“At the first Festival of the Desert in 2000/2001 there were many musical revelations – Tinariwen’s trajectory has been well documented – but another very different group had a huge impact on me: Super Onze de Gao just played one rhythm, but what a rhythm! Devastating and unlike anything I’ve heard, the relentless beat from the two calabashes had the impact of the first time I heard the Burundi Beat, or the Musicians of Jajouka. Two distorted desert lutes circled around each other calling to mind Hendrix’s most trancey moments or Howlin’ Wolf’s band when their sound turns into a web of abstract groove. I love the way the Super 11 Album sounds, I love the rawness and distortion and the heavy calabash sound. This CD brings to the West for the first time the undiluted sound of the Takamba – Not for the faint hearted – it deserves to be heard by everyone who loves wild groove music with no limits.” – JUSTIN ADAMS.

Gao and takamba: the background

The Niger sparkles like a giant sapphire luxuriating on a bed of green velvet as it flows past the city of Gao. All around the far horizons are dry, earthy-brown and immense. Travelers coming down from the arid Sahara drink their first sight of the great river from higher ground just to the north of the city. Vivid, intense colour floods back into their monochrome world. The promise of all that endless rolling blue water revives their parched senses. Thanks and praises are intoned by cracked lips. The desert crossing is over and the ‘shore’ of black Africa, or the Sahel as the Arabs called it, has been reached.

Until a few years ago, you had to navigate the Niger on a rickety old car ferry if you wanted to reach Gao on the main road from the west. Nowadays, a gleaming new Chinese-built bridge spans the sedate waters.  The local people – mainly Songhai (pronounced ‘son-rai’ or ‘son-goy’), but also Tamashek, Bozo and Fulani – hope that this incongruously flashy piece of infrastructure is a sign of things to come. For far too long, their once proud homeland has been reduced to a quiet backwater, starved of attention, deprived of investment and stuck out on the eastern perimeter of Mali, far from the seat of power and influence in the capital Bamako.

Gao’s illustrious past owes everything to its prime location at the junction of the Niger and the Tilemsi valley, a huge superhighway of sand and rock that runs from north to south across the southern desert. Before Timbuktu stole its crown in the 16^th century, the city was the biggest caravan ‘port’ in this part of the Sahara, a proud and preeminent trading hub where gold, salt, slaves, ostrich feathers, ivory, millet and all the produce of Africa set out on its journey north to the Mediterranean and the Middle East. Coming in the opposite direction, traders and students brought Islam and the cultural wealth of the Maghreb, Egypt and beyond, turning Gao into a Mecca of culture as well as trade.

In the fifteenth century, the great Songhai ruler Sunni Ali founded an Empire that stretched from the Aïr desert in the east to the Atlantic Ocean in the west. Ali’s successor Askia Mohammed built and endowed universities and koranic schools, unifying his vast Imperium under Islam and establishing a sophisticated bureaucracy and legal system. Before the Moroccans invaded in 1591 and brought Gao’s dominance to an end, the Songhai Empire was one the largest and most sophisticated political entities that Africa had ever known.  Two and a half centuries later, the German explorer Heinrich Barth found all that glory reduced to nothing more than a sleepy town of 300 adobe dwellings, sweltering by the cool evergreen shores of the great river.

Despite its waxing waning economic fortunes, Gao has always been certain, and proud, of its musical wealth. Songhai culture has given us Ali Farka Touré, Afel Bocoum, Baba Salah, Khaira Arby and Ibrahim Hamma Dicko, as well as a rich catalogue of different rhythms, instruments and musical styles.  Among the most popular is takamba.

Takamba is music made for celebration; weddings mainly, but also birth and circumcision parties, harvest thanksgivings, festivities to mark the end of Ramadan, The Prophet’s birthday or the feast of Tabeski – as Eid is known in Mali – and many other occasions of communal joy. They say that takamba has its origins in a neighbourhood of the same name situated on the edge of the small town of Témera, up-river north of Gao, on the road to Bourem. Its driving force is the unmistakable takamba rhythm which pulses on the boom and bip before lurching at the end of every phrase, catching the uninitiated in mid-step. Try and imagine the lope of a camel combined with the flow of a vast sedate river and you’ll be getting close. This beat is locked down by one or more players of the calabash, a species of over-sized died out pumpkin gourd that sounds like an entire drum kit in the hands of skilled player, with its deep booming bass thump and rattling ‘hi-hat’ click.

Atop this sedate beat come the ngoni players. The ngoni is a three or four stringed lute.  The Songhai call it the kurbu, and the Touareg the teherdent. With generous historical license you could call it the great granddaddy of the blues guitar and you wouldn’t be too far wrong. The takamba musicians play the ngoni sitting down, with the instrument lying on the floor and one knee pressing down on its body, as if they’re taming a wayward animal. With their flowing bouboul robes and heads enveloped in a cheche or turban, the ngoni players cut a cool debonair figure as the notes flutter and fizzle out of their fingers in a bewildering bluesy stream. In the last three or four decades, the ngoni has usually been stuck through an amp and a pair of deliciously distorted speakers. Super Onze employ the vintage bullhorn variety. This gives the music a modern punch and grimy edge that could easily rival The Velvet Underground or The Jesus and Mary Chain. Sometimes the ngoni is substituted with an electric guitar thus sealing its contemporary transformation.

The final layer in the takamba sound is the praise singer, the lead vocalist who directs proceedings. Takamba is a generous music. Its role is to make people feel important and happy. The lead vocalist will praise the bride’s beauty, the bridegroom’s strength, the illustrious lineage of the bride’s mother, and the great deeds of the bridegroom’s father. He’ll tell stories about the guests or recite ancient tales of love and bravery, compliment dignitaries for their honour, their astuteness and their generosity, making sure that the power structures that underpin society are recognised and reaffirmed in joyful music. In that sense, takamba, like all praise-music, has a very political and social purpose, which it fulfills in an understated non-confrontational manner.

And then there are the dancers. Not for takamba the wild gyrations and flailing limbs of many other Malian dance styles. Takamba moves are all about dignity, restraint, undulating limbs, covert smiles and trysting eyes. The dancers generally form two orderly lines which face each other, one for the women and one for the men. Sometimes they stand, sometimes they’re seated.  The more traditional mode is the seated one, which places further restrictions on unseemly bodily movement but intensifies the subtle beauty of the dance.  Takamba dancing is a metaphor for flowing water. It’s the body’s hymn to the river, the source of all life. All passion, all excitement is subsumed in its gentle undulations. But those passions still lurk beneath, just like the currents of the great river.  That’s why some swear that takamba is the most erotic dance form in the whole of west Africa, albeit eroticism of the subtlest kind.

Both the city of Gao and the takamba style itself sit neatly and squarely on the frontier between two cultural spheres: the ‘white’ Arab / Berber culture of North Africa, and the black African culture of the Sahel and beyond. Although the Berber Kel Tamashek, or Touareg, and the black Songhai peoples have long been adversaries and have even known periods of open conflict in the past three decades, it’s common for takamba groups to feature both Songhai and Touareg musicians.  For that reason, takamba is a potent and valuable bridging style, which stretches hands out across a fundamental cultural divide, and invites them to shake and make peace.  Some even say that “take the hand” is one of the meanings of the word ’takamba’.

Super Onze de Gao

Super Onze de Gao was founded in the early 1980s by Haziz Toure, Asaalya Samake and Agita Moussa Maiga, who became the group’s first president.  All three were Songhai men from Gao.  In the venerable tradition of so many west African music ensembles, Super Onze was created in order to entertain at community celebrations, preserve traditions, propagate culture and create a kind of ‘club’ or community organization which could support the needs and nurture the talents of its members. In other words, it was more than just a ‘band’ in the European sense of the word. The founding members are still alive, but now it’s the next generation that fills the active roles in the group. That’s another advantage of their typically African orchestral structure. It doesn’t depend on any one individual or person for its survival, and can thus better cope with the passing of time.

Initially Super Onze de Gao played in their own homes, three or more times a month and especially on Fridays, the day of prayer and rest in the Muslim week. From the beginning they concentrated strictly on the takamba style, and were soon a popular feature of local weddings and festivities. In 1985 they gave their first ‘official’ non-festive concert, at an election gathering in Gao. The ex-military dictator of Mali, Moussa Traore, was returned to the presidency with an absurd 99.94% of the vote that year.

