Music of the Sahel

Songhai Blues

Songhai blues is the guitar music of the Niger River region of Mali, named for the Songhai people, and it is one of the two main strands of what the wider world calls desert blues. It is characterised by hypnotic, repetitive grooves, pentatonic melodies, call-and-response vocals and is played on electric or acoustic guitar with a sound strikingly close to the Mississippi Delta blues. Its central figure, Ali Farka Touré argued that this was the older music from which the American blues descended after being carried across the Atlantic through slavery. It is a claim debated by scholars but rooted in an undeniable musical kinship. Songhai blues grew from traditional Songhai and Fulani song and earlier Malian forms that adapted to the guitar from the 1970s onward. It has become one of West Africa’s most internationally recognised sounds.

Tishoumaren (Tuareg desert blues)

Tishoumaren, also called assouf, Tuareg desert blues or Saharan rock, is the electric guitar music of the nomadic Tuareg people of the central Sahara and is the other main strand of the desert blues. It is characterised by cyclical, trance-inducing electric-guitar lines, driving rhythms and Tamasheq-language vocals. It draws melodically on traditional Tuareg song and, in particular, on tende, the women’s drum music whose rhythms the early guitarists imitated. It emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s among Tuareg exiles, crystallising with the collective Tinariwen, whose members took up the guitar while in Libyan military camps. The music spread on cassette through refugee camps and later reached the world via the Festival au Désert and, for a younger generation such as Mdou Moctar, through mobile-phone file sharing. Bound up throughout with Tuareg rebellion, displacement and identity, tishoumaren has carried artists like Bombino and Tamikrest to international festival stages.