Tinariwen

Amassakoul

(Harmonia Mundi/World Village)

            Here in the West we like to throw around terms like roots, but it’s worth asking what rootedness means to the desert blues band Tinariwen.  The guitar, vocal and percussion troupe is made up of members of northern Mali’s nomadic Kel Tamashek people, and until some 20 years ago – right about the time its key songwriters traded in ancient lutes for electric guitars – their roots often amounted to what they could slog through refugee camps and the unforgiving desert.  Judging from the band’s 2002 debut, The Radio Tisdas Sessions, it’s taken about two decades for their native traditions to outshine their influences.  The record’s trancey guitaristics seem to be culled wholesale from the local icon Ali Farka Toure, who’s from a farming tribe in a neighboring region. 

            Tinariwen’s latest, Amassakoul, represents a quantum leap beyond its predecessor. An interesting irony accompanies the album’s brilliance; it coincides with the Kel Tamashek people’s hard-won struggle to stay put in Mali following years of skirmishes with the government.  Many of the album’s lyrics are poetically articulate about the ups and downs of wandering, but what’s most compelling for listeners who don’t understand Tamashek is how marvelously varied and well paced the disc is.  Some of the sun-parched tunes exhibit the outlines of reggae, rap and rocked-up folk-blues, but the call-and-response chants and pellucid guitar lines succeed at uncovering a strikingly unique Afropop offshoot.  Is this the sound of a band (and a people) putting down roots?

   -- K. Leander Williams

Tinariwen plays Joe’s Pub Tue 26 and Wed 27.