Terakaft’s Aratan N Azawad – A Desert Blues Classic
Terakaft (“Caravan” in the Tamashek dialect of their home base, Mali) have a reputation as the hardest-rocking of the North African Tuareg desert blues bands. Their latest album Aratan N Azawad – out now from World Village Music – flips the script, edging further toward the hypnotic otherworldliness of the rest of their nomadic brethren. Like Tinariwen, with whom they’ve shared band members, Terakaft has had a rotating cast of characters – no surprise, considering that the desert blues community is a closeknit one. Many of these musicians are also freedom fighters, since the territory their nomadic ancestors roamed for literally millennia has been decimated by war over the years. This happens to be the first Terakaft album without founder Kedou Ag Ossad, which may account for the more pensive, trance-rock sound here – although the songs are as terse as always, seldom going on for more than four minutes. This latest edition of the band includes a two-guitar frontline of Liya Ag Ablil and Sanou Ag Ahmed, with Abdallah Ag Ahmed on bass and Mathias Vaguenez on drums, with what sounds like the whole band taking turns with the vocals’ mantralike call-and-response.
The swaying, bouncy, upbeat title track works a bluesy riff as the guitars snake and intertwine, bristling with natural distortion, bass rising unexpectedly mid-riff over a simple, insistent 4/4 beat. The second cut is funkier, lit up by a Chicago-style blues lead with slinky bent notes. The title track raises the question of how aware the band might be that what they’re playing is essentially a brooding folk-rock song, sort of a Tuareg counterpart to As Tears Go By; an educated guess is that any resemblance is probably intentional. The following cut offers a nonchalant, polyrhythmic vibe similar to Etran Finatawa; the one after that reverts to the bounce of the opening track but with an even simpler and more optimistic feel.
The best song here, Amazzagh, harks back to the band’s earlier work, packed with delicious reverb-toned lead guitar and a 1960s psychedelic folk tinge. The rest of the tracks range from a trio of Tinariwen-style, suspensefully unwinding one-chord vamps; another with Afrobeat overtones; and a 60s soul shuffle done as desert blues. To western ears, without the benefit of understanding the Tamashek lyrics, all indications are that they’re characteristically allusive: offering encouragement to the young not to give up hope; mourning the loss of ancestral lands; and more direct, slightly more fervent appeals to keep the party going. As this band deserves to: this is their party for their right to fight. For fans of desert blues, it’s an essential album.
Malian Desert Blues Icon Khaira Arby Brings Good Times and Intensity to the Bell House Tonight
Khaira Arby brings her hypnotic, psychedelic blend of desert blues, rock and soul to the Bell House tonight in the midst of a tour that’ll take the iconic Malian singer across the country in the next week, culminating in an appearance at South by Southwest. For a woman who defied the odds and achieved stardom at a time when women needed their husbands’ permission to sing in public, her career is pretty extraordinary. Having the famed Ali Farka Toure, commonly known as the father of desert blues, marry into her family eased the way; in the time since, with her insistent, defiant, otherworldly wail, she’s become sort of the Aretha Franklin of Mali. Her Bell House show is actually the second Brooklyn appearance of her career: for the lucky few who knew about it, she played a free concert at Zebulon last fall. This time out she’ll be sharing the stage with opening act Sway Machinery, with whom she collaborated on the new album The House of Friendly Ghosts, Vol. 1 and then playing a full set with her band.
Arby’s been a potent force for women’s rights, bucking tradition and winning an impressive amount of converts along the way. Her latest album Timbuktu Tarab – whose title is a pun referring to a part of Mali as well as the Arabic “tarab,” meaning “joy” – fearlessly stands up for women asserting their right to self-determination, most notably on the psychedelic rock-tinged anthem Feryene, a blistering attack on the practice of female genital mutilation. Yet as intensely charismatic as she can be, she explains that it’s humor that bonds her with western audiences who don’t understand a single word of the four languages she sings in (Arabic, Tamashek, Bambara and Sonrahi): she and the crowd find a universality in the slinky groove and call-and-response of her hypnotic, undulating songs.
