The world is full of unlikely stories about talented musicians who emerge from obscurity and hardship to achieve global fame.  But few acts rival the tale of northern Mali’s Tinariwen, champions of desert folk-rock, pioneers of modern Tuareg music and one of the most authentic and soulful African groups to reach the world stage in many years.  The Tuareg are a collection of nomad desert clans, with Berber (Amazight) roots, who make their home in the ever-expanding, inhospitable vastness of the Sahara desert.  Tinawaren’s is a story of war and peace separation and miraculous reunion, and extraordinary cultural exchange among a people whose very existence is remised on their resistance to the influences to outsiders.
 
For the group’s principal composer and spokesman, Alhousseïni Abdoulahi, a.k.a. Abdallah, the story begins in a small, Tuareg encampment near the Malian town of Kidal.  Born there in 1968, Abdallah vividly remembers the day in 1982 when an organizer of the incipient Tuareg rebellion against the Malian government visited the camp and and played a cassette of songs designed to sensitize and educate people about the coming struggle.  This was a time of drought and dictatorship in Mali, and the Tuareg were very much on the outs with the military government of Moussa Traoré.  The songs on that cassette were sung in Tamascheck, the local Tuareg language, and played on guitars.  It was the first time Abdallah had ever seen or heard a radio or cassette player, and the voices he heard were those of Tinariwen’s founding members, Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, Alhassane Touhami and Inteyeden.
 
“This music came via Ibrahim,” said Abdallah in a recent telephone interview from France, where Tinariwen was touring.  “He was the first one who played it.  In 1976, ’77, he was living on the Algerian border.  What he’s told me is that he always wanted to play guitar, electric guitar.  One day, he met someone with an acoustic guitar in Tamarasset, and right away he thought that what he was playing on bottles and the like would work on this instrument.  So he bought this guitar and started playing.” 
 
Abdallah was intrigued.  But for a well-born Tuareg boy to embrace the guitar – a foreign instrument – was no simple matter.  The following year, he traveled to Tamarasset, the largest Tuareg town in southern Algeria, to visit his sister, and there he saw Ibrahim and other future members of Tinariwen performing in public.  “They were playing guitars,”  he recalled,  “but at the time I was ashamed to play the guitar because that was not part of our tradition.  Many Tuaregs did not understand someone playing the guitar.  In the Tuareg tradition, only the griots (entertainers by birth) played something like a guitar, the tehardent (a spike lute).”
 
But change was in the air for the Tuareg, and for Abdallah.  Tamarasset was effectively the Big City – an important crossroads for Tuareg people in Libya, Niger, Algeria and Mali – and there, he began to hear the music that had inspired Ibrahim and his cohorts.  “You had cassettes of Bob Marley, Jimi Hendrix, James Brown, John Lee Hooker,” Abdallah said.  “These tapes had been finding their way into the desert for a long time.  When they started playing guitars they were listening to the music of Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan and lots of other Americans who played guitar.  So they had influence from these genres of music, and also Maghreb music from Morocco and Algeria.  In the quarter where I stayed in Tamarasset, there were a lot of young people nearby, my neighbors, who listened to the same songs.  Ibrahim was a celebrity at that time.”
 
 The sound itself was revolutionary, but the real appeal of these early songs was the poetic, philosophical ways they addressed the hardships of a people suffering drought and displacement.  It was music of the moment, and proved irresistible to a people under pressure, despite their cultural conservatism. 
 
In 1985, Abdallah began playing guitar himself, but he did not join the group in Tamarasset.  Instead, he moved on to Tripoli, Libya: “This was the thing for all the young Tuaregs in the early ‘80s.  Lots of people would go to these places and return to the desert with radios, cassette players, and things like that.  So I went out of curiosity.  In Libya, the guitar was the only instrument the Tuareg used.  When you arrived there, you had to be interested in Tuareg guitar.”
 
Abdallah once again encountered Ibrahim and his songs in Libya, but still as a spectator.  He then returned to Algeria, and came back to Libya, this time to begin military training.  “I had decided to join the rebellion,” he recalled.  “At the military camp in Tripoli, I met the whole group Tinariwen: Ibrahim, Japonais, Hassan, Inteyeden, Khedou, everyone.  They had already become soldiers.  I was the last member of Tinariwen to get military training.  The group had formed in 1985 in another military camp in Libya.  They had looked for equipment and taken the name Tinariwen – that’s the plural of desert.”
 
