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The Scotsman, Concert Preview >>
Music with a shot of djinn
--by Jan Fairley
"I go out into the deser and I always get this powerful feeling of a presence around me," says Ibrahim Ag al-Habib , leader of the African group Tinariwen. "Sometimes I get an incredible fear, as though there's something next to me. But it's then I get visions, images and music come into my head. The other world is communicating with me, the world of the djinns of painful memory."
The group's name means "empty place" in the Tamashek language of the nomadic Berbers of the Sahara. As Ag al-Habib says in their song, Mano Dayak, "I come from a desert well used to sand storms, I take my rest under the shadeless Tadjart bush, my home is the white, naked Tamesna, the land of the young camel, when men travel there it's always hot."
When we talk, though, they're far from the silence of the desert town of Kidal where they live. They're on a motorway, surrounded by the noise of rain and teeming lorries, as their tour bus travels from Munich to Innsbruck. The world of Tinariwen is full of such odd, romantic contrasts - they have become famous as the men who once held a Kalashnikov rifle in one hand and a Stratocaster guitar in the other.
Tinariwen was formed in the 1980s in Gadaffi's Libyan training camps for Tuareg (a Berber ethnic group) rebels, who wanted to form a Tuareg army to liberate their people by creating an autonomous Saharan state. Twenty years later they are signed to a record label best known for releasing albums by Travis, Embrace and Portishead. With the help of endorsements from Carlos Santana and Led Zeppelin's Robert Plant, they are crossing over from the world-music scene to the rock'n'roll mainstream, a process which began with their appearance on the 2005 African Soul Rebels Tour, and continued with a Radio 3 Award for World Music and a performance at Peter Gabriel's G8 Eden concert.
Tinariwen were making music before, during and after their dramatic rebel story. Since boyhood al-Habib had been playing a guitar fashioned from a jerry can, a stick and bicycle brake wire. He'd pluck age-old Touareg melodies, adding his own phrases inspired by a rag-bag of influences, from north Malian blues to radical Algerian rai music, heard while surviving itinerant jobs and a spell in jail in Oran - and pop from African stars such as Rabah Driassa. He also liked Boney M and Kenny Rogers.
Tinariwen's first audiences were Tuareg exiles who gathered in the desert oasis of Tamanrasset. Their wandering life is described by Andy Morgan, their British manager, as "friendship round a cigarette". Ag al-Habib formed a band with Hassan Ag Touhami and Inteyeden Ag Ableline, named Taghreft Tinariwen - "to reconstruct the desert land". They played for the exiled Tuareg community's weddings and campfire revelries. Within their music's exquisite, loping pentatonic melodies and polyrhythms lie deeply personal memories - Ag al-Habib was indelibly scarred by witnessing his father's murder by a Malian army when he was only four. His grandmother fled with him to exile in Algeria, where he got his nickname Abaraybone, meaning "ragamuffin kid". When you meet this tall, skinny man with his bush of wild hair and a faraway look in his eye, you understand why it has stuck.
Taking up electric guitars, Tinariwen played for people driven out of their settlements by post-colonial conflict, drought and lack of opportunity. With no newspapers, radio or TV, their poetic songs meant everything, voicing their people's hopes, struggle, exile, pain and misery, as well as nostalgia for family and a home that had disappeared. Played for the revolutionary Tuareg movement, the MPA (Mouvement Popularies de l'Azawad), this was music jammed in the tent, passed on through a cassette to cassette ghetto blaster grapevine.
Tinariwen members took part in the 1990 Niger rebellion against Malian authorities (which from 1963 had left thousands dead), a conflict which only ended in 1996 when a bonfire of weapons went up in flames in a peace ceremony in Timbuktu. The end of those dark times came in 2001 with the visionary Festival in the Desert when French band Lo'jo introduced them and their extraordinary music to people like Morgan and Plant around the campfire, over mint tea drunk under a starry sky.
Justin Adams, Plant's guitarist, produced Aman Iman (Water is Life), Tinariwen's third album, not in a Berber tent but in the excellently equipped Bogolan Studios in the Malian capital Bamako. "I said, listen guys, we've got a chance here to communicate with the whole world, so think about what you are doing," he told them.
The resulting, haunting songs have an edgy, metallic feel. They are shimmering yet gritty, with lacy "worrying" improvisations around notes drawn from the blues guitar traditions of the teher-dent, a forerunner of the banjo.
"I wanted to make sure it wasn't cleaned up," says Adams. "When you are in Mali you realise that the sound of distortion in music is not one of bad amps or speakers but part of their natural acoustic. You don't look for purity of tone, rather, texture of life. It's a hell of a raw sound coming from deep down, hitting the guts."
Despite the rebel background, it's not macho rock, and that isn't just because they have female singers. Adams says: "Tuareg women do not wear the veil. Men learn their music from the women, who sing romantic, risqué songs in private, accompanying themselves on the tindé spirit drum. Tinariwen's bittersweet poetry is a window into souls of those who have lived hard lives. As they sing in Assouf (Longing), 'The world sleeps and I count the stars and stoke my burning heart, painful longing overwhelms me and suffuses my heart and soul ...'"
Tinariwen play the Bonar Hall Dundee, 26 March; Ironworks, Inverness, 27 March; Buccleugh Centre, Langholm, 28 March; the Arches, Glasgow, 29 March; the Queen's Hall, Edinburgh, 30 March; and the Lemon Tree, Aberdeen, 31 March. 03/17/07 >> go there
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