In 1986, Super Onze de Gao were invited to perform for the Songhai community at the French Cultural Centre in Niamey, the capital of neighbouring Niger, which is about a day’s journey from Gao by road. Throughout the ensuing years, the group gradually consolidated their position as the number one takamba outfit in eastern Mali. They participated three times in Mali’s famous Biennales – a government sponsored national competition to find the best music ensemble, best theatre group and best dance troupe in the nation – representing Gao in regional and national finals.

The Biennales were instigated by Moussa Traore in 1970 to instil cultural pride and community cohesion in the various regions of Mali, especially among the youth.  Traore also hoped to strengthen the patriotic glue that bound Mali’s huge variety of cultures and ethnic groups together.  Like many African leaders at the time, he was trying to build a nation from elements that hadn’t historically had very much in common. Moussa Traore has been branded a brutal dictator by history, justifiably so, but his Biennale system is one of the reasons that Mali is one of Africa’s musical powerhouses today.

Sometime during the 1990s, Issa Toure took over from his father Haziz as the main singer of Super Onze de Gao.  He is now their president.  He comes from a family of Songhai farmers, rooted in the rich alluvial mud of the Niger valley.  His son is also preparing to become a singer, and will hopefully take over the leading role in the group in due course.

Super Onze’s leading ngoni player is Yehia Mbala Samake, son of Asaalya Samake. Yehia comes from a caste of Songhai blacksmiths. The role of blacksmiths in Songhai and Touareg society is very complex and very important. They belong to an endogamous group, which means you can only be born a blacksmith, you cannot become one. Until recently they were responsible for making almost everything necessary for nomadic or sedentary existence: tents, swords, spears, camel saddles, leather bags and cushions, padlocks, cooking utensils and, most importantly, jewellery. They still make jewellery and many other artefacts. But the role of the blacksmith has never been confined to artisanal manual labour. They’re also storytellers and guardians of family histories and lineages. They’re often called upon to negotiate between two rival clans, and to arrange marriages. And it’s their duty to play music at feasts and festivities. As such, their role has many affinities with that of the Manding or Bamana griot.

Ahmed Ag Assalat, the second ngoni player, also comes from a family of blacksmiths, but in his case it’s a Touareg family. The other Touareg in the group are Aliou Saloum and Ousmane Yattara, who come from a family of wood sellers. The remaining two members of the group are dancer Fatoumata Sarre, daughter of a blacksmith and ‘Cola’ Toure, second calabash player and the son of a farmer.

In 2003, Super Onze de Gao were invited to the third edition of the now world famous Festival in the Desert, which takes place annually near the village of Essakane, by Lake Faguibine, 60 kilometres due west of Timbuktu. They were the unheralded hit of the Festival. Robert Plant became a fan overnight, as did his guitarist Justin Adams. Both harbour a life-long mission to seek out the distant African and North African ancestry of the American blues. When they heard Super Onze de Gao in the silky white dunes of Essakane, it was nothing short of a ‘Eureka’ moment. Ali Farka Toure asked Super Onze to warm up the crowd before his performance; a very wise choice.

Although Super Onze de Gao – who are also known by the alternative name Takamba Super Onze – became fêted regulars at the Festival in the Desert and were famous all over Mali, they failed to find a partner to help them launch an international career.  They did make one off trips to Washington DC for the Smithsonian institute’s lavish festival of Malian culture in 2004 and the Sfinks Festival in Belgium in 2008.  But it wasn’t until the arrival of the Dutch DJ and producer Horst Timmers, aka MPS Pilot that their dream of international recognition began to be realised.

Timmers saw Super Onze at the Festival in the Desert in 2003 and, along with so many others, was blown away. He returned to the Festival the following year, and found that the band’s impact even more powerful. In 2008 he travelled to meet Super Onze and put together a plan to launch their career outside Europe. He enrolled them into an ambitious project that melded takamba with electronica, or ‘la machine’, as the group members themselves refer to new computer-based music technology. The project is called Future Takamba and it toured around Holland and Belgium in October of that year.

Timmers also did a recording session with Super Onze de Gao ‘sans la machine’, in other words, pure and simple, live and direct, in August 2010 and the resulting CD, released by Two Speakers Records, is the best record of raw and rootsy takamba ever released. If Justin Adams is to be believed, you might just find it “devastating” and unlike anything you’ve ever heard.

Andy Morgan.  (c) 2011

Artist biography for Future Takamba Project

Super Onze de Gao / Future Takamba Links:

Two Speakers – Super Onze de Gao CD

Super Onze on Facebook

Super Onze on Bandcamp

Super Onze on Soundcloud

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SMOD: (L-R) Ousco, Sam, Donsky

“Africa needs to speak out right now,” says Ousco calmly over a crackling phone line from Bamako. “Africa must stop crying.” It’s a neat little summary of what African rap is all about: No mincing words or metaphors. No ancient musical traditions that cosy up to power. No decadent ghetto fabulous fantasies. None of that. Just plain rhyming about the simple truth that everyone can see out of his or her window. “Africa is hungry, OK?” Ousco continues, making sure I’m getting his gist. “In Europe and America, people eat so as not to feel hungry. In Africa, people eat when they’re hungry. Everything is very very different, you know?”

Ousco is the ‘O’ in SMOD, a trio of hard working musician MCs from Bamako, the capital of Mali in West Africa. He met Donsky, the ‘D’ in the name, Mouzy the…ok, you’ve it now…and Sam at the Lycée Biya, a progressive high school in the Sogoniko district of the city. The four friends were fans of hip-hop but that was nothing special. Everyone below a certain age in Bamako was falling in love with hip-hop back in the late 1990s, along with the rest of Mali, and Africa for that matter. “Tupac Amaru Shakur, Snoop Dogg, Notorious B.I.G, The Roots, 113…they were our idols,” Ousco recalls.

The new rap sounds came in through the few liberal cracks in Mali’s media and cultural landscape, like the pioneering show ‘Generation 21’ on the national state TV channel ORTM, the radical Radio Kayira…’The Radio Station of the Voiceless’, or foreign channels like Black TV, M6 and NRJ.  They took hold of young kids who loitered on street corners around a charcoal brazier and a small bubbling enamel tea pot full of extra strong sugary tea, the kind that puts fuel in your motor in all weathers.  Such a cluster of aimless youth was called a grin in local Bamako street slang. There music was discussed, pirated cassettes were exchanged, frustrations were aired, and raps were born. Sam, Ousco, Donsky and Mouzy hung out in Faladié, one of Bamako’s most happening hoods, with its immense market and inexhaustible street-level energy. “We used to organize these little free flow jousts between the rappers,” Ousco remembers. “There was always a rap showdown or a dance showdown happening somewhere, and we always took part.  Sometimes we came first or second, sometimes lower down.”

Mali’s homegrown rap scene was young but spurting. Veterans like King Massassi, Fanga Fing and Tata Pound had pioneered rap in the local language Bamanan, with plenty of rude boy French thrown in, from the early 1990s onwards. “Tata Pound were the first,” Ousco states firmly. “And, tell the truth, we saw them as leaders.” But hip hop was still an illicit adventure for most kids, the kind of thing they wouldn’t dream bringing back home to meet the folks. “We were like clandestinos. My parents didn’t know anything about my rapping, right up until the time when our songs started to be played on the radio and our videos appeared on TV. Rappers were considered delinquents at that time.”

The four friends were beginning to get quite a following in their locality, so they had to solidify and find a name quick style. They opted for the acronym route and settled on SMOD. That was in 1999. Then, just a year later, Mouzy cut loose and left for Europe, like so many other Malians of his age.  The remaining trio stayed loyal to the name as a token of their lasting friendship with the departed Mouzy.  “Sometimes we even do interviews with Mouzy,” says Ousco reassuringly.  “In a way, he’s still in the band, and still in our hearts too.”

Sam, Dronsky and Ousco found a space to breathe and rehearse in the house of Sam’s parents, who happened to be the imminently world famous blind Malian couple Amadou & Mariam.  “We got together there every evening, in ‘seventh heaven’, on my parents’ roof,” Sam recounts.  “That terrace has always been our place of creation, of inspiration.” The trio were grafters right from the start. Sam says that hard work was the most important lesson his parents ever taught him. “Music is a tough career. Nothing is ever preordained and you have to persevere.”

The first fruits of this work ethic appeared in 2002 with the release of the group’s debut cassette ‘Dunia Kuntala’ (‘The path of life’).  It was recorded at Bamako’s famous Bogolan studios, with help from Amadou and Mariam’s French manager and friend, Marc-Antoine Moreau, and the French producer / arranger, Marc Minelli.  SMOD’s appearance at both the opening and the closing ceremonies of that year’s Cup of African Nations, which was held in Mali, brought national fame knocking at their door. They then toured all over the country, supporting the Afro-disco coupé décalé sensations Magic System, as well as Tata Pound and others.  “It was great to play in places like Gao and Timbuktu,” reminisces Ousco. “They really know their hip hop there.”

