Various Artists
Live from Festival au Desert, Timbuktu

The Festival in the Desert, held annually in or near Timbuktu since 2001, originally was a local affair that highlighted the arts and cultural traditions of the nomadic Touareg people. Just a few years after its founding, the festival opened to the world, attracting musicians from other African countries, Europe, and the Americas. (Robert Plant was an early visitor from the West, performing there in 2003.) But in 2012, the future of the festival seemed in jeopardy, as political upheaval broke out in Mali—a coup d’état in the capital Bamako and horrendous violence perpetrated by militant Islamists, who banned music wherever they took power and infiltrated (and to some extent usurped) the Touareg independence movement. The festival didn’t happen in 2013, but this year the UK-based label Clermont released a live album from the 2012 event. The sound quality isn’t the best and the audience is mostly inaudible. But the artists demonstrate the richness and diversity of Malian music, from electric guitar-driven “desert blues” to more traditional sounds. There are tracks by musicians well-known to world music fans—Habib Koite, Tartit, Bassekou Kouyate, and Tinariwen—as well as lesser-known artists who deliver fervent and gripping performances. Guitarist Oumar Konate shreds like a demon on “Bismillah”, and Tinariwen, the internationally-renowned Touareg band, backs the Indian-Canadian vocalist Kiran Ahluwalia on her version of “Mustt Mustt”, a ghazal (poetic love song) made famous by the late qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.