Andy Gill reviews "The Rough Guide to African Blues"

Apart from the Tinariwen-shaped hole at its heart, this is a fine anthology tracking the resurgent blues consciousness in African music. The emphasis on Saharan and West African forms means there's no room for Mahlathini, the Howlin' Wolf of South Africa, or Thomas Mapfumo, the conscience of Zimbabwe; but it does impose a stylistic congruence on the contributions, linking the Berber blues of Mariem Hassan and Niger's Etran Finatawa with the quietly moving manner of Nuru Kane, the Senegalese guitarist influenced by the gnawa music of Morocco. The US contributions are of dubious value: Corey Harris's attempt to return Skip James's "Special Rider Blues" to its African roots via the one-string fiddle of Ali Farka Touré is OK, but Bob Brozman's affected singing spoils his duet with kora maestro Djeli Moussa Diawara. Better, surely, to note the cultural correspondences between the continents, in which Boubacar Traoré's vocal serves as the equivalent of the "high lonesome" style of American country, and Oumou Sangaré's stirring, passionate approach makes her the African Bessie Smith.

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Rachid Taha & Vieux Farka Toure at the Barbican, London

Vieux Farka Touré has a lot to live up to, especially with an electric guitar round his neck. The death last year of his father Ali, the great master of the desert blues, was a huge loss to music, and for his son to carry on the family business is a tall order indeed. Ali preferred Vieux to be in the Malian army than in a Malian dance band, but the mulish genes of the father have been passed down, and there is a crackle of expectation at seeing what this young man can dish out tonight, in an inspired pairing with the Algerian-born rai rocker, Rachid Taha.

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Tinariwen at the Barbican London

Howard Male reviews Tinariwen's performance at the Barbican London.

As he begins the evening with a solo performance of "Tenere," charismatic frontman, Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, barely tickles the strings of his Stratocaster and sings like John Lee Hooker at his most laid-back. Then the rest of the eight-piece join him, and we find out why this Touareg band are currently capturing the imagination of Mojo readers and world music fans alike.

Handclaps, and a hand-drum no bigger than a footstool, form all the percussive backdrop that's needed. This leaves plenty of space for the three guitarists, who are the heart of the band's sound, to interlock and interact, while the bass(pictured, below) throbs away in the background. One guitarist deals out angular chugging riffs. The other two issue wiry curlicues of notes, creating the illusion of baroque complexity in songs built from just one or two chords. The tone of the guitars is clean and sharp, but with an edge of distortion: the sound of electricity incarnate; no pomp, just pure African soul.

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Tinariwen

Can blue men sing the blues? The Tuareg are proud, nomadic desert people who were sometimes known as "the blue men" after the clothes dye that stained their skin.

Tuareg nomads Tinariwen ("the people of the empty spaces") are currently the hottest band in world music, with their new album Amar Iman (Water Is Life) climbing the charts in numerous countries.

If the roots of blues music are in West Africa, Tinariwen have plugged into its ancient sources, mixing them with Western rock influences (Robert Plant, the singer with Led Zeppelin, was in the audience and will sing on stage with them later in the tour).

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Interview with Vieux Farka Touré

It must be tough being the son or daughter of a famous musician, especially when you aspire to follow in their footsteps. Unfortunately for Vieux Farka Touré, he's the son of the late, great Ali Farka Touré, a veritable guitar hero of Malian desert blues music (and mayor of his home town, Niafunké), who died recently from cancer. But fortunately for him, he's a promising musician in his own right and has been creating quite a buzz with his self-titled, debut album.

When Ali Farka Touré passed away, he was fiercely proud of his 25-year-old son (one of 11 siblings), but it wasn't always the case. After many wrangles with record labels, Farka Touré senior had developed a huge distrust of the music business. It wasn't until he joined up with Nick Gold's World Circuit label that he felt he'd got a just deal, and so when his son showed signs of early musical talent (playing drums and calabash) he was understandably concerned, and tried to dissuade him.

"It was difficult," says Farka Touré, "but I persisted with my music cautiously and quietly, and eventually my father was convinced that my desires and passion were greater than his worries about my following him into that world."

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Tinariwen - Aman Iman

There is a saying that it only takes one drop of water to make the glass overflow. Let’s hope that proves to be the case with Aman Iman (Water is Life), the third album from Tinariwen, the fabulous exponents of an intoxicating brand of desert blues.

