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Desert rockers Tinariwen of Mali have been on tour in the US this winter.Jeffrey Callen caught the show—on an off night, it seems—in San Francisco, February 22, 2010.Here’s his review.The photos by Banning Eyre are from Tinariwen’s performance at New York’s Highline Ballroom about a week earlier.
It’s easy to review a great performance. The feeling of elation from being taken out of the daily flow of life stimulates the creative centers of the brain and the words flow. Reviewing a bad performance also comes fairly easily. As an exercise in figuring out why the event didn’t work—the music didn’t gel, the crowd didn’t respond—it offers its own kind of satisfaction. But when a show almost works, when nothing is terribly wrong, there is little to say. It just fell flat. The emotional and intellectual drivers to write fail to appear:elation is missing, no intellectual problem to unravel. The performance just fell flat. And that’s what happened when one of the great bands working today, Tinariwen, played the Palace of Fine Arts on Sunday, February 22nd.
Tinariwen took the stage at ten minutes after seven and immediately broke into “Tenhert,” one of the standout tracks from last year’s album Imidiwan (“Companions”). It was laid-back, restrained, even “mellow” with none of the raw intensity that drives the album track. At the break in the song where the guitars drop out and the bass carries the beat, the audience mistook the break for an ending and began to applaud until the guitars re-entered. An embarrassing moment that indicated something was missing. A smaller ensemble than when I saw them in 2006 at Yoshi’s jazz club in Oakland, Tinariwen seemed to lack energy. The sound was thin and the groove-driven sound of Tinariwen is never thin. Toward the end of the third song, bandleader Ibrahim Ag Alhabib strolled onto the stage, electric guitar strung over his shoulder like a bandolier. Sharp shoes, gold pants, his presence made a statement. A shot of life came into the show with the addition of Ibrahim but it would not be enough to lift it out of the doldrums.
When I saw Tinariwen in 2006, it was one of the best shows I’d seen in years. The band and the crowd gelled. The arrangements were filled out, changed to meet the emotional dynamics of the event. That didn’t happen this time. Ibrahim led the band through some of its most notable songs from the four albums it has released since Tinariwen exploded into the international market in 2002. “Le Chant Des Fauves” from their first album, The Radio Tiskas Sessions, withits loopy groove-driven intensity was a standout. A few other songs held up but none were stretched out or altered to fit the evening. Nothing seemed special, a moment out of time that I’d remember.
Tinariwen left the stage at thirty-five minutes after eight. They had put on a show that was far from their best. I didn’t walk out with the feeling of elation I had felt after their show four years ago but not every night is a night you’ll remember. At least I got one unforgettable night from Tinariwen and that is something few bands can deliver.
Jeffrey Callen is an ethnomusicologist whose writing on popular music & culture appears in both popular and scholarly publications. His blog TRANSGRESSIONS: A POP CULTURE BLOG explores the boundaries of style, genre, culture and gender. He is currently completing a book on alternative music in Morocco.
