To Timbuktu and Back

By: Story by Robert Norton | Photos by Antony Hoffman | December 15, 2009 | Travel

Over the years, the festival has welcomed the likes of Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin Damon Albarn of Blur, Jimmy Buffet and internationally renowned African musicians such as Ali Farka Touré and his son Vieux Farka Touré, Salif Keita, Tiken Jah Fakoly and Tinariwen.

For three days and nights, you live in a makeshift Tuareg campsite complete with its own market and an array of services ranging from camel taxis to desert haircuts. From dusk till dawn, the cool desert air is filled with music as performers take their turn playing on one of the three principal stages.

The main stage is a concrete structure that can easily support a 20-piece band; it has a small artist green room and is staffed by a professional team of engineers and electricians to ensure the sound and lights stay on.

The small stage is a large tent that serves as an after-hour spot once the main stage winds down around 3 a.m. Finally there’s a natural clearing called an ancient-style stage that is used for traditional dances around sundown. Between the stages, you can take your pick of pop-up parties as people gather round anything from a musical gourd to a ghetto blaster. By the end, nothing is left other than the concrete stage set among the dunes.

If you want to perform at the festival, the first thing you have to do is get there, then track down the festival organizer, Manny Ansar, who resembles a young Omar Sharif, and convince him to put you on the program.

For Agee, a 28-year-old reggae musician from Bamako, performing at the festival was a dream come true. In 2008 and 2009, Agee and his manager Ali Gator arrived with neither musicians nor musical instruments. Undeterred, they went around the dunes introducing themselves to people and asking them to join their band. By the third night, they took to the main stage accompanied by no less than two student violinists from London’s Royal college of music, a professional cellist from Boston, three flutists from Berlin, two guitarists from Mali and three backing singers from the Ivory Coast. I was fortunate enough that year to be asked to announce the band on stage both in English and French. Looking out over the gathered camels and assortment of local tribes and crying out ‘Bienvenue, Essakane!’ was something I’ll never forget.

For the Westerners, the festival is all about the experience of living in the Sahara and absorbing its music. There’s nowhere else on Earth you can hear the songs and ancient instruments of the desert such as the imzad (violin), tinde (drum), teherdent (lute) and aghanib (shepherd’s flute) played with such ease. These strangely calming and hypnotic notes sound like a seductive blend of jazz mixed with gentle blues and a relaxed slow drumming beat. To the listener, it’s one long trance-like state of bliss.

One of the best-known and most loved local bands is Tinariwen, whose fourth album, Imidiwan: Companions, was released in 2009. This group of legendary poet guitarists has performed at more than 700 concerts including Coachella, WOMAD, Glastonbury and Roskilde. Its growing fan base counts Bono, Chris Martin, Carlos Santana and Henry Rollins among others.

Perhaps more than any other band, Tinariwen highlights the struggle for nomadic identity in a world of increasingly sedentary people. In the words of Tom Freston, the former president and CEO of MTV Networks, “It’s as if the Rolling Stones went off to war.”

The story of Tinariwen sets the context for the birth of the festival itself.

The group’s lead singer, Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, a man who’s been shot and wounded 17 times, was just a small child in 1963 when his father was executed and his village destroyed by the Malian army. He grew up in refugee camps across the Sahara and made his first guitar out of a tin can, a stick and bicycle brake wire. He served as a conscript in the Libyan army under Colonel Muammar Qadaffi where he met his fellow band members, and they began writing songs about their homeland. 

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