Talks & Entertainment

For Saharan blues band Tinariwen, the desert is their home, and their hypnotic and electrifying guitar rock reflects the complex realities of their homebase in North West Africa. They are Tuareg, descended from nomadic people who have wandered the dunes for millennia, but the music of Tinariwen travels too, reverberating far from dusty plains of Mali. Their 2011 album Tassili, recorded in the Algerian desert—in a tent and under the stars with an esteemed cadre of musicians including Nels Cline and TV on the Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe and Kyp Malone—won a GRAMMY Award for Best World music.

Now their new record Emmaar returns to their roots, delivering stripped-down dirges, effervescent anthems, and above all, a return to simplicity and honesty. Though the band’s success has brought them around the world, they rarely can go home, facing threats of incarceration and death by thugs in power. But like creatures of the desert, they adapt and carry on, after all, Tinariwen is a band born into chaos.

This tour engagement of Tinariwen is funded through the American Masterpieces program of Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation with support from the National Endowment for the Arts.