Until a decade ago, King Sunny Adé was one of African music's prime ambassadors to North America. The slippery, soulful, and deeply syncopated sounds of his Island Records debut, Juju Music, were embraced by pop stars as diverse as David Byrne and Stevie Wonder. In turn, Adé seemed poised to inherit Bob Marley's mantle as the developing world's ranking superstar. And then, for reasons that weren't entirely clear, he essentially disappeared.

It turns out that bad business decisions—and some nasty business of an entirely different kind—were to blame. After his Island contract expired, Adé signed with the more independent-minded Mesa label, but Mesa's U.S. distributor collapsed in 2000. Not long after that, a pair of hijacked jets hit the World Trade Center in New York City, and the U.S. effectively sealed its borders to musicians from regions, like Adé's native Nigeria, that boasted a sizable Muslim population.

Sad days for Adé's North American fans—but not for Adé himself, who says that he's had no trouble staying busy. “I'm still doing recordings, I'm still doing business, I'm still playing music, I'm still touring the whole world,” he says, reached by cellphone while being driven through the Hollywood Hills. And as his presence in Los Angeles indicates, he's ready to return to the U.S. and Canadian festival circuit this summer.

Adé is evasive but philosophical when asked if his music, which fuses electric instruments with traditional Yoruba drum rhythms, has changed during his absence.

“Oh, yes,” he says, “a lot of changes in the performance and the songs and the entire music. You know, the world is changing. We are in the 21st century, and you have to go along with it by way of introducing a new beat or a new dance. A new song, a new beat, and a new dance.”

He's happier to talk about some of the other work he's been doing at home. As chair of the Musical Copyright Society of Nigeria, he's been pressing for greater government regulation of the broadcasting industry—at least in terms of ensuring that performers are paid fair royalties for the use of their music.

“The government and the broadcasting organization, they're working hard on it now, because we don't allow them to rest,” he says.

For Adé, there are obvious economic advantages to royalty-rate reform. But there's also a moral dimension to his quest: like the praise singers of old, Adé believes that musicians have a duty to work for the common good.

“Sometimes we sing to praise somebody who's helped the community,” he explains. “And then we sing to heal the immorality of the country. Like the more you sing to children, the more you sing to younger ones, the more they listen and the more they behave.”

King Sunny Adé plays the Commodore Ballroom on Friday (June 26).