Just when you think all the iterations of rock blues have been played out, you get a surprising breath of life, blowing in all the way from the Malian Sahara.
I missed Tinariwen's first shows in New York, but finally caught them last year at a free summer concert in the World Financial Center, and I was hooked. And Tuesday's show at Highline (a super newish venue with impeccable sound) only rekindled the flame.
This band of Touareg nomads has an irresistible back story -- meeting in an Algerian oasis after violent displacement by the Malian army, becoming the voice of the Touareg revolutionary movement, and fighting in the conflict themselves in the early 1990s.
But the revolutionary romance does not account for the band's visceral appeal. It's all about the droning guitars, the circling choruses, Ibrahim and Abdallah's ferociously ringing guitar picking, the hip-swaying rhythms that incite joy and righteous struggle. It is the spirit of rock as rebellion (forgive me for committing the sin of rockism, but this time it's apt).
The ensemble was smaller than the last time I saw them, filling the stage with some seven performers and guitars overlaying guitars. This version of the band had Ibrahim and Abdallah on guitars and vocals, Hassan on occasional guitar, choruses and leading audience participation with flirting dances and delicate hand gestures, young gun Eyadou on bass, at times fairly jumping out of his skin, and Said on percussion (a single djembe that from my limited sightlines sounded like a half-dozen drums).
If I have the names wrong, forgive me: the band spent much of the set wrapped up in their scarves like they'd just come off the trans-Sahara trail, only their eyes visible.
I very much missed the timbre and presence of Mina Walet Oumar, Tinariwen's female vocalist. But she had a good excuse for missing the concert, as she gave birth to a daughter in October.
The songs were drawn from their three albums, Amassakoul, The Radio Tisdas Sessions and the new Aman Iman: Water is Life, and went back and forth between more meditative with an underlying low sad drone, like "Le Chant des Fauves" (the song of the wild beasts) to more upbeat numbers like "Chatma" and "Cler Achel" that had even the whitest of white boys clapping and shimmying. There was even a great rap segment in gruff Arabic in the song "Arawan."
I was real glad to see them, too, as it seems the band will be coming off tour until 2009 to record a live DVD and new album.
[photo by David Nunn via Flickr]
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