At that point, SMOD were following the rap textbook pretty closely. It was all about fat beats, baggies, white trainers, b-boy stances, skewed baseball hats and no instruments. The style is evident on the video clip for their song ‘Dakan’, which appeared on the band’s second album ‘Ta I Tola’ in 2004. But the independent spirit of African rap asserted itself in the flow. ‘Dakan’ accused the country’s leaders of being a bunch of robbers, and the video was censored by ORTM. It was typical of SMOD’s lyrical concerns. “We talk a lot about politics, about corruption and injustice,” Ousco asserts.

Everything changed when Sam decided to learn the guitar in 2004. “We couldn’t beat the Americans at their own game,” says Ousco. “We had to try and come from our own culture. So Sam took up the guitar and we tried to mix African singing into the rap.”  SMOD developed their own hybrid, which they call ‘Afro-Rap’, with rich tactile instrumentation and bubbling afro-centric rhythms providing a warm bed for their lyrical flow. It’s not American, or French, or even recognizably Malian. But it’s fresh and African. “In some ways I think we opened a breach,” says Sam.

SMOD got to know Manu Chao up on the roof, in the balmy air of the African night, above the raucous hubbub of the streets. He was in Bamako in 2005 to record the hit album ‘Dimanche à Bamako’ with Sam’s parents. One evening, when most of the household were already in bed, Sam found Manu strumming his guitar down in the house, so he invited him up. Manu was charmed by these three hard-working dreamers, with their radical lyrics that reminded him so much of his own. Being a night owl, Chao spent most of the following evenings up top, buzzing on tea, chatting, jamming and minting new friendships. “Whenever he come up to the roof to take some air, he would see us there rehearsing,” remembers Ousco. “Jeez! – he said, “Those guys are real warriors!” One of SMOD’s songs, ‘Politic Amagni’ (‘Politics Are No Good’), found its way onto ‘Dimance A Bamako’.

Back in France, Manu Chao sent SMOD an email telling them that he really liked what they were doing and would love to produce an album with them, if they had the songs

“We wrote back saying that if he was interested, we were interested too. To be honest, we didn’t who Manu Chao was at the time. He was an international star, but he wasn’t known in Mali.”

Manu Chao came back six months later and recorded SMOD with his little portable studio, up on their roof, or down in the house. His credo was, “You don’t mess with what happens on the terrace.”  In other words, keep it simple, natural, rooted. Then Manu took the tapes home with him to mix. “ The album ‘SMOD’ was released in May 2010 in France, and will soon be released in the UK.

SMOD started touring Europe in 2008, supporting Touré Kinda, Matthieu Chedid, Tiken Jah Fakoly, Salif Keita, Amadou and Mariam, Oumou Sangare and Manu Chao amongst many others.  They also took time to experience the French hip-hop scene and see an old idol like Snoop Dogg, in concert at The Zenith in Paris.

But far from being hypnotized by the bright lights of Paris and Europe, SMOD’s attention is still focused on their homeland. “To help hip-hip in Bamako,” Ousco explains, “We’d like to set up a studio with some French friends, because there are plenty of rappers who have no means of their own. We want it to be free. And we’re hoping to do more tours in Africa. That idea is dear to our hearts. We care about what’s happening around us. I mean, look at Ivory Coast. They have two presidents! We always said that Africa should never have celebrated the 50^th anniversary of its independence.  How can you talk about 50 years of independence when there’s no real democracy.”

In many ways, SMOD, along with many other Malian rappers, embody a new spirit, a new freedom of expression, unchained by old social constraints or the need to kow tow to the rich and powerful.

“Hip-hop is rebel music,” Ousco affirms. “It came along because things weren’t working right. Back in the day, the griot sang the praises of the King, except that the king wasn’t thinking of his people any more. Many people were marginalized and rejected and it was those people who became rappers. They said to the king, “Your power may be fine and all that, but there are people dying of hunger. And we who are from the ghetto, we want something better.””

Andy Morgan. (c) 2011

Artist Biography for Because (France) – March 2011.

The post SMOD – Folk? Rap? African? Smart? No doubt! appeared first on Andy Morgan Writes.

As the most famous Malian woman alive, Oumou Sangare embodies this alluring dichotomy like no one else. She’s the epitome of tough femininity; beautiful, elegant, determined, independent, talented…and, well, hard. She’s a singing sensation who also runs a business empire comprising a hotel, a farm, and a concession to import the specially branded ‘Oum Sang’ range of 4×4 pick-ups and SUVs from China. Her address book is stuffed with the private numbers of presidents, princes and potentates. She’s the godmother of ‘Case Sanga’, Mali’s answer to the X-Factor. She’s an official ambassador for the UN Food and Agriculture Programme and the unofficial ambassador of both Malian music and Malian womanhood. She’s duetted with Alicia Keys, Dee Dee Bridgewater and Me’shell Ndeogecello. She gets mobbed, petitioned, praised and pursued by fans the world over. Her voice makes you stop the car and peer skywards in wonder.

So, when Oumou Sangare began to cry during our interview, I was not only surprised but also embarrassed, intrigued, even impressed. These were definitely not grandstand tears à la Paltrow or Winslet. They welled slowly, imperceptibly at first, a mild intensification of the glisten in her eyes. Then, as the emotions gathered strength, Oumou gently chided herself for this uncharacteristic breach of her armour, repeating her trademark “wow!” and “I’m sorry, it’s hard hard.” Eventually, after bravely attempting to tough it out, without any superfluous fuss or theatricals, Oumou took herself off for a few minutes, and came back composed.

Until this moment of epiphany, the Songbird of Wassoulou had been talking dutifully and politely about her new album ‘Seya’, a veritable masterpiece in the offing, providing useful if measured insights into her creative methodology and the themes behind each song. She reaffirmed her central message of female pride and empowerment. She reiterated her condemnation of forced marriage, polygamy and the abuse of women, adding that since becoming a mother herself, she also felt a need to bring children and their suffering at the hands of poverty, war and aids into her championing embrace.

The chink came when she was asked to recount her early years in Bamako, the Malian capital. In 1970, when Oumou was two years old, her mother Aminata Diakite, also a renowned singer, had been forced onto the breadline by the cataclysmic decision of her father Sidiki Sangare to take a second wife and move to Abidjan in Ivory Coast.

“One day, when my mother came back from a trip,” Oumou recalled, “she saw that I had managed to clothe all her children in brand new clothes. “Oumou! Where did you find the money to pay for all this?” I answered, “But mum, I sing now. I earn plenty of money in the streets.” My mother started to cry. “That’s incredible,” she said, “It’s suffering that has forced you to become a singer.” It was a very hard childhood, but thanks be to God, all is well now. It gave me an incredible character. I can face up to any obstacle.”

Obstacles there were, and obstacles there continue to be. Oumou knows the darker side of fame all too well. In the chat rooms and blogs of Mali’s papers and magazines, she’s accused of driving one of her backing vocalists insane, acting in a porn film, ignoring the poor of her ancestral Wassoulou region in the south of Mali and even using too many skin-whitening products. All these stories evaporate like volatile poison under the heat of even a cursory investigation.

At the dawn of Oumou’s success, back in 1989, when the young starlet was buzzing around Bamako on her Yamaha Dan motorbike, drunk on life, dizzily riding the enormous wave of popularity unleashed by the release of her first ever album, the revolutionary ‘Moussoulou’, certain shadowy detractors spread rumours that she had died in a road accident. The news almost killed her long-suffering mother. Oumou’s outspoken condemnation of female subservience and her celebration of female pride and joy, even of a sexual kind, obviously twigged the beards of many a hoary old moralist. “But I coped well with success,” Oumou maintains. “I tried to be myself and stay close to womanhood. There were plenty of critics, but it was all very minor compared to the success.”

Oumou turned forty last year and ‘Seya’ wrestles with themes that befit life’s obligatory half-time pep-talk of the soul: destiny, mortality, good and bad fortune, loss, appraisal of the past, hope for the future, deep roots and the green foliage of joy. Sonically, the album is a magnificent reappraisal of the radical blend that made ‘Moussoulou’ such a blast of fresh air more than two decades ago. Then it was the inspired arranger Amadou Ba Guindo who helped Oumou to mix traditional instruments like the kamelngoni harp, the karinyan scraper, the djembe and cowrie-adorned calabash with a funky, modern and exuberantly hopeful approach, kick-starting what came to be known as the ‘Bamako’ sound. ‘Seya’ is this style’s coming of age. The cast of this epic undertaking is so huge that it’s a wonder that producer Nick Gold and arranger Cheikh Tidiane Check managed to hold it altogether, and produce something so raw, so true and so brilliantly focused.

