{"id":124326,"date":"2023-06-16T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-06-16T08:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pan-african-music.com\/?p=124326"},"modified":"2023-06-14T14:48:41","modified_gmt":"2023-06-14T12:48:41","slug":"tinariwen-amatssou-interview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pan-african-music.com\/en\/tinariwen-amatssou-interview\/","title":{"rendered":"Tinariwen, a message in a time of heightened fear"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

We met with Abdallah ag Alhousseini at the foot of the Assekrem, one of the high plateaus reigning over the Hoggar region, a three-hour drive from Tammarasset. He talked about Tinariwen<\/a>‘s future, present and past. Forty years earlier, the guitarist and composer, born in 1968 in the north of Mali, moved to the major city of the Algerian Sahara, where he encountered Ibrahim ag Alhabib and Alhassan ag Touhami, who had just founded Intayaden, the seminal group of the Ishumar movement of young unemployed Tuareg people who had left the desert to live in cities, and who were looking for other ways to resist without resorting to armed struggle. Abdallah soon joined the group, and then became one of the main spokesmen, devoting his energies to spreading the musical message of the Tinariwen Tuaregs<\/a> across the globe. They imposed a sound, desert blues, which became their signature. Twenty years after their emergence and global fame as the ambassadors of the Tamasheq (Tuareg) culture, Tinariwen has just released a new album, which creates ties with another aspect of the United States: country music. The occasion for Abdallah to explain this intimate connection and also to evoke the group\u2019s past and future. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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What role does Tamanrasset play in the life of the group as well as for the Tuareg communities?<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

The city has played a key role in the group\u2019s history, musicians like Eyadou were born there, and others like me arrived in 1983 to start a family. That\u2019s where the Humar style was born and formalized, and where I saw Ibrahim and Hassan for the first time, and also where I started playing. And, in more general terms, given its geographic situation and the geo-political evolution of the Sahara, Tamanrasset is in a way the Turareg capital. This was the rallying point for the Tuaregs who were scattered across thousands of kilometers, whether they were from Algeria, the Hoggar, Mali, Niger\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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That\u2019s also where the great singer Badi Lalla lives, in Tahaggart, an area where many Tuaregs live who fled the great drought at the beginning of the 1970\u2019s\u2026 What does tradition mean for Tinariwen?<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s the source we often drew inspiration from. We even invited her to join us on stage in Paris, at the Bouffes du Nord in 2014. Our music is the vision of young people in relation to this tradition. A way of re-creating it. I\u2019m very interested in traditional poetry, even if the Tamasheq cause is very present in the songs that I propose.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Tinariwen has inspired numerous groups that have followed in its footsteps. How do you see the group\u2019s evolution over the past forty years?<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

It hasn\u2019t evolved that much. And those that continue are a little like us. It has to be said that it is difficult to live from your music here : no music schools, no concert halls, no music stores. It\u2019s not easy for a style to evolve with so many constraints. We lack many things. The result is that there haven\u2019t been major changes in the structure of the music. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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It\u2019s mainly during your tours in Europe and in the United States that you got ideas for new directions, like on this new album where you invited country musicians\u2026<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

The structure, the spirit is the same, even if we added instruments, even if the sound has evolved. Of all music, country is the one closest to our spirit. It really touches me, and yet there is no historical relation to our music. It\u2019s a music that speaks to the soul like ours does, and as is often the case, it\u2019s not easy to explain why\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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