Peter Culshaw (right) parties with world-punk hero Manu Chao
Fes, it's the biggest medieval city on the planet and one of the holiest cities in the Islamic world. An obvious place, or not, to run into Bono (or Bongo if you prefer - perhaps in reference to his work on the Africa question). Not to mention the Edge, looking as non-linear as ever. Both of them were sitting under an ancient Barbary oak next to the Queen of Jordan, listening to the deeply wonderful Iranian singer Parissa at the Batha Museum during the recent Fes (or Fez) Festival Of World Sacred Music.
The organisers of most festivals, knowing the publicity value would have photographed them non-stop - but happily, Fes/z is rather laid back about such things, and no pictures found their way into the world's ravenous media. Until now. And even then you can't really tell where we are.
Fesfestival.com has pictures of much less famous people. The festival does make you realise how narrow our ideas of music are - there are lots of extraordinary artists from all over who make you feel like a provincial baffled by the complexity of the big city. Perhaps because the city had a university three centuries before Oxford, when we Brits were wandering around in the woods painted blue.
Eighth-century Indian music from Vasumathi Badrinathan, written by women mystics and sounding positively futuristic? Uzbeck music from the mediaval courts of Bukhara? Ancient Mauretanian music from Aicha Mint Chighaly? Gnawa music brought by slaves over the Sahara - with impossibly funky basslines and metal castanets? It's all here and you feel your horizons expanding - and all of it has yet to be packaged for the world music market.
Another Mauretanian, Dimi Mint Abba, is being given (or so I'm told) the World Circuit treatment (the label that brought you the Buena Vista Social Club). That album will emerge in - what? - 2008 at a guess and in London, Mauretania will be the country to drop. I'll receive a series of commissions to write about it, I hope. Then we'll find a newer hipper country to get behind. While this idea of countries as new consumer objects is absurd (Brazil is hip this year) and I'm also part of this vampiric process, it's strange how some countries seem to bypass the music radar.
Ukraine has a wonderful tradition and this week I'm trying to get to a festival in the Carpathian Mountains - check Sheshory.org. My friend Vlad Troitsky has invited me to hang out with his band Dakha Braka. Last time I saw them in Kiev they took over a posh restaurant dressed in bridal gear, set some chickens free and started a fire outside while bashing metal plates (anyone remember Test Department?). Vlad is a true original - he made some money out of a chain of clothes shop and started an avant garde theatre school in which he enrolled himself. He does things like go to Siberia for a week and bury himself in a hole in snow to improve his concentration. All being well, a report from the festival will follow. There's a midnight bus out of Kiev that reaches close at six am.
I was hoping to get to the Gnaoua festival in Essaouira after Fes/z (even if generally I distrust places with that many vowels in) - they said they were expecting up to 500,000 people. I'd love to hear from anyone who made it. Instead I got the summons that weekend to go on tour with Manu Chao for the new Observer Music Monthly. Listening to his forthcoming album La Radiolina (which could well be the record of the year) was one of those high-security affairs record companies go in for where you are watched over as you listen.
The funny thing is that because Manu has a habit of playing his songs in little bars in Barcelona, the city in which he principally bases himself, all the local buskers know the songs and if you want to hear the songs now (the album's released at the end of August) you can hear them now sung in the streets of the Catalan capital. Is Manu quietly our greatest living rock star?
Peter Culshaw braved cannibals to hear the world's oldest music for the first-ever Observer Music Monthly. All being well, he'll continue to write about his travels here.
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