When he joined the group, Abdallah introduced a new wave of musical influence to the sound, that of Malian guitarist Ali Farka Toure, who had created his own desert guitar revolution with his bluesy interpretations of Songhai, Tamascheck and other Malian folklore.  It was the combination of all these things that coalesced in Tinariwen’s sound, and very quickly, fueled by the solidarity of rebellion, this became the music of young Tuaregs everywhere.  “Since 1985 – 86,” said Abdallah, “all the Tuareg have become interested in this music.  It has become a modern Tuareg music.  It is even played in marriages.”
 
Buffeted by the forces of war, drought and family obligation, the members of Tinariwen separated often, and then reconnected, sometimes by sheer coincidence.  When the Tuareg rebellion exploded in Mali in 1990, the miusicians found one another again, this time in the mountains just south of the Algerian border. “Each of us had come independently,” recalled Abdallah.  “We were not together.  We all knew that the rebellion was starting in Mali and we all went there.  In June 1990, the members of Tinariwen were together in the mountains, fighting.  We played guitars.  We carried arms as well.  That was a very hard time.”
 
An accord in early 1991 failed to end the conflict in Mali, and again, the musicians were scattered.  That year, a few members traveled to Abidjan and made the group’s first studio recording.  When lasting peace came to northern Mali under a new, democratic government a few years later, most of the members of Tinariwen left the military and decided to live as artists.  “We moved between the north of Mali, Niger and Algeria,” recalled Abdallah.  “You have Tuareg in all these places, so we traveled among them doing little concerts.  We didn’t go together as a group.  We’d spend a week together, or a month, and then separate.  Sometimes one of us would be alone for five months.  Or two of us would travel together for a time.  That’s how it was.”
 
This was the state of affairs that existed in 1999 when the French world music group Lo’jo visited Mali with their producer, Justin Adams, now the guitarist in Robert Plant’s band.  Lo’jo met members of Tinariwen in the Malian capital, Bamako, and invited the group to perform at a festival in France.  The Lo’jo entourage was mightily inspired by what they heard.  “after the concert,”  said Abdallah,  “Phillippe Brix, the manager of the group, asked us, ‘would it be possible to have a music festival in the desert?’  We told him, ‘Why not?’”  The resulting Festival in the Desert (2001 – 2004) is now a world music legend unto itself, but in preparation for the very first one, held near Kidal, Adams and Brix brought recording gear to a Kidal radio station, Radio Tisdas, and recorded Tinariwen’s first international release, The Radio Tisdas Sessions (World Village, 2002).
 
Before having his mind blown by the rich musical ambiance of Mali, Adams has been steeped in Middle Eastern and North African music, and had worked with punk/reggae bassist/bandleader Jah Wobble in the band Invaders of the Heart in London for about seven years.  “I’ve always been interested in heavy trance music,”  Adams said in an interview last year, “that feeling of dread you get when you hear some really wild music.”
 
Tinariwen’s desert rock hit the spot for Adams, but the experience of recording in Kidal was another matter.  “All one’s preconceptions went out the window as far as time, space, money, technology, relationships,” said Adams.  “We were going to record Tinariwen.  But who are Tinariwen?  Difficult to say.  They’re nomads.  They might be anywhere.  It’s a loos conglomeration of writers.  Their music had been banned during the war. I think you could spend three months in prison for possession of a cassette.  It seemed like everybody in the whole of Kidal knew all of Tinariwen’s songs.  When they did a concert in town, it didn’t really matter who was doing backing vocals.  Anybody could just get up from the audience and get on the mic and join in the choruses.  The way they normally recorded was to sit around on mattresses in a little room together, and somebody would press Play and Record on a little boom box and they’d just play for 45 minutes.  That included chatting and making tea and tuning up between songs.  And those cassettes would be copied en masse.” 
 
It took time to make the record.  Electricity in the radio station was available for, at best, a hours a day.  Sometimes, key musicians would vanish into the desert for days.  And there seemed to be trust issues.  Only after many flawed sessions did all the musicians come together to deliver a truly powerful performance.  Ibrahim showed up one night and took charge, and the group recorded five of the album’s 10 songs in a 45-minute stretch.  Adams left unsure as to whether he had a record at all, but listening to the tapes soon assuaged his fears.  The elegant songs on Radio Tisdas are a perfect coming together of folkloric passion, guitar trance and easy, informal ambiance. It turned out to be an album with authentic spiritual power and global reach, creating Tinariwen fans worldwide before the group had even mounted an international tour.
 
