Searching the Desert for the Blues: Tinariwen and "Ere Tasfata Adounia"

There have been relatively few times in my life when music has stopped me dead in my tracks. By dead in my tracks, I mean so astounded me that I become obsessed with a song or a group and just HAVE to get that song or album, or everything by that group. In the past 30 years, in my slow acquaintance to all things world music, I can think of only three times it has happened.

The one earliest in time I have related in a different post, but here it is again. My girlfriend Megan (now my wife) persuaded me to attend the Milwaukee IrishFest. For those of you unfamiliar with Milwaukee, each summer brings a huge music festival called SummerFest. After that finishes, a number of weekends of the rest of the summer are filled with local ethnic festivals. There's IrishFest and PolishFest and Indian Summer and PrideFest and Festa Italiana and GermanFest and so on. Well, a good portion of Megan's ethnic heritage is Irish, and so we went to the IrishFest. She told me it would have music and activities and booths where one could by Irish themed and Irish made stuff. I wasn't all that enthusiastic about the music portion because my experience with Irish music was mostly warbly tenors singing Danny Boy or other melodramatic songs, and I just wasn't into that type of music at the time. But we walked in to the Maier Festival Park, and were right near a stage which was sparsely attended but a band was up there just killing it. They had a tin whistle and guitar and bodhran, and keyboards and bass and a woman whose voice was just incredible, and they were singing in a language that I could not recognize. Megan explained to me that they were singing in the original Celtic language, and we watched the whole show. I thanked the band afterward...the lead singer was really nice...and we bought a record (yes it was that far in the past) that I listened to over and over and over again. I've since lost that record, which is sad to me because it is out of print. The band was Capercaille, and since that time they've become international sensations on the Irish and world scenes, and their lead singer, Karen Matheson, is a star in her own right and has performed her music in movies. I still can't listen to a Capercaille song without remembering that feeling.

The second time I was blown away by global music was in an unlikely spot - driving on I-10 late at night to San Antonio, where Megan and I lived. We were coming back from a Lyle Lovett and Robert Earl Keen concert at Floore's Country Store. It was probably close to midnight, and a local world music show was on the public radio station. Suddenly, a riot of music poured out of our speakers. I didn't recognize it, but it was fantastic. I could hear fiddle, accordion, possibly guitar, but I couldn't identify anything else. The music sounded Eastern European to my untrained ear but man, was it great! I waited eagerly after the song finished for them to announce the artists and was rewarded just before we arrived home. The band was Värttinä from Finland, the song was Vihma, and once again I just had to go out, find their CD and play that damned song over and over. I also ended up playing that album over and over, because almost every song on it was wonderful.

A time in the recent past involves our band for today, Tinariwen. I didn't even discover the song that so entranced me. Megan had found it. We were hosting KUNM's Global Music Show, and Megan had put together some songs that she was going to play. Suddenly from the speakers came this rollicking song, with a distinctive minor key, that sounded like a cross between the blues, a hard-rock song and the voice of some middle-Eastern muezzin. The electric guitars were playing the same melody over and over but even without a ton of variation, it still really worked. The bass provided a perfect under-layer for the guitars to pick up on. It sounded like the birth of the electric blues. I sat there with wonderment on my face. Who was this band? "Tinariwen," Megan said. The song was Tenhert. A half year later, Tinariwen appeared on The Colbert Report, and are generally considered to be the new stars of the world music scene. I think that had I heard other songs by Tinariwen, I would have noted them but not had that same reaction. Tenhert really turned me into a fan.

Tinariwen (the band's name means "deserts") is from the Saraha desert region of northern Mali. They were formed in 1979 in Algeria by Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, who witnessed his father's execution at age four, and have been called by Slate "rock and roll rebels whose rebellion, for once, wasn't just metaphorical." Alhabib built his own guitar as a child out of a tin can, a stick and bicycle wire and started to play old Tuareg and modern Arabic tunes. In the late 70s, he started exploring chaabi music, Algerian raï and western pop and rock. In the 1980, Ghadafi wanted to build an elite force of Tuareg fighters and issued a decree for all Tuareg living illegally in Libya to join the Libyan army. In military training camps in Libya, Alhabib met other Tuareg musicians, and the result was a collective they began calling Kel Tinariwen (People of the Desert) later shortened to the band's current name. They moved to Alhabib's home country of Mali in 1989, and a Tuareg uprising against the government led to a peace agreement in which the members of the band were able to leave fighting and devote themselves full time to their music. They began to receive international recognition in the late 1990s, and performed in the touring Festival au Désert as headliners and performed at WOMAD in 2001. They began to tour regularly, and in 2010 represented Algeria at the South African World Cup. An Arabic uprising in Mali in 2012, and their denunciation of "Satan's music" led to the brief abduction of one of Tinariwen's members. Many fled to the Southwestern US to evade capture and record a new album. Their music is "assouf," basically traditional Tuareg melodies and rhythms with traditional Tuareg instruments, Berber music, Algerian rai, traditional Malian music, regional pop music, and Western rock. You can hear the desert in their driving electric guitars and chanting style. You can also hear the electric blues, though the band is adamant that they never heard the blues until they began touring the US. This song, Ere Tasfata Adounia, can be found on their 2009 release Imidiwan: Companions CD.