New York Times, Concert Review >>
Tinariwen is a more worldly band now than it was in 2001, when a performance at the Festival of the Desert in Mali introduced its resolute, hypnotic Saharan rock to an audience that carried its reputation beyond Africa. Since then Tinariwen has been on the world-music circuit, performing for audiences who don’t speak its main language, Tamashek. Wearing white robes and head scarves, the band members have made themselves emissaries. One of the band’s leaders, Abdallah Ag Alhousseyni, has a catchphrase onstage: “Welcome to the desert.”
When the band performed at the Highline Ballroom on Thursday night, the set included Tinariwen’s own kind of hip-hop song: two chords carrying rhymes in Tamashek and French. But that was just a brief bit of crossover. For most of its generous set, Tinariwen was as self-defined and intransigent as ever. The songs moved at their own steadfast pace, unhurried and adamant.
Since the late 1970’s, on and off, Tinariwen has been a voice for the Tuaregs, a nomadic minority who attempted a rebellion in 1990 against the government of Mali. The band’s founder, Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, and the musicians he gathered as Tinariwen (which means “deserts”), wrote songs at first as propaganda. Now its lyrics, by the two lead singers who took turns as frontman — Mr. Alhabib and Mr. Alhousseyni — are solemn, filled with longings, memories of “freedom fighters,” homesickness and a determination to hold on to Tuareg identity.
The group had heard rock as well as African and Middle Eastern music. Its instruments are acoustic and electric guitars and electric bass, with a lone hand drum for percussion. They applied Western instruments to the traditions of home: gnarled picking patterns from West African lutes, call-and-response vocals, three-against-two rhythms, a high descant sharing a melody, the modes and inflections of North African and Arabic music. The melodies are as straightforward as folk tunes, but they tug against the harmony in ways different from Western pop or rock, and the vocals stay unpolished — like the voices of footsore travelers, not slick performers.
Tinariwen’s songs extend minimal materials over time. Instrumental passages are more like incantations than solo and backup; guitar lines are bonded to the rhythm, with a twang glinting through now and then. The songs are comparable, inevitably, to a journey through a desert landscape that only appears unchanging to those who don’t perceive its details. A vocal quaver, a guitar trill, some new quick notes in a bass line, a flicker of extra drumming or a burst of ululation from the group’s female singer, Wonou Wallet Sidati, all became events. When some songs picked up speed, in triplet rhythms with handclaps resembling Moroccan gnawa music, they sounded ecstatic.
A few songs revealed that Tinariwen is persistent, not provincial. There were hints of blues and reggae, and in one song, Mr. Alhousseyni placed a repeating guitar line in the foreground: a full-fledged rock guitar hook. But Tinariwen has clearly decided not to change too much for outsiders, and stubbornness only makes its music stronger.
02/19/10 >> go there
