Amghar: The Godfather of Tuareg Music – Vol One

The style of Touareg guitar music known to the world as ‘desert blues’ and to the musicians themselves as assouf has some roots in the refugee camps in Libya where in the 1980s young Touareg men trained as rebel soldiers and expressed their desire for the liberation of their people in song.

The lead in developing this new style of rebel music was taken by two significant groups. The first was Tinariwen, from the Saharan territory that is today part of Mali. The other was Takrist Nakal, from the deserts of northern Niger.

While the Tinariwen story has been often told, far less familiar is the contribution of Takrist Nakal and, in particular, its founder Abdallah ag Oumbadougou. ‘He was part of the story, and maybe there’s not enough about him now in the history,’ Tinariwen founding member Ibrahim ag Alhabib notes. This set of 14 tracks recorded by Oumbadougou during ‘the first decade of the 21st century,’ just as Tinariwen was taking Touareg music to the outside world for the first time, seeks to correct the injustice.

Born in Niger in 1962, Oumbadougou fought with a Kalashnikov in the Touareg rebellion of the early 1990s and entertained his fellow fighters around the campfire with his guitar. His rebel songs circulated on cassette. His 1995 album Anou Malan was one of the earliest Touareg guitar recordings and made Oumbadougou a musical hero in Niger, where he went on to establish two music schools and inspired a younger generation of Touareg guitarists including Bombino and Mdou Moctar.

Half a dozen of the tracks included in this compilation have never previously been released. Others come from a series of albums that seem to have enjoyed little circulation outside Niger, although Oumbadougou did gain some global attention with the collective Desert Rebel, in which he was backed by members of Mano Negra and Gnawa Diffusion and with whom he recorded the 2006 album Culture Equitable. His final album Zozodinga appeared in 2012 and his last years were blighted by ill-health before his untimely death from a heart attack in 2020.

For the most part what we get here are essentially folk songs played on acoustic guitar, albeit with the now familiar, loping syncopated rhythm and call-and-response vocals. As such they’re a treat for those who love the acoustic interludes on Tinariwen’s albums and wish they would do it more often. For the rest ‘Afrikya’ and ‘He Ténéré’ are classic Touareg blues-rockers recorded live with full band and the studio cuts ‘Imidiwan’ and ‘Illilagh Teneré’ feature some scintillating electric guitar playing. Most intriguing of all, though, is ‘Iwouksane’, on which haunting Arabic strings would seem to open up an entire world of new possibilities for Touareg music which still await to be more fully explored.