Ya be ye," the first single from Yemenite thrush Ofra Haza's Desert Wind, is a song of maternal advice, a Middle Eastern rejoinder to the Shirelles' "Mama Said" and the Supremes' "You Can't Hurry Love." "My mother always told me don't forget/Remember who you are/Listen to the voice/That plays in your head/Make the right choice," Haza sings. Like so much worldwide nouveau disco, from Chicago deep house to Antillean zouk, her music reaffirms the link between trendiness and tradition. Rejoicing in the hardily guitared "Taw Shi" that "the sands will blow a thousand years/The rhythm still remains," she could just as well be Vincent Price in "Thriller," praising "the funk of 40,000 years."

More than almost any other third-world-exotica merchant currently gaining headway in the U.S., Haza has found her audience in the dance clubs, and though nothing on Desert Wind can touch the hip, weird Euro-groove of her oft-sampled 1988 single "Im Nin'alu," neither of her two previous LPs was so loaded with baffling beats and moonstruck melodies. Thomas Dolby and Joe and Arif Mardin season a shifting bottom (sunbaked bossa nova in "Fatamorgana," itchy acid house in "In-Ta") with Sephardic strings, then let Haza's sustained wail undulate through the technotronic maze. She opens "Slave Dream" sighing like Donna Summer in "Love to Love You Baby"; in "Wish Me Luck," she borrows excited rai-like hooks from Malcolm McLaren's "Something's Jumpin' in Your Shirt," fair pay-back to a guy who's been appropriating uncredited ethnicity ever since Bow Wow Wow days.

Ofra Haza has her New Age tendencies, and if you're allergic to discoera Streisand or Newton-John, be forewarned. And although this Israeli-army vet demonstrates political "insight" worthy of Janet Jackson – if not Axl Rose – when she reduces the strife in her troubled homeland to "terrorism," the lines "Borders, river, desert, dead sea/When can we meet?" certainly weren't penned by Yitzhak Shamir, either. Mainly, Haza's got a sultry swoop, and she's not embarrassed to say she wants to fly. What chutzpah! For some of us, that's entertainment. (RS 574)

CHUCK EDDY