5:30 PM Tal National, a guitar-driven band (six musicians, one dancer) from Niger’s fast-growing capital city of Niamey, has some big hits in its homeland and is celebrating its debut international release (Kaani, just out on Fat Cat Records). Niger’s borders are essentially those of the former French Colonie du Niger, carved from an inland chunk of West Africa where the southern edge of the Sahara meets the Sahel in first half of the twentieth century. The French still support Nigerien politicians who protect its economic interests, and Niger’s most valuable world-market resource is, um, uranium, which the French exploit. Niger subsumes swaths of Songhai, Fulani, Hausa and Tuareg tribal territories, and members of these groups bring their beats to Tal National. But this is no rootsy, folksy sound. Niamey, the economic, political and cultural hub of modern Niger, is a mushrooming West African city, and and Tal National plays hard-driving, urban, pan-West African music; tribal rhythms sizzle in a high-energy matrix of Nigerian Afrobeat, Ghanain highlife and Senegalese mbalax, or melt into the plaintiveness of Mali’s Tuareg desert blues.