|
|
 |
Concert Review
|
| Click Here to go back. |
Seattle University Spectator, Concert Review >>
Contrasting the typical Seattle drizzle, nomadic Tamashek band Tinariwen whipped the sold-out audience at Triple Door into a dancing frenzy Tuesday.
Tinariwen—whose name translates from Tamashek into “desert boys”—have one of the most rock and roll back stories in modern music. Lead singer Ibrahim Ag Alhabib was born in Mali in the ’60s during a time of political upheaval where his people—the Touareg—were being imprisoned and slaughtered by the Malian government indiscriminately. Ibrahim’s father was executed when he was a young boy, and he spent most of his childhood in refugee camps in southern Algeria.
It was also as a young boy that he met other orphaned Touareg youth who introduced him to the arts of poetry and music. Taking cues from western rock acts like Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix, Ibrahim fashioned a makeshift guitar out of a tin can, a stick and a bicycle brake wire.
In time, Ibrahim honed his musical skills and started writing his own songs and musical poetry with other Touareg companions. He spent time in a Libyan resistance army as a guerilla fighter as part of the Gaddafi movement, and he and his friends expanded their musical ensemble while in the military into the earliest incarnation of Tinariwen. The band has spent the last two decades honing a sound that blends western blues and rock with traditional Touareg folk music together into what the blogosphere has labeled, for better or worse, “desert blues.”
And their arid, soulful folk/rock fusion is precisely what their audience needed to dry off and warm up at Triple Door. The band took the stage with minimal fanfare, co-frontman Abdallah Ag Alhoussenyni greeting the crowd with a touching and cheerful “Bonjour, ça va,” before launching into a just under two-hour long set that convinced a hundred audience members to leave their comfortable seats to dance in front of the stage to the collective’s compelling dusty tunes.
As if it weren’t enough that the members of Tinariwen were able to make it to Seattle from the Sahara to begin with, their set at Triple Door was also the first date they had played in over a year where Ag Alhabib was able to accompany his fellow Touareg companions onstage. Ag Alhabib’s stage presence was sobering and stoic, his gaunt face looking dead ahead and expressionless throughout the night.
But Ag Alhabib’s emotional nonchalance was countered by the moods of his band mates, who were at all times in high spirits on stage. Backing vocalist Wonou Walet Sidati filled in the wordless guitar solos dotting each song with enthralling dances performed at the front of the stage, and by the end of the night bassist Eyadou Ag Leche had taken center stage by complementing each swell of sound with a ferocious, Led Zeppelin-esque stage jump.
Tinariwen are not amazing performers in the traditional rock and roll sense; they don’t rely on any theatrics to enhance their show, make room for almost no stage banter and spend as much time making eye contact with each other as they do with the audience. But with this almost casual approach to live performance, Tinariwen transform their sets into practically spiritual experiences, their tendencies toward soaring choral harmonies and frenzied handclaps recalling aspects of religious gatherings of all faiths.
This captivating spiritual quality of their music is precisely what makes it so powerful. Tinariwen sing primarily in Tamashek—an almost extinct language—but even as American audiences are totally incapable of understanding what their lyrics mean, they’re also incapable of remaining impassive and unmoved while Ag Alhabib and his companions are singing and playing together on stage.
And the group is totally conscious of its communal appeal; their last record was titled “Imidiwan,” which in Tamashek means “Companions,” but has a mystical quality not captured by its closest English translation. Their music is focused unswervingly on the ideas of love and faith and togetherness, and they capture that same sentiment perfectly in their live sets. 02/24/10 >> go there
|
| Click Here to go back. |
|
 |
|
|
|
