Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Like any good display of fireworks, Womad husbanded some of its biggest bangs for the end. São Paulo’s Bixiga 70 played driving instrumental post-jazz-rock, the brass section blasting out melodies that seemed atonal until it became clear that they were playing in perfect time and harmony; guitars churned; a keyboard player dashed on like an assembly-line worker late for a shift and hauled equipment round the stage to produce a motor-horn cacophony of squelches and bleeps. It was all like the soundtrack to a car chase in a gridlocked city, switching up patterns like a Brazilian version of John Zorn’s Naked City, and ended with a thousand-strong conga line weaving round the Siam Tent and eating its own tail.Every year a couple of booked acts fail to make it, sometimes because of the M4 motorway but more recently because of visa issues or Covid. Sid Sriram, this time, succumbed to dysentery. Instead of a battlefield promotion being handed out to a band lower down the bill, a replacement materialised on the Soundscape stage in the shape of Gong.What was once a band of whimsical Frenchmen has switched out all its members several times, like a Starship of Theseus, and all its current crew signed up this century rather than last. But the spirit remained strong, from the opening “My Spaceship is a Guitar”. “Lift up your telescope and you will see infinity,” proclaimed Kavus Torabi later as space-rock swirled around him; Ian East’s saxophone cadenzas took the place of what in a more conventional prog band would have been keyboards.Elsewhere highlights included mixtape rap from Zambia’s Sampa the Great; exquisite Irish neo-folk from The Breath; bright late-night sets from Leyla McCalla, bringing the Caribbean to the Cotswolds, and from Tamsin Ellitot and Tarek Elazhary, marrying Bristol accordion and Cairo oud under colour-washed trees.Baaba Maal, headlining Sunday night, opened with the invocation of “Wakanda”, his Black Panther theme, and then into a percussion-strong “Sidiki”. The set, mercifully heavy on sabar drums and light on synthesiser, was largely up-tempo, with the obligatory dance-off from the band. The most affecting part came when Maal sat to play acoustic guitar, largely unaccompanied, and sang tribute to two colleagues who had recently died: Toumani Diabaté and Mansour Seck, Maal’s childhood friend and griot and foil for more than half a century.For a moment everything hushed, and we were back in the world of Djam Leelii, the acoustic blues album that made Maal and Seck’s names. Maal has innovated his sound relentlessly since the 1980s but never quite bettered that debut, and it is sobering that never again will we hear their voices intertwine.womad.co.uk
