In rootless Southern California, the only cultural traditions are those which you create for yourself. Maybe that's why Van Dyke Parks is much beloved of that area's People of Taste and Style. Parks is an hallucinating cross-cultural index file of music oddities and sociological trivia; an island, however small, in a sea of taco sauce.

Song Cycle, his first album, bestowed neoclassical credentials upon mid-Sixties art rock. In 1972, Discover America introduced a miniscule but nonetheless enraptured following to the joys of calypso, steel-band and other Caribbean musical delights. Clang of the Yankee Reaper continues this fascination with island rhythms, with a tip of the cap to the record-buying public's current passion for reggae and its longstanding passion for conventional romance. He's more faithful to his affection for these forms than to the forms themselves, and the consequently playful mishmash of tropical musics and eccentric humor is always at least as amusing as watching Ricky Ricardo lead his band through a hot rumba on I Love Lucy.

The title cut, the album's off-mood piece and its greatest success, establishes that Parks's fixation with island big beat doesn't preclude successful sneak attacks on other mythologies. (Any song that begins with the line. "The sun never set on the empire/Prince Albert came in a can," had better be good.)

The only problem with all this is that People of Taste and Style are generally accustomed to getting their albums for free, which means that Van Dyke Parks hasn't sold enough records to keep the Esso Trinidad Steel Band in rum for more than a couple of hours. Warner Bros. has acknowledged his status as a cultural institution worth perpetuating by letting him continue to make records. All it takes is a piece of music as pleasing as this album's title song to convince me they're right to do so. (RS 205)

BEN EDMONDS