RFI Musique - - Africa - Tinariwen go back to the dunes

Tinariwen go back to the dunes

"Desert comrades" record on home ground

Paris

05/10/2009 -

Tinariwen, the group who came to symbolise the Tuareg uprising in the 1990s, go back to their roots on their fourth album, Imidiwan. Recorded in Tessalit, a village in the desert in northern Mali, this atmospheric album captures the grit and magic of the dunes.

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Ibrahim Ag Alhabib and his musical 'brothers in arms' made a fleeting visit to Paris at the beginning of September, staying in a house in the 20th arrondissement. Here, RFI Musique found the group transposing their desert rituals to a city environment, lying stretched out on couches, smoking cigarettes and strumming their guitars while a friend stewed their traditional bitter-sweet tea.

Gritty sound

When asked how the group find Paris, Ibrahim says that although they are happy to hook up with old friends again, "claustrophobia" generally sets in within a few days. Tinariwen are desert people at heart and Ibrahim prefers to spend his days in Tessalit, where he can be alone in the middle of the dunes with the wind, his flute, his tea, his tobacco and his animals. However, that kind of solitude has become rare for Tinariwen since they recorded The Radio Tisdas Session in Kidal back in 2000 with Justin Adams and Jean-Paul Romann.

That album set Tinariwen on the route to international fame and since then the group have played hundreds of concerts around the globe, from Europe to Australia via Japan. At the beginning of 2009, the group decided it was time to return to their primary source of inspiration. According to French sound engineer Jean-Paul Romann the move was triggered by an urge to "get some desert grit back into their sound." Tinariwen chose to record on home ground this time round, renting an old house in Tessalit to work on their new project free of the usual time constraints. This gave the musicians the freedom to work to their own rhythm. And a number of tracks on Imidiwan ("Comrades") were actually recorded out in the dunes in the dead of night with instruments exposed to the elements.

Blazing the way

While a number of songs on Imidiwan are new works, the group have also delved deep into their back catalogue, re-arranging Tinariwen classics from the past. Imidiwan, the album's title track, was written by Ibrahim in the late '80s yet the lyrics remain as topical as ever. Imidiwan was originally a song addressed to his comrades in the Tuareg insurgency, but Ibrahim claims the lyrics apply to all oppressed peoples in the world today such as the American Indians to whom Tinariwen feel particularly close. "The American Indians have exactly the same problems we do," Ibrahim says, "They're a minority, they're a nomadic people and they suffer from a critical lack of infrastructure and high rates of illiteracy."

There will always be a strong political dimension to Tinariwen's work. After all, the group was founded in the early '80s to transmit the call to insurrection. However, given that the military situation is more peaceful today, Tinariwen appear to be channelling their energies into other vital causes such as health, education and environmental issues. While Ibrahim is still concerned about the future of his people he concedes that being twenty in Tessalit in 2009 is a lot easier than it was in his day. "When I was growing up," he says, "young Tuaregs really had very little way out. Our generation was deeply marked by the conflict of 1963, a conflict in which I lost my own father. I grew up with the weight of that sadness and then we were hit by the great drought… Luckily a few pioneers came along and blazed the way. I think young people in Tessalit have a lot more options now." Thanks, we might add to role models like Tinariwen who have managed to blaze an international career while remaining true to the spirit of the desert.