Thanks to the detailed and meticulous translations of the lyrics, ‘Seya’ is also an album full of clues to the cartography of Oumou Sangare’s inner life. This is unusual for music from West Africa. Most of the time, the region doles up funky and mellifluous songs bearing wise axioms and edifying epithets of a universal nature for the general improvement of the populace. The tortuous pilgrimage of the individual soul is never laid bare as it is in our own tradition. ‘Seya’ is exceptional, but subtly so. On the surface it also trades in universalities, but between the lines there lurks a single solitary woman battling with fame, with painful memories and with a difficult daughter-father relationship.

The song ‘Sounsoumba’, for example, compares a young girl who has been forced into a loveless marriage, with a once strong and mighty tree which has been cut down to a pitiful stump. “I have become solitary / I am alone with God / I am crying softly,” Oumou sings. These words echo the pain of her distraught childhood. “Sometimes I would shut myself away,” Oumou remembers. “I would sing to console myself. I had no mother on whose shoulder I could rest my head for comfort. There were no stories at bedtime. So I sang. And I cried a lot.”

Oumou is also painfully aware of both the fragility and responsibility of fame. In the song ‘Kounadya’ she affirms again and again, almost as if to annihilate any hint of base arrogance in herself, that fortune is given by God and “your lucky star”. “You can lose your lucky star / Or you can take care of it / You must not spoil it.” When I asked Oumou if she applied this lesson to herself, her response was swift, betraying the slightest hint of resentment that I should even think otherwise. “Absolutely!” she exclaims. “I begin with myself. I try to show a good example. I thank God for this fortune, and I try and help younger artists move up the ladder in an attempt to give benefit t those who haven’t had the kind of opportunities I have.”
Perhaps the most fascinating song on the album, both musically and lyrically, is ‘Donso’. This smouldering crawling bluesy number pays tribute to the traditional hunters of the lush Wassoulou region where Oumou’s parents originate. These revered men were not only providers, warriors and protectors, but also healers, philosophers and musicians. Through a deep contemplation of the nobility of this hunting caste Oumou manages to reinstate a positive view of manhood in her own psyche, thereby healing the massive wound caused by her own father’s betrayal and abandonment. This wound, and the pain and anger that it generated, have hitherto defined Oumou’s music and her lifelong mission to champion the cause of women.

In 2005 Oumou’s father was killed in a car crash. Before he died, Oumou managed to reconcile herself with him, buying him a house and paying for his pilgrimage to Mecca in the process. She found out that he wasn’t quite the demon of her younger imagination, and had in fact lived a quiet and gentle life as an imam in Abidjan. ‘Donso’ celebrates this reconciliation, albeit obliquely. “What does death teach us / The best way to live is with wisdom / because we all die in the end,” she sings. “I praise my father Bari Sangare / Passing on is not the hardest thing / Passing on without leaving anything behind, that’s what’s the hardest / Now Bari Sangare rests in peace.”

‘Seya’, which means ‘joy’, is the guarantor of Oumou’s own legacy. It’s an album full of courage; courage to be honest, to forgive, to be wise and to move on.

Andy Morgan, (c) 2009

First published in The Independent – January 2009
http://www.myspace.com/oumousangare

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Ousmane from Tamikrest

I’ve been busy translating the lyrics for the forthcoming album by Tamikrest, the band from north eastern Mali lead by the talented Ousmane Ag Moussa. If you don’t know them already check out their existing album ‘Adagh’. One thing I always suspected but now know for sure is that Ousmane is a really excellent poet. As usual when I’m trying to get to grips with Tamashek poetry in translation, reading Ousmane’s lyrics in French gives me the feeling that I’m drinking a super fine whiskey that’s been watered down to a faint and washed out compromise, in comparison with the original. It reminds me of something that I learned quickly when I went to the Sahara and started working with Touareg musicians: their lyrics, or poems, are at least as important as their music, and probably a lot more so.

Some people complain about the repetitive nature of Touareg music: the drone, the simple call and response arrangements, the track-bound linear form of every song. It’s only a problem if you don’t understand the lyrics. I’m certain of that. And of course, apart from the very few non-Saharans who have learned how to speak Tamashek fluently, and there are some of those blessed people out there, most of us don’t understand the lyrics. Which is a crying shame. It’s left to record companies to squeeze a French translation out of the artist, and then someone like me, to turn that French into English. I’ve tried my best, and hopefully, the core meaning of each song will be very clear. But all those verbal subtleties, the puns, the nuances, the colour of and the depth of meaning of the original, will hover like an enticing aura around the words, unreachable to most of us. I’d love to do some more in depth translating work, like a real project, where the poet and the translators (English, French etc), sit down over days, weeks even, and discuss meaning and word play and all those issues. A Scottish poet called Don Paterson, who I really admire, recently published a book of poems by Rilke. His essay on the great German poet seemed to imply that trying to achieve literal translations of poetry is a useless exercise. You can only ‘version’ the original into something approximate in a new language, like a DJ doing a remix of a song, or a Jamaican dub master creating a version excursion. I like that idea. It injects real creativity into the job of translating.

Anyway, let’s hope the opportunity presents itself soon. In the meantime, look out for the Tamikrest album, which will be out sometime later in the year on Glitterhouse Records. And don’t blame me for the translations…I did my best, honest!

Andy Morgan (c) 2011

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If your power is almighty,

Then help the Touareg man.

Since his beginning,

He has lived in arid zones,

Rigorous, deserted

And without means.

He looks at the ever-changing world,

That overtakes him,

And he is left behind

In his ignorance.”

‘OUTAMACHEK’ from the album ‘Adagh’ by Tamikrest (Written and composed by Ousmane Ag Mossa – Translation by Andy Morgan).

“As far as I’m concerned, it’s Tinariwen who created the path,” declares Ousmane Ag Mossa, frizzy-locked leader of Tamikrest, in a pre-emptive strike against a thousand inevitable questions. “But the way I see it, if younger bands don’t come through, then Touareg music will eventually die.  They created the path and now it’s up to us to walk down it and create the future.”

Ousmane was born twenty-seven years ago in a village called Tin-Zaouaten, a solitary speck squeezed up against Mali’s northeastern border with Algeria.  It’s a remote marginal place.   Or to put it another way: there’s distant, there’s remote and beyond both of those there’s Tin-Zaouaten.

To an outsider, the village would appear to be nothing more than a motley collection of one-storey adobe and breezeblock houses, huddling together for protection against the burning sun, the black rocky hills and the lonely immensity of the surrounding desert.   But to Ousmane, it’s home.

Like its ‘neighbour’ Tessalit, two hundred and fifty kilometres to the west, Tin-Zaouaten is blessed with a water table that lurks benignly just below the surface of the gritty soil.  Dig a few metres and you can usually find water in abundance.   That’s why Tin-Zaouaten, or ‘Tinza’ for short, is famed in the desert for its gardens and garden produce. Ousmane’s father Mossa was born a nomad out in the bush, but by the time Ousmane arrived he had settled in Tinza, making a living from growing onions, beetroot, carrots and dates, and selling them in the local markets.

Ousmane Tamikrest & Abaraybone Tinariwen

In 1985 drought shook desert life to its core. The rains had failed for several seasons and the village was haunted by famine. “I was born in a time of calamity,” says Ousmane. “In the middle of dreadful events for the Touareg people.  My parents knew so much hardship. Then when I was five years old the rebellion broke out. It was 1990, the year of war. I was a child, and I used to hide in amongst the rocks with the other women and children, just a few kilometres north of the village over the Algerian border. When I think of that time, it’s as if it’s all still happening in front of me.”

Thus Ousmane’s childhood was buffeted by the searing winds of recent Touareg history. The droughts of ‘68 to ’74 almost destroyed the animal herds and with them the ancient nomadic way of life of the Touareg. The drought of ’84 to ’85 almost dealt the final blow. Thousands of young men fled into exile in Algeria, Libya, Burkina Faso and beyond. That’s where the modern Touareg guitar style of music was born and then nourished by anger, homesickness, frustration and dreams of a better life. It was this generation of Touareg men, known as the ishumar, who returned to Mali and Niger in 1990 to rebel against the callousness, corruption and arrogance of the governments in the distant capitals of Bamako and Niamey.

