From Africa to Cerritos

Tinariwen blends desert song, pop and blues into a unique brand of ‘guitar’ music

By Phillip Zonkel

Staff  Writer

            LOTS OF ROCK musicians claim to be rebels, but the men from the band Tinariwen were the real thing – guerrilla freedom fighters in West Africa who traveled with assault riffles, swords and guitar cases.

            They are French-speaking Touareg people, the legendary nomadic warriors from northern Mali.  From 1990 to 1996, he three eldest members of Tinariwen fought in the Sahara Desert alongside other rebels in small units, living deep in the desert and sometimes traveling by camel.  They would attack convoys, army and police posts, army camps and barracks, and then retreat back into the desert.  After a fight, they gathered around campfires and sang their own songs.

            The Fighters – and their fellow bandmates – also became cultural revolutionaries; they discarded the traditional tehardent lute and shepherd flute in favor ofthe electric guitar, electric bass and drums.  Taking notes from the native Touareg music and the harsh melodies of the one-stringed Touareg violin, they incorporated drums and electric guitar and influences from America’s pop encyclopedia into their songs.  “The 10-member Tinariwen, with desert regalia of robes and turbans, performs today at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts. 

            “The guitar was a new instrument to them,” says Andy Morgan, a British Music Journalist and the group’s manager.  “They mixed traditional Touareg 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 and John Lee Hooker. 

            “Tinariwen mashed all this together and spearheaded a new kind of music called ‘tishoumaren’ or simply guitar, a word which to the Touareg is both a genre and an instrument.”

            The band has released two CDs, 2002’s “Radio Tisdas Sessions” and the current Amsakoul,” which has been embraced by critics.  A recent review of “Amassakoul” in Rolling Stone called the disc “A freedom of ancient desert song and African blues fundamentals, played on electric guitars with the bite and brigand spirit of the ’68 Rolling Stones.  Tinariwen captures the poetry and hardships of nomadic life and exile is hypnotic, modal vocals and a tangle of side-winding riffs that sound like a mirage come true.”

            The group also can be seen on the new DVD “Festival in the Desert.”  The annual Festival in the Desert, a celebration of the music and culture of the Touareg, was launched in 2001 and has taken place every January since.  The remote music festival, held at a barren site that is a four-to-five-hour drive from Timbuktu, and also welcomes other musicians.  In all, more than 30 acts from Africa, Europe and North America, such as Robert Plant, trek through the dues to jam. 

            The men of Tinariwen are part of a generation of Touareg who grew up amid conflict with the government and military of newly independent Mali that first erupted in the early 1960s.  Devastating droughts added insult t injury the following decade and many people left Mali for neighboring countries.  Tinariwen formed in 1982, when the members lived in Libya in a guerrilla training camp.  This location also was the spot where the group tuned in to a new sound, first the acoustic guitar and then the electric guitar.  “They were inspired by the sound of the electric guitar, by the fact that it carried a lot further than the old instruments like the tehardent lute and the imzad fiddle, which are a lot more suited to the older, quieter ways,” Morgan says.

            After a peace accord was reached in and fighting ended in 1996, Tinariwen started another battle – pursuing the dream of being full-time musicians. 

            The group first toured in 1998.  In 2001, Tinariwen made its first trek to Europe and played several key festivals, including WOMAD and Roskilde.  The group returned in 2002.

            The band also has had its sights set on brining its revolutionary sound to America.  Now that the group is touring the U.S., life outside of the desert doesn’t seem like a mirage.

            “All the members of Tinariwen have family out in the desert, living in camps and adhering to the old, harsh existence,” Morgan says.  “But they themselves, and many of their friends, have settled down in the town of Kidal, which is the capital of the Adrar des Iforas, the region in which their people have always lived.

            “They have always dreamed of having a career outside the desert,” he says.  “They have dreamed of visiting the USA for a long time.  Now it seems their dreams have come true.”

Phillip Zonkel can be reached at (562) 499-1258 or by email at phillip.zonkel@presstelegram.com