Tinariwen
Joe's Pub
October 27

Who were these masked men? Attired in anonymous sand-repellent robes and head scarves, Tinariwen strode onto the Joe's Pub stage last Wednesday as though the five mustached musicians, and their lone female singer, had just been teleported from the southern Sahara. Indeed, the life of an itinerant musician bears more than a passing resemblance to Tinariwen's nomadic Tuareg tribe, whose name, borrowed by Volkswagen for its wanderlust connotations, actually means "abandoned by the gods." Yet one could hear a diaspora's worth of God-given musical echoes in this sextet's vamping electric guitars, chanted vocal chorus, clapping hands, and djembe drum.

Tinariwen started as a large acoustic ensemble in 1982 and today encapsulate rock's über-narrative. Having discovered electric instruments while exiled during the tribe's only fairly recently resolved rebellion against Mali's government, they developed a unique variation of the West Africa–seeded electric blues that emerged from the Mississippi Delta. Singer-guitarist Ibrahim Al Alhabib picked his instrument with a couple of fingers, letting melodic patterns and riffs somewhere between Skip James and John Cipollina emerge in unison with Tamashek-language lyrics like "I am a traveler in the lone desert/It's nothing special." Actually, it increasingly is something special, insofar as the Tuareg's numbers have dwindled in recent years thanks to drought and the urban lure.

Co-guitarist Alhousseini Abdoulahi switched to acoustic guitar a few songs into the evening's first show and began flat-picking blistering solos like some late-'60s San Francisco acidhead. The music—part trance, part provocation—took on complexity as Mina Walet Umar clapped out syncopated patterns above the band's loping 6/8 grooves. The songs about loneliness, nostalgia, and of course, deserts (the band's name in Tamashek) demanded surrender while also inspiring a transportive sort of joy reflected in singer-guitarist Elaga Ag Hamid's bewitching dance moves. Tinariwen opened the show with the flute-and-drone ambience of "Assoul" and ended it with "Arawan," an apocalyptic rap tune about finding their camp empty and getting "stuck in the mud, up to my camel's knees." Actually, Tinariwen brought the camp to us before riding off to another town, another stage, another desert. RICHARD GEHR