SOMETIMES words are not enough. After all, try to write about love and it is like trying to wrap jelly in elastic bands.

So how do you write about a performance like this, when a slight 25-year-old singer from Uzbekistan steps on to a stage with a voice as old as time and paints the air with sounds of beauty, majesty, truth, yearning, sorrow, delight and desire?

Close your eyes and you are thousands of miles away from that village hall with the crown green bowlers at play out the back. The walls fall away and the sound of the desert wind comes keening through in this mixture of traditional songs and original compositions.

This was a rare treat for Hovingham. Sevara's tour schedule reads Moscow, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin... Brawby. The Shed's traditional home of Brawby missed out on this occasion, the gig relocated to Hovingham's village hall, as all Shed gigs will be for the foreseeable future.

Brawby's loss, for this occasion was magical, with the BBC Radio 3 World Music Award winner a sometimes coquettish figure, sometimes strong and powerful, in front of her band of six cohorts.

The superb Toir Kuziyev, on the tambour, was a particularly potent presence, sometimes plucking at the strings of the instrument, sometimes lending a more sorrowful resonance with the bow.

The offerings of these seven wanderers, these seven musicians, painted a landscape bigger and broader than one could ever hope to hear in these modest surroundings - but then that's The Shed's calling card. The unexpected, delivered without demand, but received with pleasure.

Updated: 09:56 Monday, June 28, 2004