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If Mick Jagger spoke Tamashek
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The Toronto Star, If Mick Jagger spoke Tamashek >>
If Mick Jagger spoke Tamashek
A guitar band of Sahara Desert nomads, who play to the beat of a camel's walk, is trying to sell itself as a rock act.
The band is called Tinariwen. Its members appeared onstage with Carlos Santana at the Montreux Jazz Festival last year, with Robert Plant in a trance version of "Whole Lotta Love" in Paris this spring, and as the second of three acts opening for the Rolling Stones in August.
"If the world spoke Tamashek, then Tinariwen would be as big as the Stones," band manager Andy Morgan is fond of saying.
He and others argue that the band's hard-edged aesthetic and true rebel credentials naturally appeal to a mass rock crowd.
The band members are ethnic Tuareg, part of a nomadic Berber people found in parts of the Sahara, including Algeria, Niger and, in their case, northern Mali.
From the time of Mali's independence from France in 1960, the Tuareg's nomadic ways clashed with the rest of the country's sedentary ones. Rebellions were fought with the Malian army, including one in 1979 that ended with part of the Tuareg force retreating to military camps in Libya.
There, Tinariwen took shape. In the barracks, founding members transposed bluesy desert music from their teherdent lutes and shepherds' flutes onto jangly electric guitars to sing of loss, exile and hopes for eventual victory.
Tapes circulated. The band's legend grew. When formal peace came in 1996, Tinariwen formed musical alliances with sympathizers in France and Britain, and in 2000 helped establish the Festival in the Desert, now a celebrated annual concert event that peacefully promotes the Tuareg cause.
Onstage, members appear in robes of white and indigo, sometimes with leather purses around their necks, and their heads coiled in generous turbans.
All year, they have also been appearing on the covers of major European world-music magazines, looking indomitable, mythic and – with electric guitars strapped over their shoulders – ready to rock.
But Tinariwen is not a rock band. There is no front man, no virtuoso lead guitarist. Rather, it is a loose collective that tours in a group of seven or eight but whose membership has never been strictly defined.
The band's first album, The Radio Tisdas Sessions, of 2000, remains their best for its relaxed and unselfconscious charm.
Amassakoul, three years later, met with a commercial success helped by an extensive tour schedule that brought then to Harbourfront Centre last year. The new album, Aman Iman, sounds harder-edged in keeping with the rock-band idea.
Likely the best way to hear them is around a campfire in the open desert. Second best might be at a place like the Mod Club with expectations in perspective.
--John Goddard 11/15/07 >> go there
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