Audiences responded to Wim Wenders' documentary because by the end of that film everything Wenders had shown you seemed all of a piece. The music fit not just the musicians, the personalities they showed both on- and offstage, but Cuba itself, the pace of life, the faded pastels and faded grandiosity of the battered buildings.

Toward the end, Wenders showed a wall painted with the slogan "THE REVOLUTION IS ETERNAL." The pleasure on the faces of these rediscovered musicians as they played told a far different story: Their music antedated Castro's revolution and now there was no doubt that it would outlive it. "Buena Vista Social Club" left you feeling like you'd been granted full entry to a world you didn't know -- the opposite of the condescension with which world-music fetishists often treat their discoveries, as though they were exhibits in a multicultural petting zoo.

"Calle 54" doesn't have that coherence or that vision. Alternating scruffily filmed introductions with performances set against crisp, vivid backgrounds, the movie is essentially a fan's scrapbook. Trueba began listening to Latin jazz in the '80s when a friend gave him an album by Paquito D'Rivera, the Cuban alto sax player. He was hooked and he speaks, in voiceover, of the enthusiasm he feels for the music and for the performers he's assembled.

Unfortunately none of his heartfelt declarations do much to transcend that enthusiasm. Trueba will tell you that so-and-so set a new standard for the genre by combining elements of flamenco or salsa. But since he tells you nothing about the origins of the music and doesn't give you a sense of what it sounded like in its initial form, we've got no way of judging how closely the performances here hew to tradition or make way for innovation. He's anxious to get to the music, and like someone playing a treasured record for a friend Trueba seems convinced that we'll fall in love too if we just listen.

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I didn't want a musicology lecture, but when you go to a documentary about Latin jazz you hope to find out something about the music's beginning, how it grew, how it changed, if being born in the United States (as Tito Puente, and Jerry Gonzalez of the Fort Apache Band were) leads to a different approach than that taken by the musicians born in Latin countries (the other performers hail from Brazil, Argentina, the Dominican Republic and a preponderance from Cuba). Mostly, I wanted to know about something that I've noticed in my infrequent exposure to Latin music performances, which is that the music seems to transcend age barriers. (There was a great moment during an HBO concert given by the Latin pop star Marc Anthony when he brought out Tito Puente and the predominantly young audience at Madison Square Garden went nuts.)

I learned a lot more about the music in the few minutes it took me to read the liner notes that the Cuban novelist Guillermo Cabrera Infante provided for a 1994 album by the great mambo bassist Cachao (Israel López). Infante explains how the mambo grew out of the danzón, which, of all the damn things, originated in English country dancing, spread over Europe, to French Caribbean colonies and eventually to Cuba. (Infante even quotes George Eliot in "Adam Bede" on the glories of the country dance.)

That's a hell of a story, and a better one than you hear in "Calle 54," though you get the feeling that, had Trueba only probed a bit, the musicians might have come up with tales to match it. You want to know, for instance, why Andy González, who we see visiting the Bronx home where he grew up, is no longer playing with his brother Jerry in the Fort Apache Band. At one point we learn that the pianist Bebo Valdés left his wife and kids in the early '60s for a Swedish woman whom he is still with.

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