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Out of the desert, lonsome guitars
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Sunday Star Ledger, Out of the desert, lonsome guitars >>
By: Bradley Bambarger
Rock music hasn't been about substantive rebellion since the '60s, even if punk was a flashpoint and the wider world took Bob Marley's rebel reggae to heart. The Saharan band Tinariwen — playing electric guitars with a laconic edge —makes music of life blood rather than lifestyle. They sing of winning respect and freedom for the Tuareg, a nomadic Berber people of West Africa who have been variously neglected and in conflict with the region's governments and sedentary populations.
Tinariwen (the name roughly translates as "empty places") is a loose-knit collective of relations, led by male guitar-poets with chanting, unveiled women alongside. Their Tamashek language may be foreign to us, but anyone enamored of the blues hypnotism of John Lee Hooker or even Keith Richards - let alone late MaUan guitar star Ali Farka Toure (a Songhai, not a Tuareg) — should warm to the band's rumbling grooves and jagged, circular riffs, Tinariwen has the ache of the blues in its voices, too, the pain of exile and deprivation mixed with a meditative wisdom.
Tinariwen's "Aman Iman: Water Is Life" — its third CD for distribution outside Africa, after 20 years of cassettes for local consumption —was beautifully produced by Justin Adams, A longtime Tinariwen supporter, the British guitarist's own subSaharan-influenced style was a formative spark for Robert Plant's Strange Sensation band, (The Led Zeppelin singer, who has always had a yen for exotica, can be seen with Adams taking an old blues song back to Africa on the 2003 DVD "Festival in the Desert," which also features Tinariwen.)
Although 2000's "The Radio Tisdas Sessions" and 2003's "Amassakoul" were deserved breakthroughs for Tinariwen, "Aman Iman" is the band's strongest album yet, its most melodic and varied. The rich sound, captured at a studio in Mali's capital of Bamako, blends electric and acoustic guitars with percussion and handclaps; the lead singing has a gritty soulfulness, while the entrancing backing vocals are spiced with ululations.
The propulsive bass rhythms of "Cler Achel" (I Spent the Day) open the disc, followed by caU-and-response vocals on a theme of homesickness and missed love ones; the guitar solos ascend and spin like arabesques of rough-cut multicolored glass.
Even more than Hooker, the artist that Tinariwen evokes most directly from these shores is the late north Mississippi singer/guitarist Junior Kimbrough, whose primal trance blues seemed channeled from African ghosts, "Mano Dayak" may be a tribute to a Tuareg freedom flghter, but its vocal prelude — a solo moan over barely rustling guitar — spookily recalls the sparse opening of Kimbrough's sexual mantra "AU Night Long,"
In "Assouf" (Longing), there are searing wah-wah guitars to impress any rocker, but the sound is always organic, Tinariwen is an example of African musicians taking what they can use from the West, rather than the other way around, creating something that's both deeply traditional and totally modern. 03/25/07
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