By the time Tinariwen left Womadelaide several years ago they had gone from the realms of curiosity to world music superstars. The performances of this eight-piece group of Touareg musicians were simply stunning. As soon as we heard them play we could trace the music from way beyond Timbuktu all the way to the Mississippi Delta of John Lee Hooker.
Unfortunately, we never got to hear Malian legend Ali Farka Touré in Australia – his untimely death robbed us of that privilege - but Tinariwen are in much the same tradition. Sometimes it is difficult to tell where the Sahara Desert ends and the Mississippi Delta begins. The fact that they have been booked to appear at Bluesfest is not only a welcome stroke of near genius but also totally appropriate.
Englishman Andy Morgan has been Tinariwen’s manager for a few years now, ever since discovering them at the Festival In The Desert. He is also the executive producer of their latest album, the stunning Aman Imam (Water Is Life).
As a teenager, Morgan was in a band with guitarist Justin Adams, collaborator with Robert Plant and producer of Aman Imam. Morgan worked with Joe Boyd at Hannibal Records in the late 80s, went on to work at World Circuit and then managed French group Lo’Jo, who visited Bamako and recruited Adams to produce their 1997 album Mojo Radio. They also developed the concept of the Festival In The Desert from which Tinariwen emerged.
“I always had a double life,” recalls Morgan when I catch up with by phone to talk about his remarkable charges. “On one hand as a journalist and on the other working in the music business in France and England. Lo’Jo are quite a legendary band in France and very well known for going to very unlikely places and meeting musicians and collaborating and setting up very ambitious projects. The city that they come from, Angers, is twinned with Bamako the capitol of Mali.
“They happened to be in Bamako in 1998 at a festival and they asked the organisers if they knew any Touareg musicians. They met up with this inspirational man called Issa Dicko, a member of Tinariwen but not a musician - a kind of an intellectual wise man. They got on very well with him and he was telling them all about all the suffering that the desert regions had gone through with droughts and exile and then with the rebellion and how there was a need to do something for this region, the northern part of Mali what we might call the southern Sahara.”
Morgan says that they decided to organise a festival as a means of opening up the region and proving that it was safe for outsiders to travel there. The first Festival In The Desert took place in January 2001 and because of his friendship with Lo’Jo he found himself there where he met Tinariwen for the first time.
“The experience was just remarkable,” he recalls. “In many, many ways it was the kind of trip that I will never forget. Because I was already working in music - I had my own little label, I’d done marketing and PR for various other projects, worked for Womad - the people who were running Lo’Jo at the time asked me if I’d get involved in Tinariwen, helping promote them. I started to do that in 2001 and then it slowly developed so that I eventually became manager and that’s it really.”
Tinariwen were actually formed about 18 years prior to meeting Morgan and Adams, when the original members met after having been conscripted into Gaddafi‘s Libyan army. Founding member Ibrahim Ag Alhabib had fled Mali for Algeria in 1964 when his father was killed by the Malian Army. He says he found solace playing guitars that he made from sticks and oil cans. He formed a band and played for the Touareg refugees. As the political situation became more complex the band became figureheads for the movement towards repatriation. It was only in 1991 that the Touareg tribes were able to return to their homeland. By 1996 Ibrahim and his friends had decided to become full-time musicians, rather than soldiers.
“As soon as you got out to the festival and asked anyone about music,” recalls Morgan, “they said the band Tinariwen are the ones who have created this new style of music, which has revolutionised the sounds of the southern Sahara - they are the ones who have led us through the stresses and strain of modernity, of the clash between this very ancient nomadic culture which the Touareg had until recently and then like everyone else in the world had to deal with the wider world and globalisation.”
One thing that is fascinating about the music of Tinariwen – as it was about Ali Farka Toure is the relationship between the music and American blues. The swirling rhythms are definitely African, the hypnotic beats recall the blues. It is impossible to listen to Tinariwen and not think of John Lee Hooker.
“I love the blues and I’ve been a fan for years and years and years,” says Morgan, “but I feel it’s lost it’s way quite badly since the 70’s really and has become sort of formulaic. What I think Tinariwen has done is very unselfconsciously brought a very different perspective to the whole thing. They have brought it back to the kind of spirit that possibly existed in the late 40’s early 50’s when people were playing in a much more sort of instinctive way….. I think Tinariwen bring that instinctive way of playing things back into the fold, in common with all the other so called desert blues or African blues artists like Ali Farka. It’s one the many things that Africa can teach the rest of the world.”
“It’s really strange that they get asked a lot and they give the very honest answer,” says Morgan, “which is that until they came to Europe in 2001 they had never really heard the American blues artists like John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters or all these people. They’d never heard them at all, which seems remarkable when you hear their music. They had heard the much more pop, big rock acts like Led Zeppelin or Jimi Hendrix and that kind of thing.”
