Reaching The Plateau

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Published on: November 4th, 2011

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The band Tinariwen out in the desert. © Marie Planeille

Listen here all you denizens of the delta, the Western Sahara powerhouse Tinariwen will take to the stage this Monday, November the 7th at House of Blues. Hailed as one of the most prominent contemporary acts today, Tinariwen truly exemplifies the blues through their songs of struggle and strife.

Ibrahim Ag Alhabib founded the group in the 1970s while living in a rebel Tuareg encampment in the Sahara Desert. There, the members were exposed to a wide range of protest music from Morocco to Jamaica, and later started to solidify their own unique sound while being trained in a Tuareg rebel group, funded by none other than the late Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qadaffi.

Tinariwen reached international acclaim through the release of their 2007 album Aman Iman. The band exhibits raw guitar rifts as Alhabib yearnfully chants about his people’s quest for a nation and the hardships of nomadic desert life.

Currently on a North American tour, the band is promoting their newest installment Tassili, (which means "plateau") a live acoustic recording from the Algerian desert that bears the same name as the album. This album marks a return to the band’s roots, but also displays their evolution by featuring Western musicians, including our boys from the Dirty Dozen on the hypnotic track Ya Messinagh.

Although the band’s arid homeland cannot be in starker contrast to the muggy streets of New Orleans, we welcome in these citizens of the world, thus attesting to the awesome unifying power of music.