Admired throughout their North African homeland and by world music fans, they are yet to make a major breakthrough in the West.

Tinariwen first emerged as musical standard bearers for a youth rebellion which swept the post-colonial states of North Africa in the 1980s and 1990s.

At the root of this revolt were the unemployment, poverty and social exclusion being suffered by the Berbers, the indigenous population of the region, who prefer to be called the Amazigh, or “free” peoples of North Africa.

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Interview with Tinariwen

Hailing from the Touareg people, Tinariwen play the ‘music of the unemployed’. They spoke to Kevin Devine about their Aman Iman album

You have dedicated Aman Iman to “Peace, tolerance and development in the Sahara and the world of the oppressed.” These are powerful sentiments and I can guess where they’ve come from, but why did you choose this particular dedication?

I think it’s important for us to make it clear that the Tinariwen story isn’t just some exotic epic that happened in some obscure corner of the Sahara desert, and that is without any relevance to the wider world.

What happened to us has happened to millions of people around the world, and is still happening.

Our songs are about the Touareg, and our home in the desert. But we’d also like to think that anyone who’s in exile, who’s fighting for independence, for the survival of their people, their culture and their language, can relate to the songs too.

But having said that, we also believe in peace, tolerance and development. The rebellion we fought in the early 1990s was very painful and very brutal, especially in its effect on the civilian population.

War of any kind must always be engaged as a last resort, in self-defence. In those circumstances, no doubt the members of Tinariwen would fight again but in the meantime we place our faith and our hope in peace, tolerance and developement.

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Tinariwen

It is the hour before sundown in the desert town of Kidal and Ibrahim Ag Alhabib - aka 'the ragamuffin kid', as his nickname translates from the Tamashek - is talking about his previous incarnation as a guerilla fighter. Is it true that during the Tuareg rebellion that started in 1990, he waged war against the Malian government with a Kalashnikov and a Stratocaster strapped across each shoulder? 'That's exactly what happened,' he says softly.
Ibrahim looks like Keith Richards's younger cousin and is the charismatic star of Tinariwen, the most thrilling act in world music right now. Their third album threatens to turn them into bona fide rock stars. But Ibrahim also waged war against the government from this outwardly inhospitable corner of eastern Mali.

The Tuareg are the descendants of tribesmen described by Greek historian Herodotus in the fifth century BC and ran the trans-Saharan trade routes for more than two millennia. Known as the Blue People, because indigo dye in their shawls stained their skin, they kept black slaves, rode camels and were simultaneously feared across vast swathes of this part of Africa and mythologised in the West.

The rhetoric of rebellion is embedded in the DNA of rock music, and tales of Tinariwen's involvement in the Tuareg struggle for liberation - following independence for Niger, Mali, Algeria, Libya and Burkina Faso in the 1960s - have added to their own mystique. The truth is inevitably complex and to find it necessitates a bone-jarring journey to what is still rebel territory.

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African Soul Rebels

This is the third year of the African Soul Rebels tour - previous line-ups have included the Sahara Guitars of Tinariwen, Mali's Amadou & Mariam, Rachid & Taha & Souademassi from Algeria.

This time around you couldn't beat the line up with a stick. The "son of a lion" Fema Kuti is the headliner. Kuti's 16-strong band summon up a killer brew of Nigerian Afro-Beat, matching the energy and innovation of his father Fela Kuti. Guinean kora player Ba Cissoko, is a relative newcomer. His Electric Griot Land was a nod to Hendrix's 1968 double album, Electric Ladyland, to do for the kora and its West African repertoire what Jimi did for the Delta Blues. His cousin Sekou plays a Kora saturated with effects and veers from a skunk futurism to sounding like it has been amplified from a 1920s radio.

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Ali Farka Toure & Vieux Farka Toure

Reviews of Ali Farka Toure's Savane and Vieux Farka Toure's first album Vieux Farka Toure.

One immediate response, when presented with these two albums—the first posthumous release by the extraordinary Malian guitarist and singer Ali Farka Toure, and the first ever release by his son, Vieux Farka Toure—might be to see in the albums the passing of the “desert blues” flame from one generation to the next. In a sense, of course, that is indeed what Savane and Vieux Farka Toure represent, for the transmission of tradition from father to son is established practice amongst West African musicians—and Ali duly anoints his son's debut with two cameo appearances, one of which is amongst the album's highlights.

