By NATE CHINEN

Lionel Loueke, a guitarist from the West African country of Benin, was a spellbinding presence at Joe’s Pub in Manhattan a couple of months ago as he started into the title track of “Karibu,” his exceptional major-label debut. His long fingers flickered across the strings, eliciting not just a syncopated groove but also a shifting undergrowth of chords. He was just as busy vocally, clicking his tongue in percussive counterpoint, singing phrases in a floating cadence. It all felt rooted in African folk traditions but also cosmopolitan, progressive, harmonically fluid.
Mr. Loueke, 34, has quickly earned a reputation in jazz circles as a startlingly original voice . He made a big impression five years ago as a sideman with the trumpeter Terence Blanchard, and now he tours and records with the pianist Herbie Hancock. When Blue Note signed him last year, it confirmed what many already knew: He’s one of the most striking jazz artists to emerge in some time.
“Among the young musicians I’ve heard recently, he is the one that stands out for me,” Mr. Hancock said.
Over the last decade or so there has been a proliferation of international artists dealing seriously with jazz without tuning out their native cultures. Consider Mr. Loueke’s band mates, who performed with him at Joe’s Pub: the bassist Massimo Biolcati grew up in Sweden and Italy, and the drummer Ferenc Nemeth is from Hungary. A short list of others would include the Cuban drummers Dafnis Prieto and Francisco Mela, the Puerto Rican saxophonists David Sanchez and Miguel Zenon, and the Israeli clarinetist and saxophonist Anat Cohen.
“There’s a line of thought that is growing,” said Danilo Perez, a Panamanian pianist and composer whose 2000 album, “Motherland,” is considered a touchstone for the current generation of jazz hybridists. “People are coming to jazz with open ears and a perspective from their own place.”
To be a capable young jazz musician today is to be comfortable with virtually any groove, however complex or asymmetrical, and conversant in folk and pop dialects from several continents.
Remarkably, for a genre so frequently described as America’s indigenous art form, jazz is now unmistakably a global proposition.
Mr. Loueke engages with the jazz tradition itself, in his own fashion. “Jazz is a language,” he said at a cafe near Union Square in Manhattan a couple of months ago . “I have my accent, I have my way to choose different words. But most important for me is to understand that language.”
Many of his peers have a similar way of thinking. “The people who have been most successful in these cross-cultural combinations are as rooted in the jazz tradition as they are in their own traditions,” Mr. Zenon said. “There’s all this stuff that’s already there, that you don’t have to think about. Then you’re adding all the stuff that you’ve learned.”
That was certainly the case for Mr. Loueke, who now lives in North Bergen, New Jersey, with his wife, Benedicta, and their two small children. He grew up in an intellectual middle-class household - his father was a mathematics professor, his mother a grade-school teacher - and he played in traditional Beninese percussion groups from an early age.
He didn’t pick up the guitar until he was 17. “Benin has no native guitar style,” he said. “We have some distinct rhythms, and the traditional singing is unique. But the guitar, it all comes from Nigeria, Mali, Congo, Zaire.”
In 1990 Mr. Loueke left Benin to study music in Ivory Coast, but jazz was not a part of his training there. That really began a few years later, when he moved to Paris to attend a conservatory.
There he first heard albums by contemporary guitarists like Pat Metheny and Bill Frisell. And after graduating, he received a scholarship to the Berklee College of Music in Boston.
Artists like Mr. Loueke can be understood in the jazz realm not only as transformative but also as true to the tradition.
“His scope is so broad,” Mr. Hancock said of Mr. Loueke. “He draws on his African heritage. He’s comfortable in the area of electronics, with a more acoustic style of playing, with a Spanish style, a Brazilian style.
But he brings new things to the table.”