THERE WAS a time in the 90s when I thought ...

I was eating the "house dinner" at one of my favorite Indian restaurants back then when they put on something I'd never heard before. Usually, they'd supply ragas and such, which I love, but this was a steeplechase being run by horses of very different colors. "Who is that?" I asked the owner. "Malkit Singh," he said, as he wrote the name on a tag of paper.

Bhangra is a traditional folk-dance music of the Punjab, played for harvest festivals, weddings and any other gathering where you need to shake your joyous communal booty. But the version Singh plays evolved in the Indian club scene in London and the English Midlands, where it became?and remains?a major pop cultural force, absorbing Western instruments and just about any other musical influence you might think of. Today, it's a superbly eclectic music, happy as a Disney grasshopper but a whole lot more interesting.

Singh has been active since the 80s but took off in the early 90s, particularly with the recording of his "theme song," "Tutak Tutak Tutian." I don't know the Punjabi language, so I don't know what, if anything, this means. There's a lot of repetitious phrasing everywhere in bhangra, and I must admit that "O gay, o gay, o gayee" and similar lines sound suspiciously like nonsense syllables.

But that isn't the point. In fact (to my ears), Singh's often rollicking tremolo isn't the point either. Rather, it's the all-encompassing breadth of orchestral sounds from his Golden Star band. Incorporating a variety of native hand drums (including the big, booming dhol and the betterknown Indian tabla) along with every imaginable Western instrument (the tapes I have don't include notes, but you can identify a range of horns, etc.), they can come on like a classic jazz big band, then toodle off into an Arabian Nights arabesque without transition, as though they'd suddenly found themselves in the wrong recording studio.

Of my three tapes, I'm most partial to Sajna O Sajna, which leads off with "Tutak." Half the time I still can't believe the mix I'm hearing of folk dance, Indian classical, Western jazz, tinny, rattling Middle Eastern percussion (much like the Yemeni tray-slapping behind the late Ofra Haza), high, warbled lyrics and sounds that I can't even identify. And, like all Indian-based pop, it takes from and gives back to the lavish, over-the-top Bollywood movie soundtracks. None of the tapes comes with a date, but I think Tere Ishq Nachaiyan is later than Sajna?a little more sober and restrained, a little less raw.

Though Singh has been cited by Guinness as the biggest-selling bhangra artist worldwide, you'd be hard pressed to find anything by him or the other bhangra stars (like the Safri Boys) in the U.S. outside of the tape bins at your Indian grocery?and often not even there. Singh's website sells several albums, but because of different spellings from transliteration and slightly different album titles, it's hard to say if they're repackagings of the older tapes or new recordings.

It doesn't look like Singh's been through New York since 1998, but there's a Punjabi-American Festival coming up May 25 that will most likely feature the more traditional bhangra. And, you can get bhangra ring tones for your Nokia cellphone.

What's Out There: CDs and tapes are available through www.malkit.com (prices in British pounds). Your best bet stateside might be the Indian bazaars in Edison, NJ.