At first Ousmane just listened to traditional Touareg music at home, and the newer guitar music on battered old cassettes. “I well remember hearing my first Tinariwen songs. I was about five. After the death of my mother, my father was obliged to take me to live with my grown-up sister.  One morning I was sitting in front of the house and this guy walked by singing a song by Inteyeden called ‘Imidiwan Kel Hoggar’ (‘My Friends the Hoggar People’).  It went straight into my brain…ha ha ha.”

A few years later Ousmane began to play the guitar himself, and write songs.  He was attending a school in Tinza called Les Enfants de l’Adrar, set up by a French NGO and a local man turned community leader called Hama Ag Sid Ahmed. At the end of every school year the children would create and perform musical plays about pressing themes like ignorance, drought, education and culture.

Hama bought the school an acoustic guitar, and Ousmane adopted the instrument. With his constant friend Cheikh Ag Tiglia, he would write songs and perform them at the school shows. He learned the Tamashek guitar style by listening to a particular cassette which Tinariwen’s leader Ibrahim ‘Abaraybone’ had recorded in Algeria back in 1998.

In 2002, events once again undermined the tenuous calm and stability in Tinza.  The village was home to one of the southern desert’s most infamous freedom fighters and warlords, Ibrahim Ag Bahanga. For this reason it became a military no-go zone. Ousmane’s father left to live with his eldest sons in Libya, and both Ousmane and Cheikh went south to Kidal

Kidal is the capital of the far north east of Mali, a region known as the Adagh des Iforas (‘The Mountains of the clan Iforas’). With its wide sandy streets and dispersed one storey earthen houses, Kidal has the feel of a frontier town. For the Adagh Touareg, it’s where it all happens.

Tamikrest: 'Adagh'

Ousmane and Cheikh played the guitar and sang in hidden corners of Kidal, around a fire, drinking bittersweet Touareg tea with their friends. Their reputations grew very slowly, steadily, without wild leaps or fanfares. After a while they heard that a local cultural centre called the DDRK or ‘Maison du Luxembourg’, founded by the Duchess of Luxembourg who had fallen in love with the town when she visited it in 2001, was offering music classes. The teacher turned out to be Juhan Ecaré, a musician from Ivory Coast.

Then this French theatre troupe called La Calma arrived in town and enrolled over fifty young people to perform a massive theatre piece featuring sketches about a host of local issues.  It went down a storm in January 2006 at a local festival called ‘The Saharan Nights of Essouk’.   Although Ousmane didn’t take part in the project, claiming disinterest in theatre (“I’m a musician…theatre’s not my thing”), Cheikh went along and played with a local percussionist called Aghaly Ag Mohammedine and a bass player called Ibrahim Ahmed, aka ‘Pinnochio’ or ‘Pino’ for short.

On their return, Pino proposed that they form a proper band and record a demo at a small studio, which had been set up at the Maison du Luxembourg. They also decided that they needed a name, and agreed on ‘Tamikrest’, which means the knot, the junction, the coalition, in Tamashek, the language of Touareg.   “Each of us came from a different place, a different zone,” explains Ousmane.  “Cheikh and I from Tinza. Aghaly and Mossa Maiga from Kidal. Pino from Gao.  But we found each other and we had the same ideas, the same intentions.  We were like a coalition.”

On the 23^rd May 2006, the army garrison in Kidal was attacked by a new Touareg rebel movement called the Alliance Démocratique pour le Changement (ADC). “It was a hard time for me,” remembers Ousmane. “I woke up early that morning and discovered that the town had turned into a nightmare. Those who wanted to join the rebels had already done so. But, in general, that wasn’t the choice of me and my friends. Because we’d never been in the army. We were musicians, not people who carry arms.”

By the end of the year a fragile peace had been restored, although Tinza’s recalcitrant son Ibrahim Ag Bahanga refused to compromise and remained on the run with his own splinter militia. Tamikrest performed at the peace Forum in March 2007, when the Touareg rebels met with the Malian government and thousands of community representatives in Kidal to map out a way forward.

The group were developing their style and their fan base, which consisted mainly of Kidal’s younger generation. They knew the Tamashek guitar style intimately, but they were also deeply into rap, metal, Maghrebi pop and afro-disco music from Ivory Coast. They had new tastes, new desires, new ambitions and Tamikrest was their band.

Pino was quite the mover and shaker. In late 2007 he contacted Manny Ansar, the director of the now world-famous Festival in the Desert and clinched a gig for Tamikrest. The band found the money to transport themselves the 600 miles eastward to Timbuktu.  In the silky dunes of Essakane they met Dirtmusic, a group of rock’n’roll veterans from the USA and Australia. It was one of those meetings fashioned by fate in destiny’s workshop.

Chris Eckman of Dirtmusic remembers the meeting thus: “On our first morning in Essakane we woke up hearing music, so we went across the sand to the tent opposite ours and that’s where Tamikrest was playing.  Chris Brokaw grabbed his dobro and headed over, then Hugo and I eventually did the same and basically for three days we didn’t leave.”

Once again music overflew all barriers of language, culture, style, shyness and reticence. The friendship formed at Essakane grew in the following months and lead to an invitation by Dirtmusic to come to the Malian capital Bamako to make an album, and contribute to Dirtmusic’s own oeuvre. After another epic journey of 1,200 miles, by car and bus, Ousmane, Aghaly and crew entered their first professional studio and ‘Adagh’ was born.

“It felt very natural to play with Dirtmusic,” asserts Ousmane. “I’ve always appreciated all kinds of different music and it was such a pleasure to play with a different kind of band. Music isn’t something you study; it’s something you learn with your ears. I’d been listening and playing along to Bob Marley, to Marc Knopfler and Dire Straits, to Tinariwen for years.  We’d been listening to so much international music and that’s why the marriage with Dirtmusic worked.”

The end of 2009 finds Tamikrest on the cusp of the world and the next chapter in their great adventure. “This opportunity to go to Europe feels like a big responsibility,” says Ousmane. “I feel like someone who’s done this exam and is now waiting for the result. We’ve already achieved quite a bit, but the hardest is still ahead.”

One thing is certain: Ousmane is clear about the band’s mission. “The situation of the Touareg is very difficult right now,” he declares.  “Even before I played the guitar and started recording, I had this ambition to be a lawyer or you might say, an ‘advocate’. I wanted to be capable of expressing the hurt I felt in my heart, and speak out about the situation, even at the United Nations.  Because we’re a people who don’t have journalists, we don’t have lawyers, we don’t have advocates. But it was only later that I realised that a musician can play that role.”

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“What is the weakest part of any nation or people? It’s ignorance. We are stuck in our ignorance. I see the world changing, racing ahead, and leaving us behind.  And the only thing that is holding us back is our ignorance. As artists, it’s our duty to make our problems known to the world, to sing songs about the nomadic life, about our traditions and culture. But above all, revolutionary songs, about what we see, about what the government is doing to our people, which makes no sense to me.”

There it is…Tamikrest, the knot, the coalition, the future.

Andy Morgan.  (c) 2009

Artist Biog for Glitterhouse Records, Dec 2009.

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One of the ideas that seems to have suffered in our turntablized and booze-warehoused culture, is that of the band residency.  There was a time when a hungry combo could sharpen its performance skills, widen its fan base and work out its musical mission slowly but surely in the same dark juke joint, on the same night, week after week, month after month, even year after year.  The concept is still alive and well in Africa however.  Take Le Hogon for example, a club in the Ntomikorobougou district of the Malian capital Bamako.  Every Friday night, for the past decade and a half, the uncontested master of the kora, Toumani Diabate, has been cooking up something special in the dimly lit and darkly relaxed confines of this musical laboratory or espace culturel, as its patrons like to call it.  With the release this month of ‘Boulevard de l’Independence’, the World Circuit label is lifting the lid off the crockpot and letting those slow cooked flavours pique the expectant nostrils of the world.

It seems that, in the sphere of West African music at least, all those sessions at Le Hogon may prove to be almost as important and creatively fruitful as those that made Minton’s Playhouse, The Cavern or The Cotton Club legendary in the spheres of jazz and British pop.  What Toumani Diabate has managed to achieve with patience and perseverance is a marriage between two distinct traditions, two musical philosophies, two worlds.  Or, to borrow a well turned metaphor, the traditional ‘high art’ world of the kora and the brash ‘hi-energy’ world of the Malian dance band have had a child, and they call it Toumani Diabate’s Symmetric Orchestra.   It’s a revolutionary union, legitimised by the dazzling display of virtuosity and groove that characterises the new album, and no one was better placed mastermind it than Toumani Diabate.

