The first BBC Radio 3 World Music Awards ceremony on January 28 was a watershed event for the UK. In a glamourous gala event at a big club called Ocean in Hackney, awards and performances were presented before a packed, buzzing house. Hosted by legendary world DJ Rita Ray, the evening actually earned the attention of tabloid newspapers as the award presenters included Johnny Depp, Brian Eno, Joe Strummer, and Damon Albarn of the UK band Blur, in addition to BBC world music pioneers and veterans Lucy Duran and Charlie Gillett. The winners were:

For Africa: Malian guitarist Djelimady Tounkara
Europe and the Middle East: Taraf de Haidouks
Asia/Pacific: Yat-Kha
Americas: Orlando "Cachaito" López

Boundary Crossing: Nitin Sahney
Innovator: Manu Chao
Newcomer: Susheela Raman

Critics' Award for Album of the Year: Baaba Maal's "Missing You"
BBC Radio 3 Listener's Award: Afro-Celt Sound System

Manu Chao and Baaba Maal received their awards on video, but all the other acts appeared live during the two-hour-plus ceremony. For his second number, Djelimady Tounkara was joined on guitar by Afropop's own Banning Eyre, whose book In Griot Time: An American Guitarist in Mali was fortuitously released in the UK on Serpent's Tail press, just as Tounkara--the book's main subject--got the BBC nod. The entire event was broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on January 29, and filmed for a new television channel, BBC 4, to be broadcast later this year.

There was no doubting the significance of all this. Radio 3 used to be the classical station. It now features a 1-hour weekly world music program--World Routes with Lucy Duran--in addition to Andy Kershaw's longstanding world music broadcast, and also a nightly, anything goes program called Night Junction, which has achieved un-heard-of ratings for a program featuring world music. Now, with the launch of these awards, Radio 3 dramatically underscores its commitment to a new global identity. Naturally, there was plenty of off-line discussion about the award categories, and the choice of winners. But everyone at Ocean that night knew that something extraordinary had happened. More than at any time in the past two decades, world music seemed on the verge of breaking into the cultural main stream.