Music

Tinariwen

Queen’s Hall

Edinburgh

Rob Adams

four stars

TEN years after his death, the pioneering Glasgow music promoter Billy Kelly’s presence can still be felt at many a concert. Kelly it was who introduced Scottish audiences to the desert sounds of the be-robed and head-dressed Tuareg minstrels Tinariwen and if the band has reduced in numbers since it made such an impression in the noughties – the female voices are a notable loss – it retains its ability to pull the listener under its rhythmical spell.

Few concessions, beyond the adoption of electric guitars alongside calabash percussion, have been made in Tinariwen’s drift into the world music mainstream. There’s little compositional development in their songs as western ears might identify it, beyond a dusty, parched vocal call and response, and there’s almost no build-up of tension and release. The groove merely arrives, stays awhile and then fades, and yet while it’s with us, its effect is nurturing, reassuring, like being bathed in a pleasantly warm beverage – cocoa, say, but without the sleepy connotations.

These grooves are more hypnotic, trancey, and as the band’s self-appointed choreographer illustrates, when not also playing guitar and singing, danceable. Often they’re comprised of interlocking fragments suggesting minimal blues licks that found their way from Africa to the Mississippi but there are also elements of proto-flamenco in acoustic guitarist Abdallah Ag Alhousseyni’s playing and his flatpicking wouldn’t sound out of place in a bluegrass hoedown or an Irish reel.

His superb solo introduction to the encore aside, the biggest cheer was given to the band’s founder, singer-guitarist Ibrahim Ag Alhabib whose cameo appearance and bruised vocals emphasised the strife and hardship behind music whose feelgood factor can override its people’s troubled history.