Son of the great Sidiki Diabate, the father of the modern kora, Toumani is 71^st in a direct line of griots that stretches back to the reign of the great medieval Emperor Sudjata Keita.  The griots are the hereditary musicians of West Africa, but their role has also involved a close relationship with those in power, to whom they have provided faithful service as oral historians, sages, advisors, ambassadors and ‘truth-sayers’.  Toumani was born in the mid sixties, a decade of speed and change in west Africa as it was in the rest of the world, so it’s hardly surprising that his reaction to the crushing weight of his ancestry was a mix of respect and resistance.  “It’s true that there was a conflict of generations between my father and I,” he admits.  “He was playing purely traditional music and that’s how I began too.  But the fact is that I went to school and got into Bad Company, Smokie, Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix, and I said to myself that I would try to open a universal door for the kora.”

Toumani Diabate doesn’t lack pride in the illustrious lineage to which he belongs, or in its revered position at the cultural heart of the ancient Manding Empire, which ruled over most of West Africa until it lost power in the mid 19^th Century.  In fact, the Symmetric Orchestra is a project underpinned by acute historical awareness.  “This album ‘Boulevard de l’Independence’ is a cultural reconstruction of the Manding Empire,” he explains.  “I’m trying to rebuild it, but in a cultural way.  It’s a meeting of different ethnicities and different generations.  And the music of the kora is at the centre of everything.”

The Boulevard de l’Independence is one of Bamako main thoroughfares, whose status matches that of Mall in London or the Champs Elysee in Paris.  Toumani sees it as the symbolic and geographical nexus of the old Empire.  “From there you can go to all the regions of the Manding Empire: Senegal, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Mauritania…the whole territory”.  The Symmetric Orchestra grew in the sweltering Petri dish of Le Hogon as musicians from all over West Africa dropped by to jam with Toumani, adding their distinct touch to the burgeoning whole.  “The whole of West Africa, Manding Africa, is represented in the group,” Toumani asserts with pride.  “Once this whole region was the Malian Empire but the colonial powers split it up into different states.  That was a tragedy.  But we can reunite in culture, in music.”

In the past, Toumani’s immense reputation has rested on his ability to fuse and innovate.  In 1987, whilst in London, he recorded a classic album of solo kora music called ‘Kaira’.  The idea of the kora as a solo instrument was then quite new, and one that Toumani, with his absorbing virtuosity, helped to pioneer.  Since then he has soldered the kora sound to alien styles as varied as the new wave flamenco of Ketama, the blues of Taj Mahal, classical Indian Music and Rap.  Even his collaboration with the late great King of the African blues, Ali Farka Toure, on this year’s Grammy award winning ‘In the Heart Of The Moon’ was an exercise blending two previously non-aligned musical traditions.  Did he ever feel there was danger in this unrepentantly frontier-exploding approach?  “No there was no danger,” comes Toumani’s assured reply.  “Because I was never playing Indian music or Spanish music or American music.  I always played Malian music, Manding music.  I feel that it’s my duty to spread the message of the kora, and with more than 70 generations behind me, it’s a heavy responsibility.  And the kora only whispers Manding melodies.”   

The sizzling beats of ‘Boulevard de l’Independence’, whose delicately balanced interplay of voices, horns, bass, drums, guitars, pounding percussion, balaphon, ngoni and kora mirrors the intricacies of the kora itself, are the latest salvo in the career of one who has always struggled to be both proudly traditional and recklessly modern at the same time.  This is the symmetry that Toumani is trying to achieve.  But this time round the idea is entirely his, and its execution has been long and painstaking.  In that sense ‘Boulevard de l’Independence’ is a genuinely personal and homegrown triumph.  Toumani best expresses the crucial impulse behind this whole adventure in a sentence hidden in his eloquent sleeve notes that accompany the album.  He explains that he mixed old and new styles and instruments “so that even if we move towards other cultures, we would always remain guardians of our own.”

‘Boulevard de l’Independence’ is the second of three albums to have come out of the already revered Mandé Hotel recording sessions, masterminded by World Circuit boss Nick Gold.  The first was ‘In the Heart Of The Moon’.  And the last, due for release later this year, will be Ali Farka Toure’s solo guitar swansong.  This groundbreaking triptych of work celebrates the life of the old master instrumentalist of Malian music, Ali Farka Toure, whilst anointing his successor, Toumani Diabate.  It is rumoured that Toumani was with Ali Farka, at his bedside, until just a few hours before his death.  “As soon as I arrived back from LA where I had accepted the Grammy on both our behalves,” he recounts, “I went straight to Ali’s place to pay homage to him.  Because, let’s face it, Ali has done everything for me.  He was the Lion of the Desert.  He will always be the greatest among the greatest!”

Andy Morgan.  (c) 2006
First published in The Independent, March 2006

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Festival Security in 2003. (c) Kate Morgan.

The article in Harpers and Queen came as a shock.  “Exotic.”   “Move over Glastonbury.”  “The most remote music festival in the world.”   “The romance.”  To see an event that was born in a spirit of deranged adventure mixed with post-conflict shoestring survival previewed in magazine that epitomizes affluence and the charmed life…I had to double take and double take again.  Six years ago, under the haunting light of a lunar eclipse, the first Festival in the Desert took place on a wide stony plain near the village of Tin Essako, in the deepest desert of the southern Sahara.  We were a motley assortment of musicians, technicians, journalists, ambassadors, duchesses, tourists and friends who travelled to that unfeasibly remote and yet utterly seductive spot to witness this renaissance of cultural pride and hope.  Our hosts, the nomadic Touareg of the Sahara, had latched onto the idea of using their culture to try and extricate themselves from years of rebellion, drought, isolation and underdevelopment.  The Festival was only a means to this end.  We were only a footnote in this wider project.  Harpers and Queen was very far from anyone’s mind.

The humble seed that was planted back in January 2001 has grown into a media bougainvillea of global proportions.  The take-off point came in January 2003 at the third edition of the Festival near the tiny village called Esskane, in the dunes west of Timbuktu.  LoJo, a group from Angers in France who were so instrumental in setting up the first edition of the Festival, came with a team of technicians.  The Sfinks Festival in Belgium added another crew.  They erected a stage of dreams which welcomed a procession of the Sahara’s finest: Tinariwen, Tartit, Tarbiat, Oumou Sangare, Ali Farka Toure, Afel Bocoum, Haira Arby, Seydoum Ould Eide and many more.  A smattering of European ‘names’, including Robert Plant and Ludovico Einaudi, added a frisson of celebrity status.

The 250 strong contingent of whiteys stumbled around in the cream-coloured talcum-powder sand, drenched with sweat and wide-eyed with wonder.  The 1000 or so locals strutted their finest robes, their fanciest turbans, their most magnificent camels and the unearthly sounds of their traditional music.   A CD was recorded on a portastudio set up in a rusting old shipping container.   It sold like hot cakes, and a DVD followed.  Suddenly the Festival became a byword for extreme musical adventurism.  Attendance became a test of sang-froid and derring-do.  Big tour companies started offering all-in packages including first class tent accommodation.   The various ministries in the Malian capital Bamako began to realise that the northern deserts, rather than being a god-forsaken sink hole full of bandits and terrorists, could actually become a very bankable asset  in terms of tourism and cultural kudos.   All this success descended on the bewildered organisers like a sandstorm, at once epic, exhilarating and radically disorientating.

The painful truth is that speedy success dragged along a heap of uninvited problems in its caravan train.  The Malian authorities exerted uncomfortable pressure on Manny Ansar, the President of the EFES Association which was responsible for organising the event. It became official policy to keep the festival alive at all costs, despite spiralling debt, despite the pressure of alien crowds on the fragile desert environment, despite the growing discontent of certain Touareg who felt that the event was being hi-jacked and turned into a kind of Arabian Nights meets Woodstock Of The Sands fantasia.   No one locally could imagine that the Festival was anything other than immensely rich.  But the opposite was true.  The expense of freighting every single piece of equipment and infrastructure in huge burly Mann trucks over the atrocious track that links Essakane to Timbuktu had well nigh bankrupted the event.  Budgets were dismissed as fiction.  Grumbling suspicion became widespread.  Tinariwen, the musical heroes of the rebellion that had shaken desert society to the core in the early 1990s, went back home to Kidal in the far northeast of Mali to set up their own festival, Les Nuits Sahariennes d’Essouk.  They were pining for a return to the original mission; a celebration of desert culture, an event that brings the various different Touareg confederations, from Mali, Niger, Algeria and Libya together for three days of parlaying, problem solving and partying.

