Tinariwen: Desert Blues From The Sahara
Tinariwen (Tamasheq language: Meaning "desert") is a collective of Tuareg musicians from the Sahara region of southern Algeria and of northern Mali, in the region of Azawad. Tinariwen are a critically acclaimed Saharan Tuareg group who perform a guitar-centric branch of Malian music known as "Tishoumaren," a percussive, rock-oriented desert blues that often addresses social and political issues. Emerging out of the refugee and rebel camps of Algeria and Libya, the collective built a regional audience throughout the 1980s and returned to Mali in the '90s; they eventually earned global recognition with their first internationally released album, 2001's The Radio Tisdas Sessions. . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . Tinariwen style is possibly a distant relative of blues music, via West African music, members of Tinariwen claim to have never heard actual American blues music until they began to travel internationally in the early 2000s. Tinariwen was also influenced by American and British rock acts whose bootlegged albums had made it to the Sahara region, such as Dire Straits, Santana, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, and Jimi Hendrix. Their most recent album Amatssou was released in 2023.
