora, who sings in Portuguese, is known as the empress of the morna, a languid lament from the Cape Verde Islands. The morna sounds like the lapping of waves on a beach; it requires no translation. The gently churning rhythms, the voice awash in heartbreak--even ears weaned on nothing more foreign than the "Macarena" respond to Evora's music with an instant jolt of passion. Mar Azul is much more than a curious topic of chitchat for your next barbecue; it's beautiful enough to stop conversation in its tracks.

--J.G.