The Touareg are unified by a common language, Tamashek, and a common culture rooted in the Berber subsoil of North and West Africa.   But historically the various tribes and factions have often been rivals or even sworn enemies.   It was the rebellion of 1990 to 1991 that broke down these old enmities and forged something approaching a common Touareg destiny.  But old traditions die hard.  As the Festival at Essakane became the talk of the desert, the Touareg of Menaka, Tessalit,  Aguelhoc, In Gall or Agadez wanted a piece of the action.  Why should all the glory go the Kel Antessar, the tribe that rule the Timbuktu region, who have always been the most adept at playing politics and furthering their cause in the corridors of power in Bamako?   After all the original Festival in the Desert was nothing more than one of the Touareg’s annual traditional gatherings, a bit like our country fairs of yore, opened up to participants and audiences from all over the world with the help of some funding, a website, and friends in Europe.  In January of this year there were no less that six desert Festivals in northern Mali: at Essakane, in Essouk, Ashawadj, Gourma, Aguelhoc and Tessalit.   It’s no longer a question of THE Festival in the Desert, but of The FESTIVALS in the Desert.

At this year’s Essouk festival, about 150 nomad tents covered in terracotta stained hides were arranged in a wide crescent along a ridge near the ancient ruins of a medieval metropolis.  The setting was arrestingly grand.  On the sandy plain below was a tiny concrete stage, backed by a huge open sided truck.  The crowds were thinner than they might have been.  Local people were constrained by the fact that the annual feast of Tabeski was only a few days away, and they needed the time to get home and prepare for it.  Tourists had been turned off by a completely misguided message on the Foreign Office website advising against travel in the northern deserts of Mali.   Statistically, the area is about ten times safer than London, Bristol, or the centre of Trowbridge on a Saturday night.  The old myth about the desert being a parched hell-hole inhabited only by Touareg freebooters and renegade Al-Qaida elements still holds swa y in Bamako, and apparently also in the Foreign ministries of the UK, France and the USA.

That’s why the Festivals in the Desert are so important.  They give a region previously ravaged by conflict and insecurity the chance to show a peaceful face to the world.   They give the chance for the Touareg to prove that far from being bandits, they are a simply another African people in the pressure cooker of enforced modernisation, desperately trying to adapt their millennial nomadic culture to the merciless realities of a modern globalised world.  They give adventurous westerners the opportunity to travel to one of the most beautiful places on earth, and hear music whose alien splendour is as difficult to conceive as it is stunning.  And they give the world a chance to ponder how a friendly cultural get together can being some much needed pride, hope and confidence, where bullets and politically inspired machinations have previously failed.

Andy Morgan.  (c) 2006
First published in The Independent – Mar 2006

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Ibrahim Ag Alhabib. (c) Nadia Nid El Mourid

I first met Tinariwen in a tent on the wide stony plains of the Tamesna, sixty kilometres due east of Kidal in the far northeastern corner of Mali.  The date was January 6^th 2001 and the occasion was the first Festival in the Desert.  It was my friendship with the French group Lo’Jo that had brought me there.  I was tired, dirty, and elated, floating in the strangely sharp yet magical ether of the Saharan atmosphere.   I had managed to miss the Festival’s official opening the day before, when Tinariwen had taken to the tiny concrete platform that passed for a stage to welcome a convoy of twenty-four 4×4 vehicles carrying the Prime Minister of Mali, four Ambassadors, and an ostentatiously tooled-up escort.  Everyone I spoke to confirmed that Tinariwen were the pied pipers of the region, a band of legendary renown, a band to know.   My instinct was to just let the flow of each succeeding moment carry me away, but a gnawing and neurotic desire to capture those moments for posterity, to maximise journalistic opportunities, led me to ask if I could interview Tinariwen.  A time was fixed, an act which in itself seemed disturbingly incongruous in that timeless place.

When the time came, I ducked under the red leather animal hide covers of a traditional Touareg tent and sat myself down gingerly on a sandy Technicolor floor mat.  The cool and dark space was filled by about seven men, sitting, lounging, cross-legged, squatting, unperturbed, relaxed and minimalist in their movements.  Some were turbaned, others were not.  There was Hassan aka Abin Abin aka the Lion of the Desert, Mohammed aka Japonais, Abdallah aka Catastrophe, Ibrahim aka Abaraybone, Kheddou and other extended members of the crew like Sweiloum, Diarra and Bigga.   They sat immobile like resting fighters, neither aggressive nor overly friendly.  Their calmness and lack of excess…excess talk, excess movement, excess belongings, excess emotion…flustered me.   A tea was being prepared with unforced ritual.  Tea drinking in the Sahara is emblematic of hospitality, friendship and the slow baked pace of things.  I set up my DAT nervously and then asked the dumbest but most obvious question available to the unprepared journalist, “How did it all begin?”   Long pause.   Mild panic.  Tinariwen remained ice cool.   Eventually Japonais began to answer the question in minuscule chunks of guttural and heavily accented French, each punctuated with the phrase “Est ce que tu vois ça?”or “do you get me?”, which sounded more like ‘Iskitiwassa?”   Those bafflingly oriental facial features, which are the source of his nickname, remained sharp and penetrating, Shogun-like, throughout.   Then after about a minute he motioned me to switch off my DAT machine and proceeded to confer with his brothers-in-arms, in Tamashek, the Touareg language.  A full-blown debate started to brew.  There seemed to be disagreements about dates, times, names and places.   Fifteen minutes later the discussion was still raging, and I was still sitting there, largely ignored, with my inactive DAT machine in front of me.  It was almost comical.

It later became clear to me that there were good reasons for this inauspicious start to our relationship.   This was one of the first interviews that Tinariwen had ever conducted and none of the group members had ever felt any great need to straighten out the facts surrounding the band’s genesis.  I was also later to learn, by the slow but ultimately more fruitful method of endless aimless chats over intense cups of bittersweet Touareg tea, that the tale of those early years comprises a complex drama of exile, wandering and the clandestino life, in which fact, memory and nostalgia are entwined like spaghetti in a bowl.

The key actor in that drama was Ibrahim Ag Alhabib.  His nickname ‘Abaraybone’ means something like ‘raggamuffin kid’ or ‘the scruffy tearaway who’s always playing in the dirt’.   During the first Touareg rebellion against the central government of Mali in the early sixties, Ibrahim’s father, a livestock farmer and mason by trade, was apprehended by a unit of the Malian army for giving succour to the rebels, and shot dead.  Ibrahim witnessed his dad’s murder with his own eyes.  He was only four years old.  Ibrahim then left the Adrar des Iforas region of northeastern Mali with his grandmother, and a single cow, the last of a once substantial herd, which the Malian army destroyed, and went into exile in southern Algeria.  The cow died on the way.   Whilst still young, Ibrahim became a wanderer, a survivor, travelling around Algeria and Libya doing odd jobs.  He spent a number years apprenticed to a carpenter in Oran, for example.  He also did a few stints in jail.  It was the quintessential academy of hard knocks education and survival was by any means necessary, or not at all.

In 1979, Ibrahim found himself in the southern Algerian desert oasis of Tamanrasset, a place favoured by exiled Touareg men at the time.  There he hung out with two other Touareg from the Adrar des Iforas region in Mali; Hassan Touhami and Inteyeden Ag Ableline.  A Malian friend of mine once described the kind of life they led as l’amitié autour d’une cigarette (friendship around a cigarette).   I can’t think of a better description.   Since boyhood, Ibrahim had been playing music on self-made bush guitars, which consisted mostly of a jerry can, a stick and some bicycle brake wire.  He’d pluck out traditional Touareg melodies, sometimes adding his own phrases and images to an age-old song, or he’d imitate the north Malian blues guitar style that was already beginning to blossom thanks to mentors like Ali Farka Touré, Boubacar Traoré and a mysterious character called Aziz, whom Tinariwen have often cited as an inspiration.  Ibrahim also owed an almost genetic debt to the undisputed granddaddies of all Sahelian guitar styles, the traditional griots with their hide and gut lutes, which the Songhai call ‘ngoni’, and the Touareg call ‘teherdent’.

