Tinariwen is coming!
The Cedar is pleased to announce renowned desert blues act Tinariwen as the most recent addition to the West Africa West Bank series! Tinariwen will be performing in the intimate Cedar room on June 16, three days after the group plays the big stage at Bonnaroo, and days before they perform big outdoor gigs at Millennium Park (Chicago), Central Park (New York), and Hollywood Bowl (Los Angeles). The group of former Touareg rebels turned electric guitar wielding musicians is a sensational live act, gritty and hypnotic.
The group was founded by Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, Hassan Ag Touhami and Inteyeden Ag Ableline in Tamanrasset, southern Algeria, at the end of the 1970s. It was a period of great suffering in the desert, due to the catastrophic droughts of the early 1970s, which had decimated the animal herds and almost destroyed the Touareg’s ancient nomadic way of life. Tinariwen began to write songs describing the pain of exile, the longing for lost homes and families, the struggle for political and cul- tural freedom, and the rigors of every day life in the desert. Their music became the soundtrack for a whole generation of exiled Touareg youth, living a hand-to-mouth existence in exile in Algeria and Libya. It was not only the subject matter but the sound that was radically different. Ibrahim transposed the traditional melodies of the Touareg on the electric guitar, mixing them with blues, rock, pop, berber and arabic influences. Tinariwen created a modern desert rock sound, whose harsh simplicity was well suited to the realities of their situation.
Lured into rebel training camps in Libya by Colonel Gadaffi in the early 1980s, Tinariwen became the official mouthpiece of the Touareg rebellion, and their songs carried the message of awareness and resistance to the far corners of the desert. In 1990 all the founding members of the group took part in the Touareg rebellions in northern Mali and Niger. After the end of the rebellion, Tinariwen emerged as a desert legend. They joined up with the French group Lo’Jo to organize the first Festival in the Desert in 2001. And they have not looked back since.
Tinariwen are the ambassadors of one of the oldest and proudest people on earth. They play their music to teach us about the beauty of their desert home, the strength and dignity of the nomad and his way of life, and the problems of poverty, oppression and lack of development which continue to hamper their progress.
Tickets for Tinariwen at The Cedar on June 16 are on sale now.
Tinariwen
Tinariwen are often associated with just one image: that of Touareg rebels leading the charge, machine gun in hand and electric guitar slung over the shoulder. The band ditch this cliché on their fifth album ‘Tassili’ and it’s for the best. The founding members abandoned their weapons long ago and on this new album they have engineered a minor aesthetic revolution by setting the electric guitar – the instrument which became their mascot and made them famous – to one side and giving pride of place to acoustic sounds, recorded right in the heart of the desert, which is the landscape of their existence, the cradle of their culture and the source of their inspiration. You might even call this radical move a return to the very essence of their art, a return which, paradoxically, has also opened the doors to some intriguing collaborations with members of TV On The Radio, Nels Cline (Wilco’s guitarist) or The Dirty Dozen Brass Band.
