Home Festival Review

With the UK festival circuit at saturation point (and we’re not talking weather here) you’d need a touch of boldness to inaugurate yet another celebration of world music. But as the Home festival at Dartington Hall showed, there are still niches to be filled if you can hit the right formula, especially if you’re offering a rare opportunity to hear music unamplified, or as one performer put it, ‘as our forefathers knew it’.

Not that our forefathers (and mothers) would have known such eclecticism of course, though it’s tempting to think they might relate with the same enthusiasm as any contemporary audience. Certainly, Ladino singer Mor Karbasi’s lithe and powerful vocals evoked a sense of timelessness which seemed to need no explanations at all. While the seven-piece band, Asere, brought Cuban street performance to the Great Hall, and later played some slinky, pulsing salsa sounds on the outside stage. Closer to home (if you’ll excuse the pun) Eddi Reader offered a compelling line in sensitive, rootsy music that was a pleasant distance from the era of Fairground Attraction. But the coup of the day had to be the Rizwan-Muazzam Qawwali Ensemble from Pakistan, who, by dint of nine singers, tablas, harmoniums, and some thwacking hand claps, managed to construct a veritable phalanx of multi-textured sound that left one wondering if the venerable windows, if not the walls of the medieval hall were quite up to the job of containing it all. Try it at Home.

Noel Harvey