Jordi Savall's Ibn Battuta: The Traveller of Time

Barbican Centre, London, March 17, 2025

Catalan viol player Jordi Savall led an 18-piece ensemble to celebrate the journeys of the 14th-century traveller Ibn Battuta (1304–1368/1377). Born in Tangier, he made several pilgrimages to Mecca, which he combined with voyages to Egypt and east Africa, Anatolia, Central Asia, India and China, as well as to Spain and the Mali Empire. Amongst Savall’s musicians were several artists celebrated in their own right including Syrian singer and oud player Waed Bouhassoun, Moroccan oud player Driss El Maloumi, Malagasy valiha player Rajery and Afghan rubab and sarod player Daud Khan Sadozai. The performance was a sequence of readings from Battuta’s account of his journey interspersed with musical numbers from locations he visited.

The aim, of course, wasn’t to recreate music from the 14th century but to give a sample of music from the various territories in which Battuta travelled – with occasional dives back to Europe to mark the death of Marco Polo, the Coronation of Pope Benedict XII and the beginning of the Hundred Years War. Some moments seemed strangely anachronistic, such as the musical stop in Afghanistan, which featured ‘Laïla Djân’, a song best known by Ahmad Zahir, the Afghan Elvis. The concluding ‘Üskudar’, a well-known Turkish (and Balkan) song, also jarred. There were 19 performers on stage, but the highlights were smaller groupings like Waed Bouhassoun singing with ney, oud and kanun, Chinese pipa and zheng and a lovely duet of santur and percussion. The whole ensemble playing together seemed less than the sum of its parts.