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Dune blues
Mali’s ‘Festival in the Desert’
BY BANNING EYRE

For three days in early January, a desert village 60 miles northwest of Timbuktu, Mali, was the scene of one of the satisfying music festivals I’ve ever attended — and surely one of the most surreal ever staged. The third annual "Festival in the Desert" in Essakane saw artists as diverse as Ali Farka Toure, Robert Plant, and the Navajo rock band Blackfire performing on a fully equipped and lighted sound stage set up in the middle of rolling white sand dunes. Most of the festival attendees were nomadic Tuaregs, who had come by camel, some having traveled for weeks from far corners of northern Mali and neighboring Niger. As the music began each afternoon, row upon row of turbaned riders surrounded those seated and standing on the sand before the stage. As night fell, and dreamy music filled the suddenly chilled air, the dunes glowed orange with fires arranged in snaking lines, a theatrical touch dreamed up by the French world-music band Lo’Jo, who are largely responsible for conceiving and organizing this one-of-a-kind event.

Beyond the adventure and the carnival, music history was made at this festival. Mali has led the way for African musicians breaking onto the world stage, but except for Ali Farka Toure — the king of African blues — and his side-man-gone-solo-artist, Afel Bocoum, nearly all Mali’s international recording artists come from the far south of this vast nation, mostly from the capital, Bamako. The Festival in the Desert turned this dynamic on its head, featuring mostly hypnotic, trancy bands from the Sahara, including three from Niger and two from Mauritania. The Nightingale of the North, Haira Arby, typified the Timbuktu sound, with the light, rolling rhythms of calabash percussion, the overtone-rich wail of the one-string fiddle called njarka, and her clear, mellifluous alto voice weaving mysteriously through the mix.

The festival’s 30 odd acts included many artists whose names have yet to grace the liner notes of a Malian compilation CD. That Arby does not have a single international release speaks to the way the Malian north — not to mention Niger and Mauritania — has so far been largely absent from the world-music feast. In part it’s a matter of geography: Timbuktu, the biggest town in this region, is every bit as remote as its reputation would suggest. "There is no road," Arby pointed out. "Business people can’t do much here." After severe drought in the 1980s, the nomadic Tuareg were forced into refugee camps, from which they took up arms against the country’s military regime of that era; much of the Malian north was thus dangerous as well as undeveloped. Only when democracy came to Mali, in 1991, did the government extend a helping hand to the Tuareg. The resulting peace opened the way for events like the Festival in the Desert, and this hopeful turn of events helps explain the exuberant atmosphere that prevailed in Essakane.

Two of the festival’s Tuareg acts, the guitar-driven jam band Tinariwen and the mostly female folkloric ensemble Tartit, began in those refugee camps. Each outfit now has one international release, but Tinariwen’s The Radio Tsidas Sessions (World Village) and Tartit’s Ichichila (Network) were both made in the year 2000, even though Tinariwen formed in the 1970s and Tartit in the 1980s. Both groups proved tremendously appealing on stage, Tartit with their mesmerizing ensemble singing and slow, sensuous movements, Tinariwen with their raw, spacy desert rock.

Ali Farka Toure has become a kind of cult figure for Westerners in search of blues roots, but in truth this region is just crawling with unknown musicians whose music would prove a gold mine to Toure’s international fans. And that, it turns out, is what drew Robert Plant to the Festival in the Desert. "From 1971 to now," he said one morning as we spoke in his tent, "I’ve been traveling in the south of Morocco, where the Tuareg are quite prevalent. . . . So I was always exposed to this amazing timbre. It was a music that was, not haunting me, but it was reminding me constantly of my youth and my love of Son House and Charley Patton."

North African elements cropped up in a number of Led Zeppelin songs — think of "Kashmir" or "The Immigrant Song" — and it has played an explicit role in some of Plant’s post-Zeppelin work, notably his 1994 reunion project with Jimmy Page, No Quarter (Atlantic), and his most recent album, Dreamland (Universal). The Dreamland line-up includes English guitarist Justin Adams, who has produced albums for Lo’Jo and Tinariwen and who attended the first Festival in the Desert, in 2001. Adams and guitarist Skin accompanied Plant to this year’s event, and they were joined by members of Lo’Jo for a brief, understated set on the final night that included a jangly, desert version of Bob Dylan’s "Girl From the North Country" and a cooled-out take on "Whole Lotta Love."