Offstage, Arby is anything but a diva. A versatile songwriter as talented as any other artist to come out of Mali (a small nation which has become to this era what Jamaica was in the 1970s), she brings her songs to her band pretty much ready go to: she gives her band liberty to do their own arrangements. Likewise, her role on the Sway Machinery album was as much as a composer as singer: the composite of the Brooklyn rock band and her own group ended up doing three of her songs, along with others where she was invited to add her own vocals and arrangements. A singer since she was able to raise her voice, she is also an accomplished violinist. Although her most recent material displays a vivid psychedelic rock influence (the Pretty Things and other British psychedelic bands of the 1960s come to mind), rock is a relatively new thing for her (Hendrix is a favorite). And while like everyone else on the planet, she’s been avidly watching recent events in North Africa as revolution and the hope for democracy have swept the region, she keeps her music separate from politics: a crusader for peace and author of numerous antiwar songs, she remains an optimist, she reminds, as she’s been for decades. Songs about peace have rarely been as vigorous and exciting as Khaira Arby’s – this is a concert not to miss.
For those out of town, the rest of the tour schedule is:
3/8 El Rey Theatre, Los Angeles
3/9 Great American Music Hall, San Francisco
3/12 Aladdin Theatre, Portland, OR
3/13 The Crocodile, Seattle, WA
3/15 Hi Dive, Denver, Co
3/17 SXSW Festival, Austin, TX
3/19 SXSW
Album of the Day 1/20/11
Hee hee, didn’t think we’d get one of these up tonight, did you? Every day our 1000 best albums of all time countdown continues, all the way to #1. Thursday’s is #740:
Khaira Arby – Timbuktu Tarab
A cousin of Ali Farka Toure, Arby is sort of the Aretha Franklin of Mali. This 2010 album blends desert blues with elements of 60s American soul, psychedelic rock and even echoes of country music. Her two-guitar band here, playing through all kinds of vintage effects, is augmented by ngoni lute and screechy ritti fiddle, adding extra layers of spikiness to the hypnotically rambling, careening songs. Arby sings in four dialects, railing against offenses against women, her rasp soaring over the maelstrom. Some of the songs update folk themes – a tribute to a legendary warrior, for example – while others tackle contemporary topics, including a blistering broadside against female genital mutilation. Garage rock riffs give way to patiently circling Malian themes, the guitars sometimes playing off each other, sometimes intermingling to the point that it’s impossible to tell who’s playing what. File this under psychedelia – it’s a throwback to the golden age of the 60s, in spirit and in style. Here’s a random torrent.
CD Review: Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni Ba – I Speak Fula
‘Even if there is a war going on and it is difficult to travel, a griot, with his ngoni slung around his back, was always allowed through, because it was known that he was going to play for a leader, and perhaps act as an intermediary for political negotiations,” remarked Bassekou Kouyate recently. Where he comes from, music has a few more more important functions than mere entertainment. The Malian bandleader’s axe of choice is the ngoni, a stringed instrument commonly referred to as the ancestor of the banjo with a similar clanking tone, rapid attack and decay. He gets major props in his native land for resurrecting the instrument from obscurity, adding both new techniques as well as western influences and modern electronic guitar effects. It’s not known if he’s ever been pressed into duty as a negotiator between warring factions. On US tour with Bela Fleck starting this month promoting their somewhat defiant new album I Speak Fula, Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni Ba have come to conquer.
This is urban Malian music: spiky, circular and hypnotic in the indigenous folk tradition, but packed with imaginative licks and production touches that reveal how diverse Kouyate’s influences are, from fellow Malian Ali Farka Toure to Hendrix. It’s a mix of originals as well as new arrangements of historical ballads from over the years. What Tinariwen has done for the Tuaregs, these guys could do for what’s coming out of the cool kids’ ghetto blasters on the streets of Bamako – this stuff absolutely rocks.
