Another impossibly cool new release comes from Tinariwen, a veteran group of Tuareg musicians whose parents hailed from Mali. After the abortive Tuareg uprising following Mali's independence from France in 1960, nomadic Tuareg refugees were given asylum by Colonel Khaddafi in southern Libya. Their kids grew up in desert camps listening to the age-old songs of the Blue People of the Sahara, along with the latest jams from Bob Marley, John Lennon and Bob Dylan. After the rebel generation passed, their kids traded their AK-47s for electric guitars. Tinariwen, which means "empty spaces" in the somewhat Atlantean Tuareg language called Tamashek, formed about 10 years ago to play a new style of Tuareg music updated with electric guitars and female chanters. If you were traveling across the barren wastes of the Hogar by truck from Agadez to Tindouf, you could buy their cassettes at any of the palm oases along the often-unmarked piste.

Now this epochal group finally appears in the West on a cd called The Radio Tisdas Sessions (World Village 468010), and the result proves to be almost shockingly cool. I smelled the roasting goat and received visions of colliding worlds listening to guitarist Kheddou, former guerilla turned Saharan rock star, playing in a slow, loping, circular, desert campfire groove redolent of North African blues and Sufi chanting. Recorded at an obscure radio station in northern Mali in a gesture of reconciliation between the Tuaregs and Mali's ruling party, Tinariwen's debut album sounds like a dreamy evocation of a lost epoch of caravans, tribal ceremonies, and a freedom that doesn't exist in this world any more. Highly recommended.