BY ANDERS SMITH LINDALL

Kidal, Mali, is a sand-blasted, sun-scorched region in the Sahara that stretches between Algeria in the north and Niger in the south. It's a long way to travel for the desert-blues band Tinariwen, to play on Sunday at the Old Town School of Folk Music's Folk & Roots Festival.

But bridging geographic or cultural divides is nothing new to Tinariwen -- fresh from an acclaimed performance at last weekend's Live 8 concert event as well as recent performances with Led Zeppelin legend Robert Plant.

The band has a lengthy history translating the struggles of its people into song:

*Twenty years ago, its members lived in refugee camps in Libya and Algeria. Like many fellow Touareg, a nomadic tribe that has scratched out its subsistence in the southern Sahara, they were exiled from Mali by drought, repression and war.

*Ten years ago, with the Touareg in rebellion against the Malian government, Tinariwen's songs told stories, passed messages and preserved the Touareg culture.

*Five years ago, by then a veteran band, Tinariwen was still unknown outside the world of the Touareg and those who speak their language, Tamashek.

Today, Tinariwen has released two albums in the West, "Radio Tisdas Sessions" in 2002 and last year's "Amassakoul." Both have been widely distributed and praised in Europe and the United States. The band's soulful, entrancing, electric guitar-based sound heavily influenced Plant's new disc, "Mighty Rearranger."

The road to Tinariwen's renown ran through the Festival in the Desert, an annual celebration of music and culture held in recent years in the Kidal region. Plant's presence in 2003 attracted documentary filmmakers who included a handful of hypnotic Tinariwen performances in the resulting movie and soundtrack CD.

Tinariwen passed its latest milestone last weekend, when the band shared a Live 8 stage in England with Senegal's Youssou N'Dour, Zimbabwe's Thomas Mapfumo and other African stars. Their appearance at the Folk & Roots Festival won't match the Live 8 gig's significance -- "the heart and soul of Live 8 was there," Tinariwen guitarist Abdallah Ag Alhousseyni says in an e-mail translated by manager Andy Morgan -- but the band feels a special kinship with Chicago. The city's deep blues roots set it apart, Alhousseyni says. The band learned this firsthand when harmonica master Billy Branch jammed with Tinariwen at the Chicago Cultural Center last fall.

"When we first heard the blues about four or five years ago," Alhousseyni recalls, "it seemed terribly familiar to us. We have since learned that the roots of this music are in West Africa, especially from near the Niger River, which is our homeland, too. So you could say that our music and blues music are very much part of the same family."

The similarities go beyond the musicological. Like American blues, Alhousseyni notes, the Malian variety is often a vehicle for telling tales of hardship. "We have a word, assouf, which means pain, longing, nostalgia, soul, exile," Alhousseyni says. "This word is almost exactly the same as the word 'blues.' So American blues and desert blues are not only linked by the style of music but by the subject matter and by the emotions which are expressed."

The songs are in Tamashek, so most Western listeners will find the message in the driving rhythms, droning guitars and fervent vocals that evoke a world of passion and beauty that is universal.

"I think music can change things," Alhousseyni says. "When Tinariwen started, there weren't any TVs or radios or newspapers using the Tamashek language. It was music that conveyed the message. ... It's music that brought us out of our country and let us speak to the world. Politics doesn't do that, nor does commerce. But music does."