Algerian rai is a melting pot of rural songs, pounding beats and rock, pop and soul. One of the highlights of the African Roots and Shoots festival, this show goes back to the roots of the genre, featuring traditional stars of rai. First up is Emil Zrihan, a Moroccan Jew with a huge counter-tenor voice who bends and holds impossibly long notes with the controlled bravado of a prizefighter. There is a searing melancholy to his blend of flamenco, Moroccan mawal and liturgical music.
Zrihan's breathtaking act is followed by Maurice El Medioni, a Jewish piano player who pioneered Algerian swing in the 40s, and his collaborator Lili Boniche, a guitarist who weaves rakish Latin and European pop into local rhythms. Medioni blows kisses at the audience and plays with a baroque flourish, while Boniche totters in on the arms of two helpers, and settles himself onto a chair, his gleaming red guitar on his knee. Both men are well into their 70s, and their phlegmatic backing musicians can't be much younger, but they perform with an assured ease.
Boniche clears his throat between notes, and runs out of puff towards the end of each song, but with his slicked-back hair and zoot suit, he still has the presence of a star raconteur. He moves from Algerian jive to French chanson, even executing a few steps along the way. "I am not better than you/And you are not better than me," he croons, sending the party animals at the front into a whooping frenzy.
Although she is 76, headliner Cheikha Remitti has never played in Britain before. A tall woman with waist-length black hair and flashing eyes, Remitti is known as the "grandmother of rai", or "el ghedra" (the root). Like an Arabic Piaf, she began singing on the seaports and streets of Oranie in western Algeria, and flouted Muslim convention by singing about the pleasures of sex and alcohol. Accompanied by a sprightly band of young musicians, she slowly paces the stage, singing mesmerising drones in a deep, cavernous voice. A female dancer comes on and wiggles decoratively, but can't compete with Remitti. With just one suggestive shake of her ample hips, the older woman conjures up a musty, exotic world.
