In-store: Tinariwen

Tinariwen

Sonic Boom Records. Wednesday, March 3, 2010.

I always like taking in shows in the basement of Sonic Boom, and this was even more of a treat, with the group on stage hailing from farther away than usual, both stylistically and geographically. The in-stores tend more toward the indie-ish end of the rock spectrum, so to have a visit from Tinariwen — Tuareg musicians from the Sahara Desert region of northern Mali — was a bit of something else. It also brought out a bit of a different crowd than usual, mixing up those whom you might usually expect to see in the Sonic Boom basement with some you might more expect at a world music show. It's always good to mix up the audiences and get more various kinds of folks rubbing elbows — I'd love to see more shows like this in the basement at Sonic Boom.¹

Playing in a stripped down, four-piece format for the in-store, the band featured percussion and a pair of guitars for instrumentation, along with everyone singing. There were less layers of rhythm guitar interplay than with the full band, but it was still quite dazzling, musically. Their genre is known as Assouf, and, for a marketing "hook", it's often compared to the blues. That's as misleading as it is enlightening, though they're surely distant kin of some sort. But if we want to use that as a framework, think more of the droning minimalist end of the blues — like, maybe, imagine "Boogie Chillen'" as a liberation song with call-and-response vocals and you're sort of on the right path.

The miniature grouping of the band was led by Abdallah Ag Alhousseyni, singing lead while his fingers skipped lightly on his acoustic guitar. His banter was mostly of the "Ca va?" variety, and he stepped to the front of the stage a couple times during instrumental passages, but mostly he didn't have to be too flashy to get his point across. The band played five songs in just under a half-hour, and it was good enough to make me a little sad that I hadn't invested in a ticket to their full show.

Listen to a track from this set here.

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¹ And kudos to the Small World Music Society, presenters of the show — hopefully they'll see shows like this as a way to expose some cool music to people outside the "world music" circle.