Despite Nige’s assumed faux-uncouth persona, there is something inescapably endearing about him. It’s mainly down to that honest enthusiasm for music, regardless of pigeonholes. What matters most to him, as it should to us, is that the music should have some kind of buzz to it.

Kennedy has put some of his own money into financing this album, which confirms the extent of his commitment, but also hints at record-industry cautiousness. The execs may have worried about which browser-box the project could be dropped into: the occasional use of electronically-amplified and modified violin doesn’t make it rock, it’s hardly classical, but not really world music, nor, despite the occasional detour like Lullaby for Kamila or One Voice, light or easy listening. Even on those detours Kennedy’s marvellous sound and the vibrancy of the Kroke Band pull everything back on course, and when all the elements come together as triumphantly and mesmerisingly as they do on Time 4 Time, for example, none of these issues seems in the least bit relevant.

I share Kennedy’s evident fascination with the roots of this musical tradition, which, in the distant past, must have grown out of a meeting between cultures that first clashed, then reached an accommodation and finally forged a style (or, rather, an approach) that drew on Eastern elements and fed them into mainstream Western music.

Never as vibrant or uninhibited as the music of, say, the Ivo Papasov Wedding Band or the Del-Alfoldi Saxophone Ensemble, this album nevertheless provides much pleasure as well as prompting speculation. Until recently musical historians ignored vernacular genres, not least because they had gone deliberately unrecorded in official documents, but the evidence of their importance was always there in the living tradition guarded by bands like this. All credit to Kennedy for continuing to show us different perspectives so effectively.