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Tinariwen - Aman Iman

The phrase "Aman Iman", in the Tamashek language of the Tuareg nomads of the Sahara, means "Water is the soul", or "Water is life", and is often followed by "ach isoudar", meaning "and milk is survival". As such, it's an apt title for this latest album by Tinariwen, reflecting both the Tuareg's ongoing struggle for survival in one of the harshest environments, and the need for more nourishing fare - both physically and intellectually - required to survive in the wider world.

Until Tinariwen were discovered a few years ago and started touring outside Africa, it was rare for any Tuareg to travel outside theirhomeland; and their isolation and lack of education served them poorly during the long dispute with the Malian government, an almost secret war that has gone largely unreported. Tinariwen formed in the rebel training camps of Algeria and Libya in the early 1980s, whence they had fled following the government's crushing of a 1963 insurrection in which the parents of several members, including those of charismatic frontman Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, were brutally slain. Several songs here date from that era, notably Ibrahim's lament "Soixante Trois" and Alhassane Ag Touhami's "Tamatant Tilay", a 1983 war cry urging the Tuareg into battle.

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Tinariwen

The Tuareg tribesmen of the Sahara have a saying, something along the lines of "Patience comes from God, haste comes from the devil". I wish somebody had told our Tuareg driver. The adage, doubtless well-suited to life lived at camel's pace under the scorching sun, is rather less pertinent when you're tearing across the desert at upwards of 60mph in that latter-day ship of the desert, the Toyota Land Cruiser.

There is only one main road linking the populous southern part of Mali, around the capital Bamako, with our destination, way up in the north-east - and we left the road behind at Gao, on the Niger river. It's another 200 miles across desert scrubland littered with boulders and trees bearing spines the size of toothpicks, following the hundreds of criss-crossing vehicle tracks over what is aptly known as a piste, to Kidal, the home base of Tinariwen, the Tuareg band whose latest album Aman Iman (Water Is Life) has just been released to huge acclaim.

By the time we reach Kidal, the suspension on two of our four vehicles has broken, their sturdy iron bars snapping like twigs as we slough around in sand and bounce over rocks and potholes. Not for nothing do the Tuareg have another saying: "The desert rules you, you don't rule the desert." Frankly, you don't even get a vote.

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Toumani Diabate and Ali Farka Toure, In the Heart of the Moon

Ali Farka Toure points out in a heartfelt sleeve note that it is rare to find musicians from such different cultures collaborating in Mali. This is especially true of the northern desert traditions Ali has devoted his musical life to, and the sometimes exclusive world of Mande griots in which Toumani was nurtured. On top of that, there is the grandeur of these particular figures: Ali, the quintessential "African bluesman," legendary champion of northern music, and worldwide icon of African guitar; and Toumani, commonly acclaimed by those in the know as the greatest living player of the demanding, 21-string West African harp, the kora. Ali and Toumani inhabit the top tier of Mali’s musical pantheon, and yet there is an endearing father/son dynamic at play between them, with Ali having entered music in part under the tutelage of Toumani’s father Sidiki, and having known Toumani literally since the kora maestro’s infancy. Ali writes that Sidiki taught him the classic Mande repertoire back in the 1950s and 60s, and the songs of that era dominate here. Indeed, thought this is not the genre Ali is best known for, classic Made fare was the music that first inspired him to pick up a guitar back in 1956. Add to this compelling story line the lush, rich sound recording achieved by World Circuit’s secret weapon - engineer Jerry Boys - and this release is automatically one for the history books.

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Mamadou Diabate, Behmanka

Sizing up 2005 in the final weeks, this album jumps out as a neglected gem. Lots of world music top-10 lists this year include In The Heart of the Moon, Toumani Diabate’s soulful session with Ali Farka Toure. It is a sweet, laid back encounter between two masters, but if you really want to hear the kora played with gusto, as well as mastery, Toumani’s cousin Mamadou has the record for you. Behmanka is among the most beautiful and technically awesome kora recordings ever made. From its stately opener "Touma," which revisits the title track from Mamadou’s ensemble debut album, to the lashing, 12/8 lope of the exhilarating closer, "Djimbaseh," these 8 tracks take your breath away.

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