Tag Archives: guitar

Niamey by night

The bar is called The New’s. The blue and white painted walls encircle a courtyard of broken mosaic tile. The crowd pours back beer in amber bottles, men in tight fitted t-shirts and suit jackets sitting statuesque and bored or a handful losing their shit on the dancefloor. A flickering strobe cycles through all the colors of the rainbow. On the wall next to the bar, a projector broadcasts a WWF match and Big Show talks into a microphone, translated in Arabic subtitles, but there is no sound. An old electric roulette machine flashes lights. It’s slightly slanted. Every space is filled with the flooded out music of the bar band. They’re out of tune and out of step with one another. It’s Zirma rock, but it sounds like free jazz. The singer does his round of the tables, microphone in hand, singing praises to the people sitting there, who affect this passive stance as he yells into their faces and hovers over their table like a mariachi band at a Tex-Mex restaurant, waiting for his tip so he can move on to the next table. A slight wind blows and mixes the scents of cigarettes and stale beer. The waitress collects her orders and returns with a blue wicker basket full of cans and bottles. No one asks me for a drink, looks in my direction, or talks to me. The band keeps playing and I can swear the drum has no kick pedal, in any case, it’s not mic’d and it’s drowned out by the clipped vocals of the lead singer. I look beyond the courtyard where a building of concrete and rebar stands in some state of transition — I’m unable to determine if it’s unfinished or falling apart.

Orchestre Lomko Star, Le New’s, Niamey

tales of exile

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Ahmed’s guitar band Amanar takes their name from the constellation Orion; by virtue of an old story, one of many about a great Tamashek warrior by the same name. As the story goes, Amanar, an grand and imposing figure, accidentally bumped into a woman milking her goats to feed her children, and the bowl overturned, spilling the milk into the sand. The warrior grabbed a handful of desert and squeezed, wringing the milk back into the bowl. The mother was satisfied as was Amanar, but the earth was furious. It promised the warrior, “When you die and your body is buried, I’ll squeeze you twice as hard for eternity!” The sky however took pity on the warrior who could never be buried in the ground, but as a consolation placed his body in exile amongst the stars.

Tuareg guitar, for the uninitiated, falls somewhere between the Berber guitar of North Africa and the pentatonic rhythms of Ali Farka Touré — invoking the now cliche image of the musician, guitar slung over shoulder and Kalashnikov in hand. Not that the picture is entirely false, though nearly always misrepresented and deformed into something else, plucked out of the desert and broadcast on the Colbert Report, appealing to a common myth of rebel chic.

The foundation of the music however is rebellion, the style was formed and refined in Libyan camps of exiled Tuaregs, and the content of the music has never strayed far from these origins — lyrics that invoke struggle and suffering or outright appeals and calls to arms. It’s particularly poignant now, as another rebellion has ignited in the North with a force not seen since 1990. The same songs that have been circulating for the past twenty years in concerts in Bamako, marriages in Kidal, or in bedrooms of Tamashek ishumar from Algeria to Niger, are again speaking with a renewed fury.

An old song by a guitarist named Hamadine — the refrain which translates to: “There’s blood being spilled, why aren’t you saying something?”:

Ahmed Ag Kaedi / Amanar – Hamadine (cover)

Amanar is Kidal’s town band. But Kidal is empty, turned battleground. The group has scattered, some in the desert around Kidal, others in Algeria. Ahmed, the band leader and soloist is in the capital of neighboring Niger.

“Now is the time to write new music. The Tuareg are in exile. This is the time to say something.” We’re sitting at the house of his brother-in-law, where not a few Tamashek families have been circulating through the past few days. Tuaregs have left Bamako in droves fearing racial attacks, and the Northern towns have been emptied as the families go into their desert camps. “A lot of people are listening to my music and telling me what I wrote came true.”