The cd opens energetically with boisterous, spiraling ngoni and kora (West African harp)- throughout the album, interplay, much of it absolutely psychedelic, abounds. The first of the two most extraordinary tracks here is a tribute to Kouyate’s brother – who died while the album was being recorded – with Kouyate and Malian desert blues scion Vieux Farka Toure playing dizzying wah-wah clusters around each other. The other, Ladon, is a feast of scurrying blues runs, Kouyate showing off his bag of tricks with a big rapidfire crescendo of blues licks that could be American, or not. The band builds this to an unexpectedly explosive coda at the end: acoustic Malian heavy metal.
The closest thing to rock here is the impressively feminist Musow, fast and flurrying with wah-wah ngoni, building up to the end of the verse with a neat three-chord sequence, along with a big 6/8 ballad that could be British or Appalachian except for the language, Kouyate coming in hard against Vieux Farka Toure’s pensive, spacious guitar, nudging the guitarist to elevate his game. There’s also a swaying number that incorporates what sound like elements of both delta and Piedmont blues (or maybe not – this is where all that stuff originated, anyway), a dedication to Kouyate’s wife and bandmate/singer Amy with an intense, hypnotic jam between ngoni and Zoumana Tereta’s fiddle, and the pensive Moustafa, where the ngoni sounds almost like a vibraphone. Definitely the most exciting thing to come out of Africa since Tinariwen’s latest, last year. The album, believe it or not, is out on Sub Pop (the folks who brought you Nirvana).
CD Review: Tinariwen – Imidiwan: Companions
Their finest album. Over the past almost thirty years, Malian Tuareg desert rockers Tinariwen have pushed the envelope, taking their hypnotic, trance-inducing duskcore sounds around the world. This is their most diverse, their catchiest and most memorable cd yet, a triumph of determined, contemplative guitar, methodically swaying rhythms and vividly aphoristic lyricism (sung in Tamashek, their native tongue). All of the songs here share Tinariwen’s trademark resolute, sometimes mantra-like insistence, many of them inflected with an Ali Farka Toure-style bare-bones desert blues vibe. Yet this is also their most ambitious effort: it’s their most accessible, most straight-up rock-oriented album so far. The opening track, like most of the others written by the band’s often inscrutable leader Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, works a ridiculously catchy riff that would be perfectly at home on a Clash album. Except that it’s about half the speed the Clash would have played it at, Alhabib ruefully examining the state of a revolution whose leaders have run dry: they can’t keep the trees growing.
Another tune, a battle anthem, kicks off with echoes of Hendrix: but it’s the pensive, thoughtful Little Wing Hendrix, not the madman of Machine Gun. A traveling song slinks along with contrasting layers of male and female voices (there are ten fulltime members in the band, but as this album was recorded on the band’s home turf in Mali, they had plenty of friends available to join the fun). A rousing call for Tuareg unity gives bassist Eyadou Ag Leche, the band’s most overtly aggressive player, the chance to go up the scale and add some striking crescendos within the song’s characteristically static, resolute structure. There’s also a strikingly warm, almost pop song with a 60s soul feel, a haunting, pulsing number whose eerie descending progression evokes early Pink Floyd or even Bauhaus, and the fiery Ere Tasfata Adouna (He Who Values Life) that wraps up the songs, guitars finally cutting loose and ringing out in a hailstorm of overtones, jangle and clang. The album concludes with a somewhat tongue-in-cheek drone instrumental a la the early Grateful Dead, Alhabib playfully toying with his amp for as many subtle feedback effects as he can find. As psychedelic music goes, this is unsurpassed. It ought to win an even wider audience for the self-described “world’s most popular African band,” and for those who’ve already discovered them, it’s a must-own.
An especially valuable plus here is a complete lyric sheet with English translations. As another bonus, the cd includes a thirty-minute DVD film by Jessy Nottola, an understatedly shot mis-en-scene featuring clips of the band in their milieu along with songs from several of their recent albums. Which makes this one a considerable bargain.
