No, I haven’t been to the Festival in the Desert, not yet anyway. But I’ve travelled through Mali and loved it, from Bamako to Timbuktu. For years before that I’d been listening to Mali music which I discovered while living in Paris. There has always been a great love of African music there, from long before the phrase ‘world music’ was coined, due to the large community of Francophone Africans and exiled musicans in the 1980s. Along with Madagascar, where music just pumps through the blood, Mali is the most fertile African country for creative musicians, much thanks to their griots or caste of musicians and their ability to adapt their sounds without losing their roots.