Ibrahim would also chuck in other rag-tag influences that had accrued in his mind during his vagabond life: rai music which he’d heard in Oran, the radical new chaabi of Morocco, especially Nass El Ghiwane, who’s songs he can still sing verbatim to this day, non-aligned north African pop stars like Rabah Driassa, western pop stars like Boney M or Kenny Rodgers.  There was no musical mission, just a desire for solace, a means to distract the mind and pass the time.   In Tamanrasset Ibrahim saw his first ever acoustic guitar, and persuaded its owner to give it to him.  Together with Hassan, Inteyeden and two other women singers, Ibrahim formed a little band.   Its first name was very longwinded, but it included the words ‘Taghreft’ and ‘Tinariwen’.   Taghreft is a complex word meaning ‘the rebuilding’, ‘the reconstruction’ or ‘edification’, but also the crew or the community who carry out this regeneration.  Tinariwen is simply the plural of ‘Ténéré’, which means ‘desert’, ‘land’ or ‘empty place’.   Taghreft Tinariwen started to play for the exiled Touareg community…weddings, parties, and campfire reveries…and even managed to clinch an invitation to perform at a festival in Algiers.  They didn’t have the proper equipment so they asked a local Tamanrasset combo called Sawt El Hoggar to help them out.  That’s how Ibrahim got to curl his fingers around the neck of an electric guitar for the first time.   And that’s how a completely new style of music was born.

The crucial point is that the personal adventures of Ibrahim, Hassan, Inteyeden and future members of Tinariwen are faithful microcosms of the wider phenomenon of the ishumaren.  This Tamashek word is derived from the French ‘chomeur’, meaning ‘unemployed’, and it describes a whole generation of Touareg men who were driven from their homes by the droughts of ’73 and ’85, as well as by political conflict and lack of opportunity, to go and find work in neighbouring states like Libya and Algeria.  This epic displacement transformed Touareg society and forced it to confront the modern world.  Old hierarchies of tribes, clans and families, in which each person knew their place and their duty, were completely devastated.  Men who were descended from generations of nomadic animal herders and traders were forced to work for money for the first time.  Old tribal enemies were now united by suffering and common political motives.  Many young Touareg men exchanged the utter silence of their desert home for the bustle of modern cities.  And they heard music from Europe, America and other parts of the Arabic world that they never even knew existed.

The camps which were set up by Khadafy in Libya to welcome hordes of these errant young Touareg in the early 1980s were run along brutish military lines.  The Libyan and Chadian trainers could be ruthless.  Khadafy had a vision of a mercenary Islamic army that would further his revolutionary and territorial ambitions in places like Niger, Chad and the Middle East.  The young Touareg however were told that they were being trained up to liberate themselves and eventually create their own autonomous Touareg nation in the middle of the Sahara.  This lie became more and more apparent towards the end of the 1980s, especially when Khadafy started to negotiate the repatriation of Touareg from Niger directly with the Nigerien government.   In any case, the idea of an Arabic Islamic regiment ultimately held little appeal to the Touareg, who were increasingly proud of their distinctly African and Berber origins.

During this time, Taghreft Tinariwen, as they were still known, started to take on the role of the musical voice of the ishumaren.  The revolutionary Touareg movement, the MPA (Mouvement Populaire de l’Azawad), and it’s charismatic leader Iyad Ag Ghali, saw the potential in fostering the group’s talent, and provided money for basic equipment and a rehearsal space.  With no Tamashek language newspapers, magazines, radio or TV stations in existence, Tinariwen’s songs carried the message of hope, struggle, pain, exile and nostalgia to the Tamashek speaking people.  It was a cassette-to-cassette ghetto-blaster grapevine.  The audio quality was as atrocious as the message was powerful.   It was an electrified sound and thus appealed to a youth that were wrestling with modernity.  It was rock’n’roll.

But it would be a mistake to ever reduce Tinariwen to one-dimensional propagandists.  Their message was always more about the rebellion of the soul that the rebellion of the Kalashnikov and bullet.  Their songs freeze frame the young Touareg everyman, exiled from his homeland, forced into meaningless labour, pining for his home, his family, his mother and his sisters.  And in that sense, their music is also intensely personal.  The older members including Ibrahim, Hassan, Japonais, Kheddou, Inteyeden and Abdallah, did take part in the rebellion which broke out in Niger in the summer of 1990.  An ex-rebel once told me that he well remembers Ibrahim and Abdallah entertaining their fellow fighters in a secret bush camp on the night of the now legendary attack a the police post in Menaka, a skirmish which kicked off the rebellion in Mali in June 1990.  Like almost every other European or North American I was initially dazzled by these stories of ‘real’ rebellion and I’d admit to putting excessive emphasis on them when we started promoting Tinariwen in Europe.  Prolonged contact with the band has since wised me up.  It’s clear that the rebellion is a mute subject for them, one that harbours a great deal of pain and bad memories.  There was adventure, and there was heroism too, but in the end, the actual conflict was but a brief episode in a long struggle which is full of unexpected shade and subtlety.  In every real world conflict the distinction between good guys and bad guys is never as blatant as sensationalising journalists would like it to be.  The Touareg rebellion was no exception.

When peace finally came to the southern Sahara with the ritual burning of more that 3,000 small arms at The Flame of Peace in Timbuktu in 1996, Ibrahim, Hassan et al refused offers of reintegration into the Malian army or administration and decided to make a go of being full time musicians.  Some of the extended Tinariwen family (and that’s precisely what Tinariwen has always been, an extended musical family of friends who form little sub-groups to tour and record when opportunity knocks), like Kheddou and Foy Foy did accept jobs offered by the Malian government under the UN sponsored post-conflict reintegration programme. Tinariwen emerged from the rebel underground as a working group and they were welcomed like a heroic mystery finally unveiled.  Thanks to that portentous meeting with the French band Lo’Jo in Bamako in 1998, the Tinariwen phenomenon started to spread beyond their southern Saharan home, slowly at first but now with increasing momentum.   It started with a brief tour of France in 1999 and that first Festival in the Desert, followed by their debut CD, ‘Radio Tisdas’, their latest, ‘Amassakoul’, tours of Europe and USA, accolades and the modern nomadism of the struggling musician.   Where all of this is leading, none of us know.

Managing a legendary group from the southern Sahara is no piece of cake.  You’re constantly having to explain the apparent absurdities of the western music industry, with its voracious and fickle media machine, its painfully slow money flows and its time and paper obsessed ways of operating, to people who feel more comfortable with a smile, a handshake, immediate payment for a job well done and an ‘I’ll make it if I can’ outlook.  But I have to say that working with Tinariwen has been a joy.  Somehow the pervasive toughness of life in the desert, where to complain about discomfort is taboo, has knocked any hint of prissy prima-donna behaviour out of the band.  No doubt those Libyan army sergeants also had something to do with it.  If the gear needs to be loaded into the van at three in the morning on a pissing cold night in Manchester, then Tinariwen is equal to the task.  Compared to the life of a nomad in the bleak hills of the Adrar des Iforas, it’s nothing.

But above all the pleasure has been in getting better acquainted with a remarkable bunch of characters; Ibrahim with his intense reserve and melancholy which more than occasionally get swept away by a magnetic friendliness, which is awkward, guileless and very appealing all at once; Hassan with his rock solid sense of humor reminding you that laughter is the strongest weapon of all; Abdallah with his Errol Flynn smile, his self-deprecating quips, his uncharacteristic chattiness; Eyadou with his simple straight-forward friendliness; Sarid with his cheeky desert dude charms and unassailable grin; Elaga with his slightly spaced out look and quiet mischievousness; Mina, the princess, who doesn’t even have to make any kind of effort to emboy all the beauty and grace of Touareg womanhood.  And there isn’t even the space to praise the qualities of the ‘resting’ members of the band, like Japonnais, Kheddou, Foy Foy or Sweiloum.  When Tinariwen launch into one of their songs on one of their good nights…let’s say ‘Amassakoul’, or ‘Amidinin’ or ‘Chatma’…I’m immediately transported to the place they come from.  My nostrils prick up to the smell of tea, tobacco and gasoline.  The pentatonic drone of the music rolls out the endless line of the desert horizons.  The perpetual polyrhythms put wanderlust back into my heart and my feet.  The slashing guitars remind me of the bewitching harshness of those stony plains, and the gritty truths of recent desert history.  The flowing robes and cheches or turbans of the band remind of the equally bewitching beauty and poise for which the Touareg are justifiably renowned.  And the lyrics, as far as I understand them, remind me that there’s more to this band than I can possibly ever grasp or know.

Andy Morgan.  (c) 2009

First published in Songlines – Feb 2007

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