CD Review: Amadou & Mariam – The Magic Couple
One of the real feel-good stories of recent years, Amadou & Mariam went blind at an early age, met while he was running a music school for the blind in their native Mali, and the rest is history. Just off a national tour opening for Coldplay this summer (whom they no doubt blew off the stage), their new cd collects some of the most inspired tracks from the duo’s 1997-2002 period, available for the first time in the western world. Some of the songs take a darkly bluesy western rock song structure and imbue it with austere, hypnotic desert blues guitar and violin, American piano and organ and the couple’s understatedly warm harmonies. Others hew closer to the minimalist, otherworldly desert blues style popularized by Ali Farka Toure and Tinariwen. It’s nothing if not psychedelic. The duo sing in French as well as native dialects, taking turns on lead vocals – Mariam has a uniquely and sweetly winsome delivery; Amadou’s also an excellent singer with a contrastingly bittersweet, soulful voice. What’s most striking is that this isn’t just pop music – the songwriting is artsy and complex, with playful, imaginative, completely out-of-the-box ideas and tinges of both Bob Marley and Pink Floyd. Some of these songs are unselfconsciously romantic; others are more philosophical or socially aware.
The cd opens with Je Pense a Toi (I’m Thinking About You), a stark bluesy minor-key love ballad with characteristically tasteful incisive desert blues guitar. Sarama (la Charmante) has the piano playing Ali Farka Toure riffs. On the insistent harmony-driven antiwar song Combattants (Soldiers), Amadou solos through a Leslie organ speaker. The reggae feel is pervasive: on C’est Comme Ca (It’s Like That), there’s a brief interlude that hints at dub, with a cool bass solo. Chantez Chantez evokes some of the faster material on Marley’s Exodus album, with a bracing Chicago style blues guitar solo straight out of the Magic Sam riffbook. There’s also a funky soul-inflected number with flute and wah-wah guitar: sixties soul as played by Jethro Tull? The desert blues numbers are uniformly excellent as well, often spiced with horns, organ and lush layers of interweaving guitar lines. With those beautiful vocals and the recent Coldplay tour, this remarkably accessible album comes out at a particularly auspicious moment in the couple’s increasingly celebrated career. Good for them.
Concert Review: Tinariwen at le Poisson Rouge, NYC 4/24/09
The sold-out club was treated to a show mostly reprising the self-described “most popular African band in the world”‘s fascinating, spikily hypnotic new dvd Live in London.What was most striking about Tinariwen’s show was how lyrically-driven their songs are. There was plenty of improvisation, but most of it was carefully, patiently cached in the nooks and crannies of their intricately meandering songs: all indications to the contrary, the expat Malian Tuareg rockers are not a jam band. One can only wonder what these guys have been thinking, singing in their native Tamashek to American audiences: they could be saying “Bite me,” over and over and nobody would know the difference. Reputedly their lyrics have the same fiery and fearless, politically-charged fury as the Clash along with a generous dash of desert mysticism. As with the dvd, they opened quietly as a trio with the song Chet Boghassa, one of the guitarists holding down a steadily rhythmic one-chord pattern over which the starkest of guitar sketches could be drawn before bringing up the full six-piece contingent. Resplendent in their desert robes and shesh headcoverings, they delivered the songs methodically without much interplay with the crowd. On a few occasions, members of the band (especially the bassist, who proved to be most gregarious, and something of a ham) would make a tentative inquiry in French to see if they could connect with anyone. Not much response, and no fellow Tuaregs in the house either (their diaspora is mostly urban European).
