Kicking off with a funky, yelping dance track that makes you wonder whether James Brown actually spent the 60s and 70s living on Colombia’s Pacific coast, this double CD of African-influenced numbers is practically a collector’s item. It helps that the in-depth liner notes feature some of the music’s original artwork, complete with rows of polo-necked gents with beatnik beards posing next to trucks, on motorbikes and in jungles. But more than that, the 43 tracks on this scorching compilation have been cherry-picked from the cavernous archives of Discos Fuentes studios, a facility that is to Colombia what Motown was to the US.

Here is salsa, cumbia, boogaloo, bomba and tropical funk, mixed up in a sonic blender and poured over African roots. Colombian music has long been reinvigorated and reinvented by the descendents of enslaved Africans who eventually migrated from plantations to cities; much of the hot, playful sound heard here is down to legendary producer Julio Ernesto ‘Fruko’ Estrada – head honcho of Fruko y Sus Tesos, a band whose musical irreverence and funky reach is showcased here. Standouts include the heavy-breathing, moody Moog grooves of ‘Jungle Fever’ (a sort of Afro-Colombian ‘Love to Love You Baby’) by Discos Fuentes’ house band Afrosound; Wganda Kenya’s brilliant and hilarious instrumental cover of the 1974 hit ‘Kung Fu Fighting’; and Fruko y Sus Tesos’ ‘Descarga Espectacular, a cumbia-funk cult favourite.