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At GrassRoots this year, there was a band from Mali called Tinariwen. They were incredible. I can't even really describe the music other than to say it is really beautiful, rich, and deeply rooted.
The band(group) itself was beautiful as well. The history of the band is also interesting, as well as the religion(Dogon)which I had never heard of.
Anyway, this performance is available on BitTorrent for anyone who knows this method, and from me if you don't. ILet me know, and I will give you the locations of the downloads)
quote: Passions That Were Fired by the Embattled Sahara By JON PARELES
The six members of Tinariwen were dressed for the desert, in robes and turbans, when they performed at Joe's Pub on Tuesday night. They are Tuaregs, a nomadic people spread across the Sahara who staged fierce, unsuccessful rebellions during the 1990's in Mali and Niger. Tinariwen was formed by exiled Tuaregs in a refugee camp in Libya. A Tuareg rebel leader from Mali bought the band its first electric guitars and amplifiers and used its songs for propaganda during the rebellion. A decade of uneasy peace later, Tinariwen sings stark, hypnotic songs about the harshness of desert life and a still-smoldering rage. The songs are call-and-response tunes set to lean but spellbinding guitar patterns. Most of the early set's songs are on the band's new album, "Amassakoul" (World Village). Handclaps and a hand drum sketch three-against-two rhythms to mesh with sparse guitar and bass lines: a little trill, a brief run, just enough to pinpoint a mode and a groove. The songs reach back to ancient drones and ecstatic rituals that build through repetition and acceleration. With electric guitars replacing more traditional lutes, the songs can suggest the kind of bleak one-chord blues that John Lee Hooker played - music with African origins that has been reworked again in Africa. Every so often, Tinariwen's choppy guitar chords create a kind of North African funk. One song, "Arawan" was a rap in which Alhousseini Abdoulahi declared, "Nobody cares about the people of the desert who are suffering from thirst." Yet the power of Tinariwen's music comes not from its modern elements but from its ageless ones: from the Arabic and North African turns of the melodies, from the way terse lines add up to propulsion and profundity, from the austere power of the drone. Although the lyrics are often melancholy, there's no self-pity, just a spartan determination. Most of the singing was done by the group's five men, but in "Aymana," men intoned an overlapping drone note while the voice of a female singer, Mina Walet Oumar, rose above them, sharp and incantatory. Tinariwen's music seems inseparable from its origins. With the drones and circular patterns, songs can extend like sweeping desert landscapes. And like a nomad traversing those sands, Tinariwen's music carries only essentials and needs nothing more. Tinariwen performs tonight in Washington at Lisner Auditorium and tomorrow night in Santa Cruz, Calif., at the Kuumba Jazz Center
[ August 09, 2005, 10:19 PM: Message edited by: Elizabeth ]
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quote: The Dogon people of southern Mali are a poor agricultural people, still dwelling chiefly in caves. They believe that they were visited and taught by extraterrestrials from another star system. An integral part of their religious beliefs is a detailed knowledge of a star that is so difficult to observe that no photo of it was obtained until 1970. The Dogon shared this knowledge with French anthropologists in the 1930's. We know the star as Sirius B, but they call it Po Tolo. It was first suspected to exist in 1844, when observers of Sirius, the "Dog Star," noticed its abnormal movements. After much further observation, a companion star was discovered in 1862. This companion is a White Dwarf, which is a tiny star of immense mass and density.
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