Beyond the borders of music and the world with Bombino

Jimi Hendrix meets Mark Knopfler in the Sahara. They hold a pact: merge two talents in one, as long as it is the master music, the desert blues. The rough push of Hendrix, the rapid and plus touch of Knopfler, the Tamashek language and hypnotic melodies. It looks like one of those dreams that become in the most arzigolated feverish delusions, but it is not. It is a Bombino concert.

Goumour Almoctar’s tour – aka Bombino, as a “child”the nickname that the guitarist Tuareg Haja Bebe gave him when he joined his band as a kid – He stops in Trento, just over a month after the date at the Temple of Venus and Rome, in the capital. On June 22 he plays in front of the Colosseum, on July 25, the splendid scenario offered by an unprecedented Cesare Battisti square is enjoyed: The back of the social theater opens and the historic gallery is illuminated behind Bombino. Next to the guitarist Nigerino climb Anass Almahamoud on stage on the bass, Mohamed Alhassan Kawissan on the rhythmic guitar and Corey Wilhelm, who before reaching the battery is positioned at the percussion for the acoustic debut of the concert. In hindsight, it is understood that this short initial parenthesis is more than anything else a heating session to deal with what will come later: a torrential and fiery performance.

The band – dressed in traditional Berber clothes – soon turns into a rock quartet that gives a completely new guise to the songs recorded in the studio. The songs merge and transform into long jam session that highlight extraordinary improvisation skills. The ease with which you go from Riff Blues to psychedelic melodies is so natural that the boundaries between genres become a mere formality from academic manual. In the world of Bombino the boundaries do not exist, in all senses. Like George Harrison and Sting were overwhelmed by the charm of other cultures (especially Indian and Arab), Almoctar looks at the music from the opposite perspective: It undergoes the charm of western rock and integrates it to the sounds of one’s land, without distorting either one or others.

Those who start as solos of pure virtuosity result in increasingly faster vortices, increasingly pressing rides, which closely remember the shamanic dances. A moment before you have Riff from Woodstock in your ears, the next moment you are among the desert caravans. If the frenzy with which he moves his fingers between the leader and the bridge is impressiveis equally the psychophysical trance in which Wilhelm enters to be able to keep up with the battery. Martella like a damned on the drums and the heart of the rhythmic section pulsates with a power to make the wrists tremble, enhancing the qualities of the one who is no coincidence that he is the first Niger artist in history to be appointed to the Grammy.

A few minutes to breathe, the only ones in which the guitarist turns to the public. “Peace is fundamental, we people of the desert know it. “Although his political expression is not so marked, he is often underlying his texts the desire for freedom and protection of his identity, that is, of the Tuareg culture. And the choice not to bend to universal English to assert itself musically is already a more than sufficient test. To appreciate the cultural and social messages of which the Bombino texts are made a vehicle, an effort to translation, discovery and empathy is required to which we Westerners are too little used to. Of course, you can enjoy its inspiration even “only” admiring what her fingers manage to release from the guitar, but it would mean appreciating it in half.

In addition to the use of pentatonic and blues scale typical of subsaharan music, in addition to what it affectionately defines as “” Tuareggae “, there is desire, the need to be recognized in a too Eurocentric mappamondo. Although the desert groove can enter the heart, the most beautiful gift that takes home from a Bombino concert is another: the cultural slap that comes when you realize that you are trapped in too partially, music and the world. Stevie Wonder invited him with him on stage in 2011. Keith Richards asked him to record Stones “Hey Negrita”. Robert Plant wanted him with him on tour. Over the years the sultan of the six ropes has managed to hit the greatest masters. Let’s find ourselves ready too.