Tartit
Ichichilla
Network/Harmonia Mundi

Ever since Ali Farka Toure made his entrance on the international scene, one knew that the blues is a music that was born in the Sahara. Ensemble Tartit, coming form the same region of Timbuktu,  confirms this. Touaregs by their circumstance, exiles in a refugee camp in Burkina Faso, Tartit’s singers and musicians were reunited by the Festival “Voix de Femmes” (Voices of Women) in Liege. For these women from a community where music is a daily activity in the same way as cooking,  they formed this group very easily.  This recording manifests the emblematic dexterity inherited by the practicalities of life, of their profound artistic spirit.  With this music, minimally punctuated by handclapping, woven around the strings of the lutes, the guitars or the ancestral violins, they relieve each other with song, alternating registers of lows and highs, alternating moods of sadness or celebration. Above all,  the blues rhythm hovers, its repetitive syncopation holding your attention for all thirteen selections.