If you want to know what living in a global village means, there were few better places to be Sunday night than San Francisco's Palace of Fine Arts, where African group Tinariwen rounded out the first weekend of the San Francisco Jazz Festival's spring season.

For starters, there's the mere fact the musicians were there. All refugees from Mali's Touareg community, the performers have spent the last few decades shuttling around various parts of North Africa, fighting repression and making music. But mix in a key performance at an African music festival, high-profile supporters such as Robert Plant and Carlos Santana and fervor for spreading their message, and you've got a global media sensation.

Then there's the music. Tinariwen was undeniably exotic, clad in colorful headdresses and caftans and singing in a dialect unfamiliar even to many Malians. Yet the stuff they make their music from was absolutely familiar: guitars, bass, drum and voice.

Ibrahim Ag Alhabib and his cohorts applied those common ingredients with methods both exotic and familiar. Tinariwen's songs mostly eschew Western ideas of construction, relying on a single sinuous groove more than verse-chorus-verse or any typical notion of soloing. Yet the players have obviously absorbed multiple influences, particularly an almost subliminal sense of the blues.

The result was haunting, irresistibly physical and often just on the verge of sounding familiar. For entire songs, the group managed to sound like it might break into "Jumping Jack Flash" or "Concrete Jungle" at the drop of a beat.

I still don't know what to call the music, so for now I'll just settle for "magic."