It was almost too good to be true. In just 10 days, 4 pre-eminent West African bands came through New York City: Youssou N'Dour from Senegal on Sunday at the Ritz, Tabu Ley Rochereau from Zaire for a three-night stand Thursday through Saturday at Kilimanjaro, King Sunny Ade from Nigeria the previous Monday and Tuesday at SOB's and, on Oct. 26, Papa Wemba from Zaire at SOB's.
If I had been told a decade ago that I could hear four African superstars in such a short time - and that all four would be familiar from past visits - I would have been skeptical at best. Back then, African rock was barely a glimmer on the cultural horizon here. Record stores that had African-music bins offered old Miriam Makeba albums, ethnomusicological field recordings and maybe something by the Nigerian band leader Fela Anikulapo Kuti or the Ghanaian-British jazz-rock band Osibisa. African rock had a continent dancing, but to most Americans it was utterly unknown.
That ignorance has receded through the 1980's, with such events as the release of Mr. Ade's ''Juju Music'' in 1982, tours by Mr. Ade, Mr. Rochereau and the late Zairian bandleader Franco in the mid-1980's, and such African-influenced albums as Talking Heads' ''Remain in Light,'' Peter Gabriel's ''So'' and Paul Simon's ''Graceland,'' which opened doors to the real thing. For a top African band, the United States is now part of the touring circuit and an American recording contract is at least a possibility.
Hearing the four bands, it was clear that new opportunities have changed the music; like African-based popular music from juju to salsa to rap, African rock responds to its audience. African rock plays out, in danceable form, all the tensions and triumphs of modernization; it adapts old songs and styles to electrified instruments, it soaks up international influences, it tries to balance traditionalism and cosmopolitanism.
Yet while Africans are familiar with American rock and pop (and Cuban rumbas were a huge influence in Zaire, as transplanted West African rhythms coming home), the rock styles of Senegal and Zaire and Nigeria grew up before local audiences. Electric guitars are ubiquitous, but each regional style has groomed them for its own uses; they don't speak with an American accent.
The ''discovery'' of African rock by Europeans and Americans, and the expansion of the touring circuit to transcontinental itineraries brought new questions for musicians who don't want to be quaint ethnic curiosities - prime among them whether, and how, the music should meet Western listeners' tastes. And each in his own way, with varying success, Mr. N'Dour, Mr. Ade, Mr. Rochereau and Papa Wemba have tested new ideas abroad and at home to find internationalisms they can call their own.
That's nothing new for Tabu Ley Rochereau, whose band, Orchestra Afrisa International, has been around since the 1950's. Mr. Rochereau sang with Joseph Kalle, who is credited with the first electrified Congolese rock, and he has always been open to outside ideas. He's a suave entertainer who borrows from jazz and Western pop as well as Western show business; the liner notes for ''Babeti Soukous,'' recently released on Peter Gabriel's Real World label (through Virgin Records), say he polished his stage show before many other African bands had thought about their presentation.
At Kilimanjaro, a welcome new club that apparently plans to let performers play long, African-style sets into the wee hours, the show was like an Africanized cabaret revue. It started with Afrisa International on its own (playing tepid instrumentals touching on American pop-jazz and Jamaican reggae), followed by two long sets with vocalists. Mr. Rochereau shared the spotlight with two breathy female singers, Faya Tess and Beyou Ciel; a pair of dancers in scanty gold-lame; and three male backup singers whose voices rivaled Mr. Rochereau's own sweet, high tenor.
Mr. Rochereau's internationalism is pan-African. Most of the songs were Zairean soukous, garlanded with intertwining guitar riffs, but the 15-piece band also moved into South African mbaqanga, Nigerian juju and French Antillean zouk, a relative of soukous. Even when it was zooming along, Afrisa International's soukous had a light touch; the drumming virtually danced atop the beat with precise, ever-changing cymbal and snare patterns.
Papa Wemba, from the generation after Mr. Rochereau, was a disappointment. He is based in Paris, where he is at the center of a fashion-conscious subculture known as sapeurs; the peculiarly French taste for sustained, sentimental ballads currently holds too much sway over his music. Like Mr. Rochereau, Papa Wemba has a voice of extraordinary tenderness and power, and when his streamlined, seven-piece band (with two dancers) latches on to a soukous vamp the guitar lines could go on forever. But he devoted too much of his two short sets at SOB's to what sounded like Africanized versions of French chansons, and even with longer, asymmetrical melody lines (proably akin to Zairian traditional songs), the music sounded saccharine. From an American viewpoint, his French-tinged hybrids sound more parochial than his soukous.
King Sunny Ade and Youssou N'Dour have made more gratifying covenants with Western rock. Since he began performing in the United States, Mr. Ade's music has taken on a few Western touches - a keyboard player, passages in unison and the use of something like power chords, which become bell-like in the hands of his guitarists. The set on his second night at SOB's methodically featured each section of the 17-man band; percussion, guitars, steel guitar, horns and singers each had a spot. But more so than on previous visits (when Mr. Ade seemed to be trying to cater to what he saw as American tastes), the music felt traditionalist because no matter what else was going on, the core of the music came from deep-toned Nigerian talking drums, pounding out cross-rhythms in an unbroken torrent. Mr. Ade was beaming throughout the set, and his band members' informal dance routines made complex music look like one big party.
Youssou N'Dour's recent path has been a tricky one. Although he was a superstar in Senegal, outside Africa he came under Peter Gabriel's wing, opening for Mr. Gabriel's arena concerts and joining him on the Amnesty International tour. Along the way, Mr. N'Dour tried to update his band by shrinking it and to update his music by incorporating Western rock, funk and reggae. There was a tug of war between his own style, mbalax - in which the vocals are incantations amid guitar riffs - and Western rock, where the vocal melodies lie squarely on the beat; for a while, as he tried to reach Western audiences in an idiom he thought they'd prefer, Mr. N'Dour seemed like an awkward student rather than a master musician.
But at the Ritz on Sunday, he had clearly survived a tough transition. The band had expanded back to 12 pieces, including two percussionists whose doubletime and tripletime rhythms restored mbalax's sense of swift, sprinting momentum. Some of Mr. N'Dour's songs used Western-style melodies on the beat, as others let his voice soar in more traditional style. And the band was able to come down hard on the downbeat, like a rock band, without trampling the glorious intricacies of the Senegalese cross-rhythms. Mr. N'Dour, speaking and singing mostly in Wolof, brought the Senegalese members of the audience to their feet, but his music didn't shut anyone out.
None of these African performers have given up on reaching beyond their own cultures. Mr. N'Dour, perhaps the most conscious of his international audience, ended his show with a song called ''Toxic Waste,'' insisting that the industrialized world should not dump its pollutants in Africa. Western influences aren't always pollutants for African rock -the electric guitar didn't hurt one bit - but for the moment, African rockers may be finding out that they're better off when they face the West with faith in their own cultures.