Originally, the Festival in the Desert had a lot more of Thanksgiving to it than of Robert Plant. Now an internationally famous musical gathering in Northern Mali, the festival morphed out of regular gatherings of people who lived on the move and got together for holidays a few times a year to eat, talk, dance, and play music as well. But, beginning about 2001, the Festival in the Desert invited Westerners in to the desert of Northern Mali to hear and share in the music.

Unfortunately for them, but fortunately for us, the civil unrest in Northern Mali this year has postponed the festival until peace can be built again in that region. The cultural and ethnic sharing that the festival was about for so many of its participants is now on the road, with the Festival of the Desert 2013 becoming the Caravans for Peace: groups of musicians traveling around the globe to share both traditional and new music. Trumansburg’s Grassroots Festival will be graced by three bands: Mamadou Kelly, whom many will remember as a band member for the late Ali Farka Toure and also for Alkibar, which is the same band in a different configuration playing with Kelly at Grassroots. If you don’t know it, you should be prepared for amazing African-style fingerpicking and what’s been called “the DNA of the blues.” (good example on Youtube: Afel Bocoum- Ali Farka.)

In a different musical tradition come the two interrelated groups, Tartit and Imharhan. Led by Fadimata Walett Oumar, Tartit plays traditional women’s music, using the imzad (like a single-string violin), and the tinde, a percussion instrument that can be taken apart into cooking utensils. “Initially,” says road manager Chris Nolan, “Tartit was radical. They were mixing classes; women and men were playing together; they were mixing instruments.” The tinde was a woman’s instrument, but a few men have picked it up to save it; with the same cultural destruction affecting indigenous people worldwide, the young people were moving to the cities from the nomadic life of their forebears, and leaving many traditions behind. The group also uses guitar, which they say expresses their culture well and helps make their music accessible to the young.

Among the Tuareg- or, as they call themselves, the Kel Tamasheq (those who speak Tamasheq) men are veiled, but women are not. The culture has a strong matrilineal tradition and harkens back to a founding queen, Tin Hinan, in the fourth century. “La femme touarègue est libre, et je parle de liberté d’action et d’expression,” Oumar explained in an interview with the Italian journalist Barbara Loumanaco. “Chez nous on dit que ‘la femme est le pantaloon de l’homme’: la femme est liée à l’homme, c’est elle qui couvre l’homme qui autremont serait nu.”

(“The Tuareg woman is free, and I’m speaking of freedom of action and expression. We say, ‘the woman is the pants of the man’: the woman is tied to the man, it is she who covers him who otherwise would be nude.”)

Tartit added the guitar, but Imharhan added the electric guitar. Literally related to the first group- there are two brother-sister pairs between them- Imharhan gives them room to stretch into new music, while Tartit preserves the past. “These are master musicians, at the top of their class,” says Nolan. “It’s not a taste of the festival; you’re going to get a full meal. You don’t have to spend a lot of money to go to the desert, because it’s coming to you.”

Nolan got into the whole thing himself when he went to the festival eight years ago. “My whole interest was in the socio-economic development aspect of the music festival,” he explains. “It’s not owned by a Western NGO. What do they have of their own to export? Sand? Anything that they have to export is owned by a multinational, but they have ownership of their music, their culture… I gave them my phone number, and said, if you ever need anybody to run an errand, this is where I live. I don’t get paid,” he adds.