As with their big inspiration Ali Farka Toure, chord changes are few and far between in Tinariwen’s music, meaning that dynamics are everything, not only volume-wise but notably in the attack and sustain of the band’s mosaic of sound. On a couple of occasions, once merely as an aside while tuning up, one of the guitarists showed off remarkably blazing speed with a handful of almost bluegrass runs up the scale. Otherwise, the group and the songs formed a cohesive whole, the bassist taking the longest solo of the night, all of twelve cascading, smartly chosen, bluesy notes to end one of the more driving numbers. The most overtly bluesy, western-influenced number, Assawt N’Chet Tamashek, was held back just a hair enough to keep it from careening into a mad stomp, the percussion echoing the bouncy edginess of the guitars. The rest of the show was a dusky clang, overtones quickly rising and then just as quickly fading as the resonance died. Their guitar sound is very 1960s, and on a single occasion one of the players quickly tossed off a tongue-in-cheek Mike Bloomfield lick, perhaps to see if anybody else would be in on the joke.
Hassan Hakmoun opened with a very brief, four-song set which was absolute heaven for fans of low frequencies, playing a loudly amplified sintir (Moroccan three-string bass lute) and backed only by his longtime percussionist. Playing with his thumb, Hakmoun would find a phrase and run it over and over again while the percussion crackled and sparkled above the booming atmospherics. Then he’d slap at the strings like an American funk bassist, which proved far less interesting. He’s starting a restaurant in the East Village (424 E 9th) named after his instrument, grousing about how much the local block association “just wants to see you suffer,” but apparently Sintir has won out and will be opening soon.
The concert’s only drawback was completely beyond control of the bands. Some moron in the far corner felt compelled to whistle at earsplitting volume whenever there was the slightest pause, or the music got quiet (this is not a Tuareg custom). We ought to amend the law to allow amnesty for those of us who might be tempted to exercise vigilante justice on fools like that.
CD Review: Toumast – Ishumar
Hot on the heels of Tinariwen, here’s another expatritate Tuareg band, a very good one. Like their brethren (the two bands share several members), what Toumast play is ostensibly rock, but not what Western ears are used to hearing, although their music contains more definably Western tropes: chord changes, distinct verses/choruses and familiar guitar licks. The band name means “identity” in Tamashek, their native tongue, a matter of great importance for nomads who’ve been uprooted and persecuted in their native Mali for decades now. Like Tinariwen’s music, much of this is beautifully hypnotic, but Toumast is more energetic and melodically-oriented. Their songs are long, often going on for six minutes or more, replete with surprise false endings, crescendos that explode out of thin air, and upper-register blues guitar played with a clean, trebly tone. Their lead guitarist has a unique, percussive style, sounding as if he’s slapping at the strings like an American funk bass player would. Their lyrics are imbued with nostalgia and sometimes outright rage.
The album kicks off with Amidnine, an afrobeat-inflected number that meanders but eventually picks up steam. The following cut Ammilana opens with a chorus of women’s voices, haunting over a hypnotic 3/2 groove with a surprise crescendo driven by the bass before one of their trademark false endings. After that, Dounia opens with the guitar playing a funky bassline as the beat kicks in…and it’s pure 70s disco! The next track, Ezeref begins with an ominous melody that turns out to be straight out of The End by the Doors. Then, on Ikalane Walegh, they mine the Burning Spear catalog for the classic lick from Marcus Garvey, but play it faster, with gently Hendrix-inflected guitar. Finally, about halfway through the song, doubletracked guitars kick in and it bursts into flame.
Innulamane builds on a hypnotic chord until another recurrent lick is introduced, this one from Los Angeles by X. Say what you want about this band, you can’t say they aren’t adventurous listeners! The seven-minute epic Kik Ayyitma, perhaps the best cut on the album, builds its drama quietly from an ominous guitar intro followed by a rousing call from the singer, as the drums build almost unnoticeably until the deluge is unstoppable. After hearing this, one can only wonder how many other sons (and daughters) of Tinariwen are out there, doing the same thing, spreading across the desert via lo-fi cassette recordings. Fans of any hypnotic genre, from dub reggae to Mississippi hill country blues will find much to feast on here. Excellent album, four stars. Toumast make their New York debut sometime in the fall of 2008: watch this space for details.
Lucid Culture 