Like all the non-Malian artists who played the festival, Plant received no fee. His set was his contribution, but he mostly came to listen. "You hear what’s going on in the tent next to us," he said, and indeed, some of the best music at the festival was played on sand dunes and in tents far from the main stage. "It’s so close to Bukka White’s ‘Jitter Bug Swing.’ How many generations is the difference between what we’re hearing now and what was recorded by Alan Lomax in 1938-’39 in Parchman Penitentiary in Mississippi? I don’t know. I mean, I’m a music buff. I’m a collector. I’m a vinyl junkie and I love the blue note. The blue note is everything — that dipped vocal when you don’t expect it and it arrives out of nowhere and it just dips down there. . . . In England, a nice young Catholic boy was only exposed to ‘tra la la la la’ — everything in a major key and mostly in ‘D.’ ‘Breathe on Me Breath of God’ doesn’t have the same pull as a bunch of Gnawa cleaning out a house, you know? That’s why I’ve come 3000 miles with my pals to be here."

After a couple of days of hearing Songhai and Tuareg singers from Mali and Niger, Plant was fairly humbled. "As a singer I realize how restricted my capabilities are. I know how what I do works, or did work, in one genre, but across another, it’s real tough. I couldn’t sit in the middle of that lot and sing. It’s so beautiful and so soft. There is no room for Joe Cocker in there. Or Howlin’ Wolf."

Plant also has no illusions about his ability to turn his enormous worldwide audience to desert roots music. "It has to have its own feet and its own legs. You have to be careful that it doesn’t just become a coffee-table moment in Western culture, because it’s all very well listening to Tinariwen and saying this is amazing stuff. The trouble is, with the coarseness and the cynicism of the world which we arrived from, it’s just another disc to play to replace Mark Knopfler and Sting."

Speaking of discs to play: there are precious few available of the music heard in Essakane. I’m hoping there’ll be a Festival in the Desert release; Lo’Jo’s sound crew made a 24-track recording of every act that played the main stage. In the meantime, an excellent two-CD compilation called Desert Blues 2 (Network) is just out, a rich, moody sampling of recent music from Mali, Guinea, Senegal, Morocco, Algeria, Sudan, and Ethiopia. Once again, Mali accounts for the lion’s share of the music, nine of the 26 tracks. Tartit’s "Aïtma" is a guitar song, not especially representative of the group’s repertoire, but in the vein of the more-electric Tuareg bands whose sound dominated at the festival.

Desert Blues 2 also has two great tracks by Lobi Traore of Bamako, whose hard-edged set on the final night was a knockout. Robert Plant got his blue-note fix in spades when the diminutive guitarist began teasing elegant, raw melodies from his red Stratocaster. Desert Blues 2 is especially rich in vocal blue notes — down and dirty from female Gnawa artist Hasna El Becharia of Algeria, sweet and poppy from Rasha of Sudan. With beautiful photographs and extensive liner notes, this compilation gets the "desert blues" marketing concept just about right, but given what went down in Essakane, it only begins to tell the full story.

Ali Farka Toure closed the festival with a raucous, spiritually satisfying performance that was only slightly marred by his inability to get his acoustic guitar in tune. Toure is famously tired of performing, preferring life as a farmer in his home town of Niafounke, which is not far from Essakane. But as a long-time champion of Mali’s neglected northern musicians, he was thrilled to see so much international hubbub in the neighborhood. Rumor has it that he will come to DC for the Smithsonian Folklife festival this June, when Mali will be one of the featured countries, but the line-up has yet to be announced, so don’t count on it.

As Toure’s final notes rang out, around 2 a.m., a convoy of 25 four-wheel-drive trucks was waiting to take people on a wild night ride over the dunes. We reached Timbuktu around sunrise, by which time Essakane was surely reverting to a placid landscape of sand and scrub. But the just-concluded three-day music-and-media circus is bound to guarantee this obscure desert village a lasting place on the world-music map.

 

Issue Date: February 27 - March 6, 2003
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