{ 2009 01 07 }

Desert blues

Outside Timbuktu

Mali’s Festival in the Desert, the only music festival in the world in which most of the audience arrives by camel, begins tomorrow. A nine-year-old gathering of the tribes that mostly features West African musicians but occasionally draws the likes of former Led Zep frontman Robert Plant, it’s held in Essakane, an ancient Saharan trading post hours from the nearest paved road (which might be in Timbuktu–itself shorthand for “end-of-the-world”). So you get the picture: it’s way the hell out there in the dunes. It’s hosted by the Tuaregs, nomadic tribesmen who ride for days, coming from villages scattered across the sands. Essakane lies at the heart of their ancestral territory, more or less, so the festival is something like a big family reunion. (Of course, the Tuaregs, having never really accepted the idea of the modern nation state, view basically everything around here as their territory. Hence the on-again, off-again insurgencies against the Malian government. But that’s a story for another day.) Writing for San Francisco magazine last year, I gave the festival an SF spin–”Burning Man without the glow sticks” (caveat emptor: PDF).

I’ve never been to the festival, but I have been to Mali, so I find myself wishing I had the cash to get back over there. All the usual suspects are onstage this year: Vieux Farka Toure (son of the late lamented Malian guitar god Ali Farka Toure), who often wears a cowboy hat with his boubou when he plays; Etran Finatawa, from next-door Niger, who are rapidly making a name for themselves in the West; and headliners Tinariwen, aka the Tuareg MC5, former rebels who traded in their AK-47s for guitars. (Imagine them doing “Kick Out the Jams.” Ah, well. I’ll have to settle for “Whole Lotta Love,” with Robert Plant.) What all these guys have in common is searing guitars and clean, crisp rhythms, sounds perfectly adapted to a climate so dry that you can actually feel the hot wind sucking the moisture out of your body (Lessons learned: I got heat exhaustion when I was there last year). Desert blues, indeed.

The only real absence this year, by my lights, is Group Inerane, an obscure seven-piece from Agadez, Niger. When I saw their lp (via demoniazed) buried in the stacks at Amoeba, I had to have it–the cover shows a dude in a turban, staring down the camera, brandishing a battered guitar. And the music: Raw leads and ululating call-and-response, the songs’ unpolished punch enhanced by fluctuating, basement-tapes-style production values. Mythic stuff. Or as the liner notes put it, “the now sound of the Tuareg Guitar Revolution.”

Posted by Chris Smith on Wednesday, January 7th, 2009, at 7:15 pm, and filed under Africa, Articles, Music.

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