|
|
 |
Tinariwen's sounds born of unrest in Mali
|
| Click Here to go back. |
Chicago Tribune, Tinariwen's sounds born of unrest in Mali >>
Twenty years ago, Abdallah Alhousseini trekked across the Sahara to flee a disastrous situation in Mali in the Western Sahara. Currently, as a member of the blues band Tinariwen, he recollects that time from a different vantage point.
Tinariwen's journey has been just as incredible. The band will perform Sunday as part of Old Town School of Folk Music's Folk & Roots Festival. The group is comprised of Tuaregs, a semi-nomadic tribe whose documented history in North Africa stretches back for more than 1,000 years. During the 1960s, the Malian government began seizing their traditional territory and forcing them to flee into Algerian and Libyan refugee camps. A series of droughts devastated the Tuaregs throughout the following decades.
Alhousseini came to live in the Tuareg refugee areas when he was a teenager in the mid-1980s. Part of everyday life in the Libyan camps was military training to fight against the Malian army. He remembers the rifle drills as especially brutal. But he says their instruction by tribal cadre at that time was also intended to raise a sense of political awareness.
In the camps, he fostered an interest in music and met the guitarists who would become Tinariwen. Co-founder Ibrahim Alhabib had transposed traditional anzad (one-string fiddle) and tahardent (three-string lute) lines to the modern guitar, he says, "without even really being consciousness of it." They formed a group and chose the name Tinariwen to reflect their situation; the word means "empty places" in the Tuareg's Tamashek language.
Even though the members of Tinariwen lived around the Sahara, they were not isolated from outside musical influences, and rock cassettes circulated everywhere. Today, the band has adapted the driving beats of rock `n roll into an absorbing, percussive drone in their sound. Its poignant vocals waver between incantation and song. Alhabib and Alhousseini add the distinctive serrated musical phrases that resulted when traditional one- and three-string instruments were adapted for six-string electric guitars.
In 1991, the Tuareg rebellion officially ended. The members of Tinariwen were able to return to Mali and openly perform their once-clandestine music.
Today, Alhousseini says, "A lot of Tuaregs see constructive development as the way to achieve what we want to achieve."
A 1996 peace accord also made it easier for the outside world to hear Tinariwen. Producer Justin Adams recorded the group's debut, "The Radio Tisdas Sessions" (World Village) five years ago in Mali, that feat despite the country's rationed electricity. Tinariwen was able to spend more time working in the studio on a subsequent 2003 disc, "Amassakoul" (World Village).
Tinariwen performed at one of the Live 8 benefit concerts last weekend in Cornwall, England. In a controversial programming decision, African artists were to be presented in Cornwall and Johannesburg, while Western pop stars were slated for larger cities London and Paris. But Alhousseini says he looked forward to presenting Tuareg issues for a potentially worldwide audience.
"There has been a major drought in our home region in northeast Mali," Alhousseini says. "Herds have been wiped out, and since the Tuaregs don't have their own country, that makes things harder."
As the American media began paying attention to Tinariwen last year, the press often focused on its culture's militant past. A CD review in Rolling Stone even compared Alhabib's multiple gunshot wounds to those of rapper 50 Cent. But, as Alhousseini says, such stories tend to ignore the group's introspective lyrics based on Tuareg history and, "songs that deal with the problems of everybody--love, society, nature, philosophy."
Andy Morgan, Tinariwen's manager, also wants the media to step away from that image of guerrilla warfare--although he admits that it made for exciting publicity copy initially.
"We tended to stress that part about being freedom fighters when I started working with the group," Morgan says. "But what I've really come to understand from knowing them is that it's more about a rebellion of the soul than a rebellion with guns." 07/08/05 >> go there
|
| Click Here to go back. |
|
 |
|
|
|
