Mali Blues

 

By Phil Reser

 

Tinariwen

 

Musicians like Ry Cooder, Taj Mahal, Bonnie Raitt, Bruce Cockburn, Corey Harris, and Markus James have been exploring the African Mali connection to the roots of American Blues over the last decade.

 

British guitarist Justin Adams, a member of Robert Plant's band, produced the first recording of Tuareg desert Blues by the northern Malian group Tinariwen called The Radio Tisdas Sessions.

 

The Tamashek people of North Africa are a collection of nomad clans, with Berber (Amazight) roots, who make their home in the ever-expanding vastness of the Sahara Desert. Forced from their nomadic life, they became fighters in the Tuareg insurgency against the Malian government. It was in the rebel camp that the members of Tinariwen came together while fighting as soldiers and began forming music relating to not only the rebellion, but also the struggle of their people to be educated and to provide for themselves and their families.

Their songs and original fusion of Western-influenced Rock, Reggae, and Blues styles quickly caught the imagination of the Tuareg youth due to their lyrics, awakening political consciousness and evoking the plight of their people across the desert. By the mid-1980s, Tinariwen's songs of exile had crossed the desert via home recordings made on ghetto blasters and by the end of the decade the band's reputation for political protest had spread to the point where the Malian government outlawed the possession of any of their musical cassettes.

 

In 1999, when the French World Music group Lo'jo visited Mali, they met members of Tinariwen in the Malian capital, Bamako, and invited the group to perform at a huge festival in France. After the concert, Lo'jo asked Tinariwen if they thought it would be possible to have a music festival in the desert? They told Lo'jo yes and the result was the first "Festival in the Desert," which is now five years old and a World Music legend unto itself.

 

Tinariwen's most recent album, Amassakoul, was released in 2004 to widespread critical acclaim. Described as "Fela Kuti meets the Velvet Underground," "desert Blues," and "the Rolling Stones of the desert," it earned them the BBC Award for World Music 2005. In an interview, guitarist, singer, and songwriter Abdallah Ag Alhousseyni talked about his collective musical group. Alhousseyni was the band member who introduced electric guitars and bass to Tinariwen's music. He also brought the musical tapes of Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, and Malian guitarist Ali Farka Toure's bluesy interpretations of Songhai, Tamascheck, and other northern Malian folklore into the group.

 

Phil Reser for BluesWax: How would you describe your musical style?

 

Abdallah Ag Alhousseyni: Our style of music is modern Tuareg guitar music. That's it really.

 

Tinariwen at the 2005 Notodden Blues Festival

Photo by Art Tipaldi

 

BW: What type of instrumentation does the band use?

 

AAA: Guitars, percussion, voices, and handclaps.

 

BW: Do you experiment or collaborate with additional musicians at times?

 

AAA: Sometimes. We like working with musicians like Justin Adams, from Robert Plant's band, who has been producing our new album. We have also collaborated with Taj Mahal. Of course we also love collaborating with other desert musicians and friends. We've seen plenty of artists during tours in the last few years and we like meeting and talking to them. But mostly we just play our own style.

 

 

BW: How do you create your lyrical messages and what type of things do you sing about?

 

AAA: In fact Tinariwen is like a collective of songwriters. The main ones are Ibrahim, Hassan, Japonais, and myself, Abdallah. Each of us writes about what concerns us most and then we bring our songs to the group, and take it from there. The main themes are about nostalgia, friendship, loss, homesickness, education, desertification, love...all kinds of things. It's true that during the 1980s, Tinariwen's songs were often very militant, but they have always been very personal, too. It's just that our personal experience at that time was very militant!

 

BW: What kinds of ties do you see between the Northern and Western African music?

 

AAA: Of course there are plenty. To begin with, we sing in a Berber language called Tamashek, which is very close to the Berber languages of North Africa like Kabyle, Chleuch, and Chaoui. The Berber singers of North Africa are also very aware in their lyrics, talking about love, loss, and struggle just like us. So people see quite a lot of similarity between our music and that of artists like Ait Menguellet, Idir, or Ferhat. Then, in the 1980s, when we were often in Algeria or Libya, we absorbed a lot of North African music, especially Rai and all the Moroccan groups from the 1970s, like Nass El Ghiwane. Then there's Gnawa, which has its roots in West Africa, and which is such a huge influence on North African music. So these musical worlds are very close, just as they are in terms of language, culture, and society.

 

Photo by Art Tipaldi

 

BW: In what ways do African, and especially Tinariwen music, connect to the American Blues?

 

AAA: I think the connection is pretty close. A lot of the African American slaves who developed the Blues style could trace their ancestry back to West Africa and especially to the Niger Bend in Mali and Niger. That's the heart of the African Blues and the root of American Blues. And the Blues is about loss, pain, suffering, longing and we have had a lot of reason to feel those kinds of emotion in the past few decades. We have a word "assouf," which means sadness, longing, nostalgia, pain in the heart, etc. In fact, it means "Blues." So when we heard the American Blues for the first time, we were struck by the emotional connection. Then the actual music is very close, of course. Africans went to America centuries ago and took the kind of music that our traditional griots play over there. We're like cousins.

