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Concert Preview
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Chicago Reader, Concert Preview >>
by Peter Margasak
This Tuareg group, formed in a refugee camp during an insurrection against the Malian government, had been playing together for a decade by the time their music made it out of Africa, and their first stateside release, The Radio Tisdas Sessions (2001), got my attention quick. Tinariwen's cyclical guitar-based blues is similar to the music of Ali Farka Toure, but they favor electric instruments, playing aggressive riffs and chords as well as liquid single-string runs--they could almost pass for a rock band, albeit a rock band with long, wandering call-and-response vocal lines and a mesh of overlapping rhythmic cells instead of a backbeat. The group's third internationally distributed album, Aman Iman: Water Is Life (World Village), is the sharpest expression yet of this signature sound: the guitars interweave in loose, hypnotizing lattices, driving the harder tunes and floating atop the delicate ones, and the grooves feel beautifully serene even at a full gallop. The arrangements tend to stick with a single chord, getting deep inside it and creating a delicious tension that builds and builds, especially during a live set--not even the ends of the songs break the trance. Unfortunately, Tinariwen will be without founding singer and guitarist Ibrahim Ag Alhabib--this is the second U.S. tour he's missed due to illness, but the rest of the band put on a great show last spring at Martyrs. Wonderful Malian kora player Mamadou Diabate opens. 11/16/07 >> go there
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