“Before I believed that all the Tamashek had the same objective,
Now, I don’t know.
One morning that surprised us in pain.
Every where I look, I see our people running away.
In whose hands are we leaving Kidal?”
– “Alghafiat”

Amanar’s song Alghafiat translates into “Peace” — but it should not be misconstrued as counter-rebellion. Rather, it’s an appeal to unity amongst the Tuareg, an end to tribalism, class-ism, and corruption in the North. It’s a departure from the old rebellion anthems with a clear enemy in the powerful Malian state. The song accuses the new ruling class of the powerful figures that operate with almost complete transparency: the well respected Tamashek elite who earn their fortunes from drug trafficking, the politicians who navigate side dealings with Al-Qaedi, and the heads of various NGOs, lining their pockets with diverted aid money. It’s a song that has success in Kidal and across Mali, “because everyone thinks it’s talking about someone else, when it’s really talking about them.”

Amanar – Alghafiat

The battle continues to rage, and the confusion of the rebellion has made it impossible to return home for the moment. Ahmed says he will continue to work, that now is the time to speak. It’s fitting perhaps, that like Amanar the warrior, it’s in exile that their message will be heard.

tahoultine, chopped and skyped

Moonlight in the Gold Port

the choice is yours

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“It’s called world music – music without boundaries. You take a little bit of African, America, Europe, Latin – and mix it together. That’s world music,” Ama explains. “We don’t play world music.” We’re sitting outside Demba’s house in Niafounke. It’s a starless night, the residual clouds of the evening’s duststorm shrouding the sky. The torrential winds have passed on and left a balmy cool stillness in their wake. Kola is skipping through songs on a memory card, plugged into a DVD player, connected to a boombox. “Here,” Kola says, “this is Alkibar Gignor.”

Alkibar Gignor – Allah Baoudou

It’s a grainy recording, a digital copy of an analog original from 2003. A cassette “ordered” by a friend or patron, performed with the occasional shout-out and praise song in that long tradition of dedicated performances. The sound is warbly and rough, and they seem a bit embarrassed by the quality. No one records on cassette anymore, they explain with an air of nostalgia, as though we we’re talking about another era and not just a few years prior. The recordings are a historical record of the group, their own personal archives. For example, the 2003 recording of “Allah ka Baru (Hommage a Ali Farka Toure)”:

Alkibar Gignor – Allah ka Baru (2003)

At the organization of the annual “Ali Farka Festival,” (now defunct for mysterious reasons) the organizers heard of the young group from Niafounke and offered a slot in opening the festival. Ama remembers “everyone from town was incredulous when they saw us get on stage.” Young and unknown, even the promoters were skeptical and told them to hurry up and play. The song is a hommage and is addressed to Farka’s children who were in attendance, telling them “don’t be sad when you’ve lost someone, remember them, and be happy that we had them on earth, because everything must move on.” The song is in Sonrai, but also quotes Koranic verse. “We sung the hommage and everyone cried. Even the marabout couldn’t believe what he heard. They were all asking — who are these kids?”

The festival launched the band into a moderate local success. They’ve become Niafounke’s hometown band, touring throughout the dusty scrub villages on the riverside. We travel to one such village in a rented landcruiser with drums and generators and amplifiers strapped to the roof, bumping over the furrowed river bank, passing the occasional donkey and wide eyed child shouting and waving furiously at the local celebrities.

Alkibar Gignor – Allah ka Baru (sung by child)
(see previously, bandcamp)

“Afel said that if you want to please white people ["les blancs"],” Ama explains, “you need to play acoustic guitar and calabash — leave the electric guitar and drum set.” And while the Northern Mali guitar does lend itself to the rich vibrato of the acoustic double octaves and I hasten to get caught up in some tired defense of authenticity or the “real” sound of Niafounke, the preferred style of performance represents another side of the what has become the standard of the North — electric riffs and decalé drumming. But Niafounke is hardly isolated, and in the past has brimmed with international tourists, musically inclined, and not a few of the predominant “world music” producers. Alkibar Gignor knows how to play to their crowd, whether it’s a rendition of “Tamala” in a riverside village to praise a predominant benefactor, or those who traveled around the world to Niafounke to hear some Ali Farka Toure.

Alkibar Gignor – Soundcheck

Alkibar Gignor – Tamala