 

BW: Since your success, what have been the major changes in your lifestyles?

 

AAA: None, really. Success so far hasn't meant huge amounts of money, because we're a large band and what we've been doing so far is mostly investing in our future and in the band. So when we go back home, things don't seem to have changed that much. We travel more of course. And maybe we can afford a car, when we couldn't before. But that's about it.

 

BW: What kind of adjustments has the group had to make to work with the music business aspects?

 

AAA: We've had to get used to playing relatively short sets at our concerts. At home we're used to performing all night, in a leisurely kind of way. The idea of coming on stage, knocking out some songs for an hour, and then leaving was quite new to us. Then there's all the media stuff, all the interviews. We've had to accept that and grow used to it. It's true that the way the music business works in the West is very complicated to understand. People have tried to explain it to us and we do understand quite a lot, but in the end, some of our relationship with the business is just based on trust.

 

BW: What were the creative changes or growth that occurred with your music between your first two recordings, Radio Tisdas Sessions and Amassakoul?

 

AAA: Radio Tisdas Sessions just caught us in our very raw state. It was only the second time that we had recorded in something like a proper studio. We didn't know about overdubs and that kind of thing. Each of us just came in with whatever friends he wanted to bring along and laid down a few tracks. By the time Amassakoul came out we had already toured quite a bit, we'd been in the studio a few more times and we had prepared a lot more. We worked with Jaja, our sound engineer, to try and get things right.

 

BW: Coming from your original traditional forms of music interpretation, how have you adapted to both studio and the technology of the Western World?

 

AAA: The thing is that we never really played traditional music as a band. The whole point of Tinariwen is that it represented a new generation of music, which took the older melodies and put them on newer, more universal instruments like the guitar. We've never been traditional musicians. We're learning about the studio, slowly but surely. We still leave most of the technical stuff to our sound engineers and our producer, but maybe we'll start playing with computers soon as well.

 

"Africans went to America centuries ago and

took the kind of music that our traditional griots

play over there. We're like cousins."

 

BW: How do your audiences accept your music and cultural messages in Europe and the United States?

 

AAA: I think a lot of people just take us at face value and accept us as a strange band from the desert with nice tunes and rhythms. But some people want to go further and find out about the meaning of our lyrics and our history. And some even have so much curiosity that they feel the need to come out to the desert. But that's great. That's the effect we'd like to have.

 

Tinariwen's Amassakoul

Click Cover For More Info

 

BW: Do you feel the use of your native language in your lyrics and vocals without available translation has been difficult for your audiences and promotion of your music throughout parts of the world?

 

AAA: This has been a problem and it's one that we're planning to put right on the next CD, which will be out either later this year or early next year.

 

BW: Are you working on a third recording and can you describe the music and most exciting aspects of the new material for you as a group?

 

AAA: Yes, we've already done all the recording. We worked with producer Justin Adams, who did Radio Tisdas too, and with engineer Ben Findlay at Studio Bogolan in Bamako in February. We recorded about 26 tracks! The problem now is that we can't fit all of them onto a CD, so we're having to make some pretty hard choices. I think Justin and Ben have managed to capture a very faithful Tinariwen sound, but with good depth and attack. It's also exciting to work on different parts of our repertoire, which is huge. And we're writing new songs, too.

 

BW: Are you working on a DVD that would give the historical content and understanding of Tinariwen's music to Western audiences?

 

AAA: Absolutely. We've been working on various films with various people for years now. There's a film called Teshoumara by Jérémie Reichenbach, a French guy, which is completed, but it hasn't been properly released. We really want a good film because we feel that it's the best way to get our story and our concerns across to a wider public. Let's hope that we can get one out soon.

 

Photo by Art Tipaldi

 

BW: What does the band believe is your social responsibility with your music?

 

AAA: Tinariwen have always been about education. Here in the West you learn about the world through TV, the radio, newspapers, the Internet. Well, in the desert, until recently, we had none of those things. So music and the songs of Tinariwen filled the gap. And in a sense, that job is still going on and it has become global. Instead just trying to raise awareness amongst desert people about their own lives and their own situation, we're trying to raise awareness throughout the world about what's happening in the desert and what's happening to Tamashek people and their culture. So that's our responsibility. And of course, we also have to entertain people and make them feel good in some way, which is the social responsibility of all musicians the world over.

 

BW: What do you see as the strongest emotional bonding that keeps the band together?

 

AAA: It's a shared experience. When you've been through exile, loss, a war, and other very hard experiences, you develop a very close bond with people. This doesn't mean that you have to be with them all time. Sometimes the opposite is true. But it means that there's something between you that nothing or no one can break.

 

BW: What are some of the future projects and dreams for the band?

 

AAA: We'd like to create better and better music, and better records. We also really want to developed some projects back home...a recording studio, an eco-travel agency for visitors, our annual festival in Essouk, schools, and many other things. There's work to do!

 

Phil Reser is a contributing editor at BluesWax. Phil may be contacted at blueswax@visnat.com.