Festival Music

Anoushka Shankar & Faiz Ali Faiz

Usher Hall

Rob Adams

four stars

THERE was an inspiring example here for any Fringe performer striving for attention in that often unforgiving environment. Back in the mid-noughties Manu Delago could be found playing the then-novel percussion instrument, the Hang, in a duo called Living Room with bass clarinettist Christoph Pepe Auer to modest attendances in makeshift venues not far from Lothian Road.

Now, here he was providing a key component – and one of the most thrilling moments – in an evening of unity and contrast in a packed Usher Hall. Delago co-composed sitarist Anoushka Shankar’s Land of Gold suite, a work that draws together Indian tradition, music technology and western harmony in response to world events.

Moving at a mostly stately pace, it is episodic overall but at its best, with Shankar plunging soulfully into the sitar’s lower range and then producing exciting, scurrying high register lines or trading phrases with the magnificently understated Sanjeev Shankar on shehnai, it carried power and resonance. It also featured a superb Hang solo from Delago that captured all the heat, timbre and urgency of a tabla master at full tilt.

While Shankar is moving her tradition forward, the Pakistani devotional singer Faiz Ali Faiz and his seven-strong troupe show the strength of theirs by making it come alive in the moment. The quality of their voices as they passed melodies and improvisations from one to another was fabulous and the joy they created in their rhythmical repetition of chants in tandem with searching harmonium phrases and driving tablas was mesmerising. Groove, momentum, passion, spontaneity, soul – everything that contributes to great music of any stripe was in this wonderfully elemental performance.