The marking appears quite often on musical scores: da lontano, ‘from the distance’. But all distances now are near, with non-western music so readily available in western concert halls and record stores.

here and there

The South Bank/Radio Three festival of Asian and African music is proving immensely successful as well as revelatory, with large audiences to welcome music that is, after all, not so very alien. Hearing a Turkish ensemble play pieces from the Ottoman court is to recognize the Islamic strain in the monodic song of medieval Europe, while the north Indian singer Mohammed Sayeed Khan is clearly engaged in the same business as virtuosos of a more familiar sort, that of pushing a given form to the borders of technical possibility and artistic licence.

Sayeed, practising the art of khyal, or ‘fantasy’, offered an hourlong improvisation in the common slow-fast pattern of Indian musicians, choosing a rag from the court of Akbar, and recycling it with ever-changing embellishment, which his hands seemed to echo as they moved with the grace, linked independence and suddenness of a pair of fish. Extraordinary precise lip control produced a great variety of tone within the thin nasal colour that matched the sarangi playing of Asif Ali Khan, who shadowed his master exquisitely, and occasionally was rewarded with a solo break as, most deservedly, was the tabla player Latif Ahmed Khan.