“But I think we are talking about two styles of music that really share very, very strong common roots,” he continues, “because the music of the Niger Bend as it’s called - the area of western Mali between say Timbuktu and Gao - I think is arguably the cradle of the blues. Back in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when trans-Atlantic slavery started to come into existence a lot of the black Africans that were taken as slaves came from the interior of West Africa and - contrary to the racist prevailing attitudes amongst the white ruling classes at the time which said that they were just savages and had no culture - they had a very strong culture which was rooted in Islam.
“They had a very developed sense of music and poetry. That culture survived right through the 19th and 20th centuries in West Africa as traditional folk music based around certain key instruments like the ngoni - which is like the folk lute instrument like a sort of a primeval banjo or guitar. People like Ali Farka and Boubacar Traoré who in the late 60’s and 70’s started transposing that music on to the acoustic guitar. When it made that leap from traditional instruments onto guitar, first acoustic then electric, it immediately sounded like the American blues because it shared this very, very common heritage. I think Tinariwen were part of the same tendency even though what they were working with was mainly Touareg music and also Arabic from the north. That was their route rather than the music from Ali Farka - although in that part of the world all these different cultures have been very intertwined and it’s sometimes to make boundaries in between them.
“Whereas, the blues musician encountered western influences such as church music and brass band music right back in the 19th Century and developed blues then rhythm and blues. In Africa that process really started in the 50’s and 60’s and in a way had an accelerated development to arrive at the same point that we have today. And that’s the way I see it. I’m sure there are ethnomusicologists that could go a whole lot deeper and talk about it in a much more subtler way but I think that’s basically the story.”
“Funnily enough, the landscape of the Mississippi Delta and of Louisiana and the Deep South is so reminiscent of Mali,” continues Morgan when I mention the fact that I had been to the Delta. “Instead of the Mississippi you have the Niger and the kind of flat endless expanses are kind of reminiscent in a way. It’s very parallel. The musics are like two cousins - first cousins really in the same family. I think that’s why the affinities are very strong between the two.”
The other key player in the Tinariwen story is guitarist and producer Justin Adams, whom we saw here recently at Womadelaide. Having played in Robert Plant’s band he managed to persuade the singer to attend the Festival In The Desert – that probably gave it more publicity than it had ever had.
“For me, it was a kind of natural decision to make to have Justin there with all his experience of production but also with his quite impressive knowledge of African music and more specifically desert music,” says Morgan. “He has a real affinity with it and understands it and has brought quite a lot of those elements to Robert Plant. Anybody who knows Robert Plant’s recent solo work would know that there is the ngoni which features thanks to Justin. So I it was a very logical decision to get Justin to produce this new album.”
Morgan says that the Festival In The Desert has prompted the emergence of a whole slew of local festivals across the region but that the original event is still going, despite the hardships of putting it on and of getting people there.
“Instead of stying in a five star hotel you’d be staying in a million star hotel,” he laughs. “As you sleep under the stars you look up to the sky you get the most beautiful décor that you could possibly have. There is something almost very luxurious about it as well because you have the freedom of the desert, you have the silence, you have the space and that’s something that no hotel in any city in the world can give you.
“The Touareg’s absolutely love their homeland,” he continues, “and when you go there it’s easy to see why. What they’ll tell you is, life in the desert is hard, the nomadic life especially is a very tough life, but there is something very powerful about it, very self contained, very independent.”
As Australians living through a near ten-year drought we can certainly empathise with the title of the band’s latest album Amam Imam: Water Is Life. In fact, given the rate of desertification the title is almost prophetic.
“The Touareg have always known the value of water,” agrees Morgan, “and how without water there is no existence, there is no joy and there is no quality of life. This is something in the west - with all our sophisticated systems of water management and irrigation - that we’ve forgotten. We take it for granted and maybe that’s something that we’ve got to learn, something the Touareg already know, something that we’re going to have to learn through quite painful experiences in the next few decades as global warming manifests it’s self more and more.”
I mention to Morgan that if you were sitting down to dream up a group to play world music (as the category has the musical category has become known via an inadequate description) you could not dream up a story that is more incredible than the one that is behind Tinariwen.
“I’ve got to say when we first started working with the group and wrote their first biography’s first press releases the reaction that they had was very immediate because people were immediately fascinated by the story,” he agrees. “What I find interesting about it all is there is a sort of superficial cliché vision of it with guns and guitars and rebellion and that kind of thing but the more you talk to the band the more you see how complex it is and how difficult it has been for them to live through all of that. They are struggling very hard to even today to cope with it and to find a way existing within the modern world and interacting in a positive way.”