Mesmeric moments of African magic

In theory, listening to three American acoustic blues guitarists, each with their own individual style and presence, should be a mixture of exploration and excitement. Certainly, the constituent ingredients were there: Kent DuChaine has spent the past 30 years drifting from country to country with a battered guitar he calls Leadbessie. Like its owner, it's a weather-beaten but roadworthy instrument. Corey Harris's tradition is rooted in country blues, yet has a thoroughly modern structure to it. And Alvin "Youngblood" Hart plays country blues as if to the manner born.

Unfortunately, while offering up occasional moments of spiky playing, the thrills were very much absent from this tripart gig.

Minnesota-born DuChaine has an earthy, plucky sound which derives its quite assertive style from his guitar's extra-heavy strings. Sunday afternoon at the Meeting House Square boom-booms to the pulsating rhythms, and all is reasonably well in the land of the blues.

Corey Harris has jumped, in the space of three years, from busking for money to sharing stages with the likes of the legendary B.B. King, the Dave Matthews Band (America's latest plodding pub-rock phenomenon) and the rather more fragrant Natalie Merchant. Harris has a deft, smart style, blending Afro-American "ancestral" blues with a droll sense of humour ("Will anybody tell me what Diddy Wah Diddy means", he sings) and an undeniable urgency. It was spitting rain throughout his set, but the only time people moved was to put up their umbrellas.

Curiously, as Alvin "Young blood" Hart came on, the rain stopped, but people began to drift away after several songs. The 33-year-old Hart looks interesting: a Buddha-like figure with bushy beard and abandoned dreadlocks, he actually does sound like he was present at the birth of the music he plays. Alas, what a painful birth that must have been.

With the exception of a couple of crafty, nifty instrumentals, Hart's set dragged as if weighted down with concrete slabs. No dynamics, absolutely no charisma, and with not a hint of stage presence, this was one blues guitarist who sorely disappointed. A pleasant afternoon, then, but nothing really special.

Ali Farka Toure, at the Red Box later on in the evening, provided the real element of surprise every festival needs to keep the customers on their toes. This was no traditional blues gig - which even at the best of times can be an exercise in staid and lumpen electric workouts - but a series of moments rarely achieved.

Perhaps best known for his 1994 Grammy Award-winning album, Talking Timbuktu (on which he collaborated with Ry Cooder), Farka Toure started with a 15-minute raga blues that was simply mesmeric. Looking for all the world like Danny Glover wearing Garth Brooks's cast-offs (gloss-white smile, horrible shirt, big hat), Toure played guitar like no one I've ever heard before. A primitive, glistening sound, imagine Link Wray or Alex Chilton playing fuzztone guitar filtered through a warped concoction of Delta blues and traditional African ryhthms and you'll only have a hint of what it sounds like.

There were no songs titles I could spell, and very little between-song banter I could understand (Toure's English isn't the best, and I lost my Mali-English dictionary somewhere past Santry), but the music didn't need anything other than what was offered.

Supported on stage by four African musicians (and an interloping, fairly redundant Caucasian, for some strange reason), Ali Farka Toure provided an exceptional and fascinating insight into how cross-fertilisation need not be an excuse for two - or three - cultures clashing.

There is, of course, a sweet irony in a group of Africans playing the blues, but the smiles all around seemed to refute such a notion. The most mind-expanding, nimble and distorted blues guitarist in the world? Quite likely. Ali be praised!