Tinariwen: Music to Cross Deserts By

Photo by Andrew Glaser

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Tinariwen sound-checks like any other band: Musicians filter onstage one at a time, adjust knobs, tune up, play little melodies. It’s a scene of subdued chaos, like the pleasant cacophony that precedes a classical orchestra performance. But the last musician to step into the soft blue stage lights of Bimbo’s 365 Club in San Francisco isn’t noodling. A faded old Fender Telecaster hangs from frontman Ibrahim Ag Alhabib’s shoulder, but for now it’s silent. His dark eyes stare absently out at the empty hall from under a shaggy Jimi Hendrix mane. The look says, “I’m here, but I’m a million miles away.”

Really, it’s more like 6,000 miles: Tinariwen hails from the harsh, windswept deserts of northern Mali, and despite a decade touring the world the band is still fixed—musically, spiritually, politically—to that spot. Watching the group perform early this month was like experiencing a hallucinatory mirage; intellectually I knew I was in San Francisco, but all my senses told me I had landed somewhere deep in the Sahara. This is the central irony of Tinariwen: that a band that so keenly communicates a sense of place could be formed by members of the nomadic Tuareg people, who have for centuries (and still today) wandered restlessly through the desert with nothing but a few belongings and a fierce disdain for anything remotely static—including the Malian government.

It was that disdain that first brought the musicians together in a 1980s Libyan military training camp (sponsored by now-fugitive dictator Moammar Qaddafi), which prepared them to take up arms in an early-’90s Tuareg rebellion against the Malian state. It’s been years since they traded guns for instruments, but bassist Eyadou Ag Leche told me the band sees itself as the voice of a people who still feel marginalized.

“Music is a way for us to share our story with people around the world,” Ag Leche said, in French. (The band members speak no English; they sing in French and Tamashek, their native tongue.)

It’s the painful story of a distressed culture, but over the years Tinariwen has become deft at telling it. They were given a 2005 BBC World Music Award, and have garnered praise from the likes of Robert Plant (who described the band as “the music I’d been looking for all my life”), as well as Carlos Santana. This week, the band’s fifth album, Tassili, comes out on the Anti- label. It features collaborations with members of TV on the Radio, Wilco, and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band. The album is gorgeous, with everything from stirring, ghostly ballads like “Walla Illa” to signature thumping dance numbers like “Tenere Taqhim Tossam” (see video), where TV on the Radio vocalist Tunde Adebimpe’s high-pitched wails cut through a sound that is usually dense and bass-heavy.

In San Francisco, Tinariwen opened its set gingerly, as if afraid to pull out all the stops in front of a small audience. It felt almost like waking up, or watching the sun slowly rise over a crusty desert outcrop. That feeling lasted about three songs, at which point percussionist Mohammed Ag Tahada shattered the stillness with a resounding djembe slap, using a force that would split most hands. The drumming was joined by a chorus of claps and ululations that kicked off what would become a three-hour musical trance. It was still impossible to tell what continent I was on, and it didn’t matter.

Tassili is the group’s the first album that includes contributions from non-Tuaregs, but that doesn’t mean the band is straying from its roots. Quite the opposite: The album was recorded in the desert, with all acoustic instruments and portable generators for the recording equipment. Not surprisingly, there were some technical difficulties: There were sand-choked amplifiers, power was spotty, and keeping the wind noise off the tracks was damn near impossible.

Ag Leche told me that the band took it in stride; after all, this where they’ve been playing music all their lives. “For us, it’s the same to organize this in the desert as it is for anyone to record in a big studio,” he said. “We know the conditions in the desert.”

Those conditions forced the recording operation to relocate frequently; the band would set up, try a spot out, then move on. Sounds like a pain, but moving around is what the Tuareg do best. Even in music, it seems, phylogeny recapitulates ontology: To tell the story of a nomadic people, the music must be nomadic as well. Here’s Tinariwen in action:

Click here for more music features from Mother Jones.

THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

payment methods

THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate