THE first African Festival Weekend at the National Centre for Early Music in York will be held next week.

Ensemble Tartit, the Tuareg Women of the Desert, present their desert blues ballads from the Sahara next Saturday (26th) in a 7.30pm performance of austere melodies and call-and-response vocals accompanied by simple instruments and hand clapping.

The following evening at 7pm, the African ancestral dance group Dade Krama explore the rich, vibrant musical traditions of Tanzania, Ghana and the Gambia, such as the hypnotic melodies of the mbira thumb piano, the ancient rhythms of the gyle and the thunder of drum pieces.

To add a York flavour to the African festivities, The Pocket Drummers beat out West African and South American rhythms at the National Centre at 2pm next Sunday (February 27). Led by Jon Ward, York's young group of African drummers from the Performing Arts Centre will play Djembes, African bells, Djun Djun bass drums and Surdo drums from Brazil, and also will talk about the music and its origins.

National Centre director Delma Tomlin says: "We've been doing World Sound concerts here for a while, and what we've found through events such as the Chinese Festival is that it's easier to present it under one umbrella rather than as one-off concerts.

"Ensemble Tartit had been lined up to come here for a while now, and we noted York had its own young African drumming group, and we then added Dade Krama, who performed at York Arts Centre some years ago, so we now have a bright, colourful weekend festival."

The World Sound programme resumes on June 7 when the Jaipur Kawa Brass Band, from the edge of Rajasthan's Thar Desert, visit York for the first time. Under the leadership of Hameed Khan Kawa, eight musicians, a fakir and gipsy dancer Sapera Kalbelya perform traditional music, popular songs from Indian cinema and North Indian classical music.

See next Friday's York Twenty4Seven for details of the National Centre for Early Music's programme of jazz, folk and early music for Spring and Summer 2005.

Updated: 10:09 Friday, February 18, 2005