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Desert blues: Here come the Tuareg
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Boston Herald, Desert blues: Here come the Tuareg >>
The Touaregs are coming Friday to the Somerville Theatre.
If you're an automotive enthusiast, you're probably envisioning a car show featuring Volkswagen's spiffy off-road SUV.
But, no. These Touaregs are people: Sahara desert nomads whose unstoppable, always on-the-go lifestyle inspired Volkswagen to nick their name. And these particular Tuaregs - to use the more common spelling - are the musicians of Tinariwen, the first Tuareg electric guitar band.
Finding a place to plug in your guitar is tough enough in the Sahara. The members of Tinariwen had bigger problems. When the band first formed some 25 years ago, the Tuaregs' homeland in the desert region of Mali was wracked by poverty, drought and warfare.
While rock 'n' rollers often style themselves as rebels, the men of Tinariwen (pronounced tee-nah-ree-WEN) became the real thing: guerilla fighters who traveled with Kalashnikovs as well as guitar cases.
``They were the young soul rebels of the Tuareg nation,'' said Tinariwen's manager, Andy Morgan, from his home in Bristol, England.
``The guitar was a new instrument to them. They mixed traditional Tuareg music with a strong dose of North African or Arabic pop and elements of rock and blues they'd heard on these cheap pirated cassettes of music by the Beatles, James Brown, Boney M. and John Lee Hooker,'' Morgan said. ``Tinarawen mashed this all together and spearheaded a new kind of music called guitar, a word which to the Tuaregs is both a genre and an instrument.''
Tinariwen is part of a generation of Tuaregs who grew up amid a conflict with the government and military of newly-independent Mali that first erupted in the early '60s. Devastating droughts worsened the Tuaregs' situation in the '70s and many left Mali for neighboring countries. Tinariwen - which means ``deserts'' - solidified as a more or less formal group in Libya around 1982 while the band members were living in a guerilla training camp. They were back in Mali by 1990, jamming when they weren't fighting alongside other Tuareg revolutionaries.
``If you were caught in possession of one of Tinariwen's cassettes by the army or the police, you could get into serious trouble,'' Morgan said. ``They were singing about the rebellion, the aspirations of the young Tuaregs, and the realities that the Tuareg nation had to face.
``This was modern Tuareg music talking about the actual situation that was going on. Not only that, you didn't have any newspapers, radio or TV. So these cassettes were the way to conduct a discussion or awareness raising campaign about the rebellion. They were incredibly valuable and potent.''
After a peace accord was reached and the last skirmishes ended in 1996, the members of Tinariwen began pursuing the dream of supporting themselves through music. They met the French world beat band Lo'jo and its producer Justin Adams, now the guitarist in Robert Plant's band, when they visited Mali in 1999. This friendship led to the first Festival of the Desert in 2001, a gathering of African and Western musicians beyond Timbuktu on the edge of the Sahara. Plant himself performed at the most recent one, along with Tinariwen, Lo'jo and the Navajo rock band Blackfire, an event captured on the just-released ``Festival in the Desert'' DVD.
But Tinariwen's unique, hypnotic guitar rock is better demonstrated on its new, second CD, ``Amassakoul,'' which Rolling Stone likened to ``Keith Richards, Ry Cooder and Ali Farka Toure picking side by side under an unforgiving sun.''
``Tinariwen's music is like the desert,'' Morgan said. ``It's empty, rhythmic, hard, harsh and precise, but with a gentleness and power inside it as well.''
And you don't have to understand a word of the Tamashek lyrics to feel the emotion in Tinariwen's desert blues. Turns out the Tuareg call themselves the Kel Tamashek - ``the people who speak the Tamashek language'' - and aren't terribly fond of the term Tuareg, which is Arabic for - yikes - ``abandoned by the gods.''
Bet the folks at Volkswagen didn't know that.
( Tinariwen plays Friday at the Somerville Theatre. Tickets are $22-28. Call 617-876-4275. )
By Larry Katz
Wednesday, October 27, 2004 10/27/04 >> go there
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