With a syncopated flute splashing over pounding drums, cumbia began as a mating ritual between African slaves and the indigenous population on Colombia’s Caribbean coast.

When Curro Fuentes added explosive horns and cranked up the bass, he helped fuel a sonic revolution that spread throughout Latin America.

In recent years, cumbia’s galloping beats have burst onto the global dance scene and boomeranged back to its homeland, in the form of popular young Colombian bands like Bomba Estereo.

Now, a new critically-acclaimed compilation goes back to where it all began in Cartagena, with Cartagena! Curro Fuentes & The Big Band Cumbia and Descarga Sound of Colombia 1962 - 1972.

“He was recording bands for a new age of record production, fulfilling a demand for hot danceable music,” says Will Holland, a Colombia-based British musician known as Quantic who helped rediscover and select the songs on Cartagena!, which have never been released outside Colombia before.

“He was busy putting together supergroups of musicians solely for the purpose of recording, something new in a record industry that was evolving by the minute,” Holland said, adding that collectors find Fuentes’ records “irresistible.”

Over the years, cumbia’s pliable rhythm lent itself to all kinds of new sounds, from swinging Latin big bands in the 1950s to psychedelic rock and early salsa in the 1960s, and it spread like wildfire through South and Central America and eventually into Texas.

Fuentes, who produced his label’s albums, emphasized percussion and electric bass, laid on heavy horns and added other Colombian Caribbean styles to create a raw, danceable sound.

Fuentes’ brother founded Colombia’s most important label, Discos Fuentes, the first to record the music of the black and native people of the Caribbean coast, which had been ignored by elite whites who lived inland.

Curro stubbornly remained in Cartagena after his family’s label moved inland because he wanted to go off on his own, said Roberto Gyemant, a music writer from Oakland, California, who wrote the liner notes for “Cartagena!”

“He was the younger rebel brother, and he had a really weird, amazing vision and ear,” Gyemant said. “His sound is ridiculous.”

The story of Fuentes’ rediscovery began, oddly enough, in Panama where Gyemant began poking around a radio station’s old records and fell in love with the quirky sounds of Panamanian pop from the 1960s and ‘70s.

Gyemant visited nearly every radio station in the small tropical country, buying up as much vinyl as he could where it hadn’t been thrown away yet.

Back in California with more records than he knew what to do with, Gyemant put some up for sale on eBay and soon found a very enthusiastic buyer: Miles Cleret, the British founder of Soundway, who had preserved countless tracks of West African pop music that were on the verge of extinction and had set his sights on Latin America.

As Gyemant kept selling old records to Cleret, one obsessive collector feeding the obsession of another, Cleret encouraged Gyemant to make a record of his own: a compilation that became the first installment in a trilogy called Panama! that earned praise from critics.

Gyemant’s travels naturally took him south of Panama’s border to Colombia. He also wrote the liner notes for Soundway’s Colombia! The Golden Age of Discos Fuentes 1960-76.

During several trips to Cartagena, Gyemant, Holland and Cleret dug through crates of vinyl, looking for Curro’s records.

Decades of civil war left Cartagena relatively unscathed, but record collecting was a luxury few could afford, so plenty of recorded music has been lost forever, Holland said.

“Colombian musical expression is constantly there, there are always fantastically talented people making very beautiful music, and I think there always will be,” he said. “You have to understand, music is an integral part of daily life ... The key difference in Curro’s age was that Curro was there listening, recording and promoting this, and it had commercial value.”

It will be difficult to top Cartagena! Colombia is no longer off the beaten path for vinyl collectors and labels, Gyemant said, and the competition for old records has become intense over the past five years.

“A lot of people are going there from Europe and the US, so the super rare ones are gone, and the ones that are not that rare are still hard to find,” he said. “But we had a phenomenal time looking.”