Womad Festival, Bath & West Showground, Bath

Wonderful world

My goodness, doesn't time fly when you're world culture-hopping? Can it really be 20 years since the Drummers of Burundi and the Musicians of the Nile were sharing unprecedented equal billing at the Bath & West Showground with Peter Gabriel and Echo & the Bunnymen at the first Womad, and introducing new festivaliers to the joys of roots African percussion? And roots African commerce – I still remember the wizened blue-robed figures of the Nile farmer-musicians squatting by the roadside, hawking cassettes and trinkets half an hour after coming off stage.

Two decades on, Womad has seen its own near bankruptcy, the universal acceptance of the neologism "world music", a colossal expansion of ethno-trinket merchandising, and transformation into the leading and best organised member of a world-wide fraternity of similar festivals. Along the way, it's developed an almost sinisterly chummy relationship with the weather. Half an hour before Friday's kick-off, there were still grey clouds over the M4, but by the time the young Malian n'goni player Issa Bagayogo led the first band on to the central open-air stage, the biggest of the eight performance areas, the sun was beaming over the forest of rippling silk banners, held out obligingly by a refreshing breeze.

Bagayogo's set demonstrated why his country's track record is as successful internationally as Womad's own. A body of distinctive and vibrantly living popular music styles – in Bagayogo's case, the powerful Wassoulou genre of the southern hinterland of the Sahara – and a musician corps capable of rendering them stunningly modern, but not mere incidental colour in an electronic dance mix.

Within 48 hours, half a dozen more major African treats had graced the stage – the Tartit Ensemble, a group of indigo-swathed Touareg lutenists and drummers who combine wedding (but strictly no bar mitzvah) work around Timbuktu with 40 dates a year in Europe, a circuit Womad virtually created; Rebecca Malope, the diminutive, crew-cut gospel star from South Africa, fronting a high-kicking honey-voiced chorus and thanking Jesus for the audience's understandably ecstatic reaction; Kanda Bongo Man, the old kwassa-kwassa dance ace of the Congo, extended greatly in girth, but still a crowd-pleaser; and, jewel in the crown this year, the re-formed Orchestra Baobab from Senegal, an ensemble of such visual and musical elegance, with their magnificent silk boubous and their haunting guitars, saxes and voices, as to bring tears to the eyes.

All of this a mere 10 minutes from the cocktail bar of the Holiday Inn, Reading, in case you got bored with the army of global food and drink stalls. And with a field full of politico-environmental pressure groups on hand, from hunt saboteurs and Esso-baiters to the actress Vanessa Redgrave on Chechnya, in case you feel you're enjoying it all too much.

The 20th Womad retained its vestigial links with Anglo-US rock – Echo & the Bunnymen, still around it seems, and Terry Reid (remember?) – and was strong on fashionable Latin sounds: the African-Cuban double act of Papa Noel and Papi Oviedo turned near-disaster, the non-appearance of the latter and half his band, into triumph via the pyrotechnic guitar-playing of his last-minute Cuban substitute, a star in the making named Cotó, in a shrewdly chosen scarlet trilby.

His fellow Cubans Asere boosted by the huge drumkit of their guest Billy Cobham, provided a rare occasion for the appropriate use of the term "awesome", and Los Angeles's Ozomatli held Mexico City's Los De Abajo to a tenaciously fought tie in the "modern Latin dance" category. Talking of which, a big BBC4 film unit turned up with a sequinned interview set clearly purloined from Come Dancing, and there were enough Radio 3 presenters in attendance to have taken the channel off air till Christmas, had a rack of butane canisters gone up in the world food village. All in all, a satisfactory 20th anniversary.