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.

To most people, Mexican music means mariachis. Or even, for the spectacularly ignorant, Andean Pan-pipes (this sadly came to me recently out of a highly respected London publishing-house).

Mariachis are hard to beat, their music is infectious and the full-on harmonies and volume perfectly match the high-colour and heat of long Mexican afternoons and tequila-fuelled evenings. Their homeland is Jalisco, and a Sunday afternoon in one of Guadalajara’s big family restaurants gives the best overview. Small groups of musicians (usually a couple of trumpets, a guitar and a violin or two) move from table to table to play pieces chosen and paid for by the diners, some of whom end up shedding a tear or two in sympathy with the more soulful songs. It’s heart-rending stuff.