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For most bands, life on the road consists of half-empty bars, van trouble, too much pizza and not enough sleep in questionable settings, but for Tinariwen the road conjures up images of camel travel in the Sahara, refuge camps and run-ins with armed soldiers. In many ways, life is life on the road for Tinariwen, since they are from a culture that is still largely nomadic. Tinariwen are members of the Tuareg ethnic group, or Kel Tamashek, as they prefer to be called, from Mali, in West Africa. The Radio Tisdas Sessions is their first CD, although the group has apparently put out several cassettes that are popular in the bazaars of Timbuktu. Recorded on rationed electricity from a generator, this disc is marked by the raw bluesy sound of slightly distorted electric guitar, and the steady offbeat knock of what sounds like a rim-shot or a woodblock. Somewhere along the line the members of Tinariwen traded in their traditional stringed instruments in favor electric guitar and amps, and that's the defining feature of this music - a style that is sometimes called simply "guitar."

While the guitar may be the distinguishing feature, everything is at the service of the ornate and curly-cued vocal melodies, which the guitar lines and group-singing mirror and answer. The music sounds like it might be a family affair, with a single male voice singing the first phrase and the whole crew of others including women joining in with the response. The guitar playing often pivots on a droning bass note, with spiky high notes swirling in ornamentation. At times the droning guitar is aided by delay effects and muffled patting percussion coupled with the vocal doubling of the surging melodies, and it can have a downright psychedelic quality.

Many African guitar-playing styles involve finger-picking techniques and cascading single-note phrases transposed from indigenous harp, thumb piano and zither traditions. Tinariwen has the noodly single-note riffs, but there's also a background of more anomalous, gentle, rhythmic strumming subdued in the mix. Unlike much Malian music, Tinariwen works mostly around a solid four-beat rhythmic frame, without tricky polyrhythms or six-beat phrases.

Because of the history of trans-Saharan trade, Mali has often been at the crossroads of different cultures. The Tuareg, with their distinctive robes, are known as the "blue men of the desert." Descended from Berber-speaking North Africans, the Tuareg have a longstanding adversarial relationship with the sub-Saharan majority groups in Mali. The southern fringe of the Sahara has always been a point of interaction between Muslim traders from the north and sub-Saharan groups from the south.

If much music from Mali has been achieving a level notoriety in recent years, music of the Tuareg is perhaps the exception. Tuareg music hasn't quite had its vogue yet, but with The Radio Tisdas Sessions that could be about to change slightly. One complaint: there are no translations of the lyrics provided. Since much of the identity of this group is wrapped up in their involvement with the Tuareg independence struggle, and since the poetry is obviously the source of inspiration of this music, it seems a shame to not have more of an idea of what the songs are about. Even without knowledge of what's being sung, the music has a mellow soul and head-nodding groove.

Contributed by: John Adamian for www.afropop.org