Adam’s description of the music is revealing.  Each composer plays lead guitar on his own songs.  Another guitarist accompanies, always with the low E string tuned up to G – the trademark northern Malian guitar tuning.  Adams said, “If there’s a bass guitar around, someone will play bass.  Otherwise they’ll just play bass on the bottom strings of the guitar.  Abdallah does that very well.  They can take or leave perussion, I think, because they can feel that rhythm in their heads so much they don’t really need it stated.  Nobody wants to play drums.  It’s considered women’s or children’s work, not really a manly thing to do.  The calabash players get bossed around like mad.  They found it weird that we were so interested in the percussion and wanted to get it to sound good.”
 
As magical as that first album was, the follow-up, Amassakoul (World Village), recorded in Bamako three years later, is even better.  Abdallah told me that although the members of Tinariwen have long dreamed of recording and traveling in Europe and America, it was not easy for them to come together and make this record.  “It’s very difficult for us,” he said.  “In the desert in Mali, we can’t stay together because we can’t live by music.  There are no materials to do concerts, no concert halls.  Music doesn’t work.  But in 2003, Phillipe (Brix) and our manager decided to bring the musicians to Bamako to stay for one month together to prepare the new album.  We took a house, and we stayed for one month with a sound engineer.  We arranged the songs and worked on our ideas.  Then we recorded the album in three days at studio Bogolon.” 
 
The result is a tour de force, capturing the relaxed, trance vibe of the earlier sessions while adding new musical colors to the sound.  “Amassakoul ‘N’ Ténéré (The Traveler in the Desert)”  sets the tone with a crisp, chugging electric guitar groove, topped by Ibrahim’s guttural voice and a rich, mixed-gender chorus.  “Chet Boghassa,” a song by Abdallah going back to the war years, builds around a short, pumping guitar riff that might have emerged from a recording studio in Memphis in the ‘60s.  “Alkhar Dessouf,” an ethereal meditation on the “shock of worry and nostalgia,” features Ibrahim playing a beautiful, breathy flute intermingled with voices of spiritual possession.
 
“We talk about nostalgia,” Abdallah told me.  “All the time.  Look at our lives.  In the past we were in exilein Algeria and Libya.  Returning to Mali, our parents always lived in the desert with the animals, but we were no longer nomads.  We were looking for lives in the towns with music and other things.  It’s not easy to go and visit our parents in the desert.  We have to rent or buy a 4 x 4 and it’s expensive.  So our lives are always in nostalgia.  That has not changed right up to today.  Where I was born and grew up, I have not seen since 1982 – that’s 22 years.”
 
The much heralded echoes of rock and blues in Tinariwen’s sound are strong on the new album.  The rowdy guitar crank of “Oualahila Ar Tesninam (Oh my God, You’re Unhappy)”  is reminiscent of the Grateful Dead in their early ‘70s blues-rock heyday.  For Abdallah, the blues connection has less to do with instrumentation, rhythms and scales, and more to do with lifestyle.  “Blues,” he told me, “is also a music that was created in a situation of nostalgia.  Our music was created in some of the same conditions as the blues – exile, suffering, separation from relatives.  If you want the truth, all the members of Tinariwen listen to the blues, more than other types of music.”
 
After requests from young Tuareg fans, Abdallah tried his hand at a quasi-rap song, “Arawan,” a spoken lament about the forgotten peoples of the desert.  “Rap music has become the music of youth,” he said.  “In Tuareg tradition, it’s the youth who mostly listen to music, not old people.   So I tried to write a song especially for them.  I am not a person who had ever thought about making rap music, but I did it, not with machines, just my guitar and some percussion.”
 
Tinariwen is eagerly anticipating their first U.S. tour, underway in late October.  Coming to America has been a dream since the start.  It’s too soon to predict the exact lineup for that tour.  Tinariwen remains a shape-shifting entity.  At the Musiques Metisses festival in France in 2002, there were women singing in the chorus.  At the Festival in the Desert in January, 2003, the women were gone, but there was a drummer playing a trap set, giving their sound a stronger rock edge.  Later that year, at WOMEX in Seville, Spain, a six-piece version of the group took the stage, including one female vocalist, but without the drum kit and missing key composer/vocalists Ibrahim and Japonais.  Abdallah acknowledges these transformations as the inevitable result of nomadic Tuareg life, but he says as long as a quorum of the groups nine core members are present, it’s Tinariwen.  “It’s not that the group wants to separate,” said Abdallah.  “It’s an obligation.  This is life in the desert.”