Womad, Charlton Park, Malmesbury, UK

Playing the long game: Baaba Maal performs at the Womad festival

The gods of Womad played their hand capriciously this year. Bellowhead and the Easy Star All-Stars, reliable crowd-pleasers, were thrown away on Thursday night before many had arrived. Even Jazz Jamaica, who opened the festival proper on Friday, played to an appreciative but largely empty main field. They used the ska classics “Guns of Navarone”, “Liquidator” and “Double Barrel” as the spines for extended soloing, from sax to trombone to guitar. “If you can remember these songs,” said the leader Gary Crosby, droll, “you shouldn’t be here.”

They took the James Bond theme back to its Jamaican roots, the instantly recognisable seven-note fanfare building over the slaloming downhill bassline from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, with an extended tenor sax exploration from Denys Baptiste. The veteran Jamaican singer Myrna Hague added languid, vibrato-heavy Lover’s Rock vocals, preacherly at first, and then sprightly on “My Boy Lollipop”.

The best of the action, though, was away from the main stages. Susheela Raman made three widely admired albums that mixed Indian classical music with rock dynamics before a misstep into a whole record of cover versions. She then spent several years exploring Tamil devotional music, making a powerful return to form with Vel. This sole UK outing for the new material placed her in the arboretum, barely discernable through foliage. She opened with a prayer to Ganesh, remover of obstacles, voice throaty through Sam Mills’s guitar atmospherics.

Then a ripple of tablas, Aref Durvesh pattering with fingertips before pounding with the heels of his hands. Raman, cloaked like a witch, jumped about the stage and swung her hair; Mills struck power chords from his acoustic guitar. “Paal” was a climbing pilgrimage, culminating in an ecstatic trance, Raman chanting “Murugan vel, Murugan vel, vel vel vel”.

After a detour through the delicate acoustic “Magdalene”, invoking mystical rivers of magma, came the show-stopper “Raise Up”, a full-throttle anthem. “Raise up your hands, higher higher”, sang Raman to a glade full of people doing just that, while Mills strummed righteously and Durvesh hammered an insurrectionary beat. “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)” dissipated into Hendrixian psychedelic whimsy, but all was recovered with “Daga Daga”. Raman took the voice of the skeletal female saint Karaikal Ammaiyar, dancing with Shiva in cosmic union until the earth shook, pouring out glossolalia while the tablas hit straight to the sinuses, Kartik Raghunathan’s violin moaned and Mills’s guitar shredded.

As always, much of the best of Womad could have been seen by simply staying put in the arboretum, where the BBC Radio 3 Stage rounds up the most exciting new artists. There was Fatoumata Diawara, Malian protégée of Oumou Sangare, an engaging solo singer and guitarist, though here fronting too noisy a band for her songs. There was also Lokkhi Terra, introduced by the compere as “a sort of Afro-Cuban thing with Bangladeshi origins”. Kishon Khan leant back from his keyboards with the glee of a man driving a super-car, and played as if distilling the entire 1970s work of Herbie Hancock into a high-octane drive in the country, as congas bounced and brass slid around him.

Jamie Smith’s Mabon, complete with a pair of enthusiastic Welsh stepdancers introduced as the Mabonettes, took Celtic dance music to the Principality. Smith hunched over his accordion while the band jumped around him. The rock drums and electric bass gave the music more swing than the standard folk-rock plod, and the encore of “Whiskey Burp Reels” was stratospheric.

Late night amid the trees was an outing for Dub Colossus, a brimming cauldron of Ethiopian music and dub that ranged from a solo on the messenko (an ancient one-string fiddle) to Mykael Riley singing the Old Testament reggae “Satta Massagana”. Samuel Yirga, a young Ethiopian pianist, added jazzy improvisations that threatened to burst out of the set (and did, when he played his own concert elsewhere during the festival). But “Uptown Top Ranking”, with horns bright and hard and PJ Higgins’s punctuating squeals echoed by the crowd, was lock-tight.

Away from the arboretum, Rodrigo y Gabriela filled the aircraft hanger-sized Siam Tent to the gunwales with a young audience, shouting and cheering along to their percussive, high-energy acoustic guitar playing. Gabriela, in particular, spent as much time slapping, scratching, tapping and knocking her guitar as she did plucking or strumming it, maintaining a complex rhythmic barrage for Rodrigo to ornament. At the end, the pair sat in front of a giant projected Leonora Carrington painting and played a quiet, almost folky melody, before leaping back into a final “Hanuman” halfway between religious ritual and political rally.

The best of the headliners was Baaba Maal. His stated ambition is to put an African village on stage. This time, it looked initially as if he had instead put a western recording studio on stage, with Jim Palmer on percussion, Barry Reynolds on slide guitar and Didi Guttman on keyboards. But Maal plays a long game: an acoustic set, delivered as if sitting around a campfire, gradually warmed. A song dedicated to his absent (and much missed) friend, foil and anchor Mansour Seck was followed by a solo “Baayo”, and then the set pivoted into a frenzy of sabar drumming. It closed with an otiose disco thump from the keyboards, punctuated by redundant dancing, but left the audience wanting more.

At the tired end of the weekend, Amparo Sánchez walked on to the sound of a freight train, to be greeted by the sight of the Siam Tent with tumbleweed blowing through it. But with some peremptory Spanish and the hand gestures of a sheriff, she herded a sufficient posse of fans to the front of the stage and launched into “Aquí Estoy”, with twanging guitar and mariachi trumpet to match the heat and dust outside.

Sánchez once led the unremarkable Madrid electro band Amparanoia, but since falling in with desert revivalists Calexico she has reinvented herself as a balladeer strung halfway between Tucson and Havana. On “Hoja En Blanco” her words tumbled out in a Dylanesque torrent over a lurching waltz, with a honky-tonk piano solo to follow. The sultry start of “Sé Que No Sé” exploded into trumpet fireworks over a marching drum tattoo. “In Spain, now, is fiesta time,” she said. “But not for us here.”

One promising new song, “La Cuenta Atrás”, was a brisk two-step with shouted choruses; another, “This Kind of Love”, was straight-ahead 1950s rock-and-roll, with barrelhouse piano. The long reggae vamp of “Quisiera, Pero” and the shimmering Cuban sway of “La Parrandita De Las Santas”, and Sánchez was out of time, leaving with a regretful wave.

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