Customers entering La Malienne La Mama de Momy Mame Gakou announce themselves loudly.

“Moussa!” shouts a tall man wearing jeans and a black puffy ski jacket, walking inside to give Moussou Kassoumou, the store’s thin, soft-spoken manager, a handshake and an embrace.

Clattering, lush highlife music booms from a stereo inside the small music store, inviting sidewalk traffic and prompting visitors digging through the CDs to speak up when talking to the staff.

Across the street, two other music stores, New Africa Music and Video and Bakh Yaye, are selling many of the same CDs: Senegalese, Nigerian, Ghanaian, and Ivory Coast music.

The stores form practically a West African music belt in Little Senegal, a largely immigrant neighborhood on 116th Street east of Frederick Douglass Boulevard wedged between Columbia University, where Afro-prep band Vampire Weekend crafted its trademark “Upper West Side Soweto” style, and Harlem, where major-label rappers like Mase and Cam’ron claim the streets as home.

By outward appearances, Little Senegal’s music stores resemble typical New York variety goods businesses, the kind found on many uptown blocks. But the stores are distinct. La Malienne’s music selection is curated by Jose Toure, who has spent more than 20 years in the music industry. Bakh Yaye sells much of the same music that Mrde Jop, who is managing the store while the owner, his brother, is away in Africa, sold at a store he owned in Senegal in the early 80s.

West African music long ago caught music listeners’ attention as a secret sauce in likeable pop music. Artists like The Talking Heads, Peter Gabriel, and Bela Fleck have cited its influence, as have new Brooklyn music acts like The Dirty Projectors and Animal Collective. Recently, though, the music hasn’t been so easy to find.

“Tower records isn’t selling the African music like they used to. HMV closed,” said Toure, a producer who sells his artists’ CDs at La Malienne and consults for Central Park Summerstage, advising the booking for its international performer lineup. Once Virgin Megastore pulled the plug on its Union Square store and vacated New York, music stores with a sizable African music selection became scarce, he explained. Little Senegal became one of its last surviving outposts.

Yet the stores mostly serve as local favorites, appealing to the area’s West African immigrants, who know them by word of mouth and bolster sales by buying CDs in person from their fellow Wolof- and French-speaking West Africans.

“We almost never advertise,” said Jop. The stores’ main overture to outsiders is the shattering drumming and melodic vocals that drift from the stores into the street.

Miscellaneous wares supplement the stores’ music sales, making them reminiscent of outdoor street market vendors where incongruous goods mix freely. Bakh Yaye sells gold jewelry and pump heels, La Malienne sells knock-off designer luggage and cell phone accessories, and New Africa Music and Video’s cell phone service puts money on its owners’ phones, so they can call overseas.

CDs in the stores are cheap: two for $5 or one for $3 in all three stores. Samba Top, New Africa Music and Video’s owner, said that the more CDs someone buys, the cheaper he will sell them individually. Jop said that neither Bakh Yaye or La Malienne have been profitable in the last few years. Top, though, said New Africa Music and Video has consistently made a small profit because of its prepaid cell phone service.

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West African music’s influence on American rock and folk music has deep roots, critics say. Pitchfork Media’s African music critic, Joe Tangari, explained what he called his pet theory of West African music: “It’s one of the four proteins that make up modern American music’s DNA (the other three are European art music, European folk music, and electronics and the recording medium),” he said via e-mail.

Tangari outlined various influence streams. “You have a whole group of bands, the best known being Antibalas, that directly build their sound off of Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat. Then you have your Vampire Weekends, who use African elements in the service of indie rock. There are trans-Atlantic bands that pair American or European and African musicians—see the Kenyan-American benga-rock band Extra Golden, the Ghanaian-American highlife group Occidental Brothers Dance Band International, and the Malawian-British The Very Best, for some examples,” he said.

In fact, cross-pollination between West African and American music seems to be reaching new heights. Banning Eyre, Afropop.org’s senior editor, has followed the uptick. “West African music has a growing influence on American bands these days. Bonnie Raitt, Taj Mahal, Bela Fleck and Ry Cooder have all recorded with West African musicians,” he said.

Back in Little Senegal, conversations with Toure, who sips a cup of Lipton tea and wears a brown beanie, are interrupted by cell phone calls to artists, some of which escalate into heated arguments in heavily African-accented French. Toure disdains the other two shops on the street. “They’re not legit,” he said. “The other two do a lot of bootlegging … La Malienne’s CDs are made in Africa and France.”

But the fact is, music passes between Bakh Yaye and La Malienne all day as the owners partner up and transfer dozens of CDs, rearranging their shelves in the hopes of boosting sales. Staff from Bakh Yaye sometime walk over, carrying armfuls of CD cases, and stock La Mallienne by hand themselves.

Kassoumou said Bakh Yaye sells more Senegalese music than La Malienne, which specializes in CDs from Ghana, Mali and the Ivory Coast. Yet with the stores’s music in constant flux, any differences seem minimal, which explains why Bakh Yaye employee Mody Fill said the stores’ music is “all the same.”

Owners at all three stores agreed, though, that whatever the shops’ tastes, final judgment comes from the fans. “We sell Youssou N’Dour,” Fill said, “because all African people know him. I sell the music I like, and the people like. It’s the same music I sold in Senegal,” he said.

Youssou N’Dour, an artist whose name is repeated with chant-like reverence in Little Senegal’s stores, was a founding Senegalese mbalax singer in the 80s, Eyre explained. And he still records; Rolling Stone named his 2007 album, Rokku Mi Rokka (Give and Take), the 30th best album of the year .

N’Dour, who “in much of Africa … is perhaps the most famous singer alive,” according to Rolling Stone, occasionally visits the stores to wish the neighborhood well, said Top. Fans can take a photo with N’Dour or get an autograph.

The storeowners buy music from different distributors. At Bakh Yaye, employee Mody Fill, who stood in the backroom working at a computer, explained that African record stores ship him a single CD, which he duplicates. Then he sells the copies. “The stores in Africa don’t have the money to ship the CDs,” he explained. At New Africa Muisc and Video, Top said he buys from both Senegal record stores, who ship from overseas, and from American suppliers, who burn their discs stateside.

Customers trek uptown from Africa, France, and across the United States. Mamadou Kome, who was visiting New York for the weekend from Atlanta, made a point to visit La Malienne. “I’m buying two DVDs,” he said, deciding to pass on music. “But the people in Atlanta know this store. There isn’t a music store like this in Atlanta.”

Bronx resident Aicha Bamba, who was shuffling through a few CDs in the back of La Malienne, said she comes to the store three or four times a month. As she browsed, she walked between the CD rack and a boombox, where customers can sample music before making a purchase. “They’re the best,” she said, pointing to Moussa, whose recommendations have turned her onto obscure CDs like “coupe decale, Youssoun N’Dour, and Ishmael Isaac.”

Tangari expects that interest in African music will only rise. “There’s a Los Angeles-based band called Fool’s Gold that released an excellent debut album this year,” he explained. “It incorporates highlife and desert guitar and Tamashek influences very smoothly into an indie rock environment, and then includes lyrics sung partly in Hebrew.

“It’s hard to imagine something much more global than that. As the Internet and MP3s breed more musical omnivores, I think this trend will only accelerate.”