Rough Guide to the Music of the Sahara

The rich river of talent flowing from beneath the sands of West Africa has rather hijacked our perception of music from the Sahara in recent years. But, as the liner notes remind us, the Sahara is ‘almost as big as the USA’ and spans an area that stretches from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea. It has a diversity of cultures and traditions to match. The distinctive, snaking desert blues of the Touareg and Wodabe peoples is well represented by four tracks from the extended family around Niger's Etran Finatawa – three of them previously unreleased. Samba Touré and Anansy Cissé represent the Songhai blues tradition that Ali Farka Touré made famous. Mauritania's Moudou Ould Mattalla and Libya's Touareg de Fewet offer further earthy variants of the now familiar desert blues template, and the soulful voice of the Saharawi singer Mariem Hassan confirms why her album El Ajun Egdat went to number one in the WMCE (World Music Charts Europe) in 2012.

Although there's plenty of cultural diversity between these artists, there is also a sonic cohesion. The same isn’t necessarily true when we travel to the eastern Sahara for tracks by Sudan's Abdel Gadir Salim and Emmanuel Jal. The Nubian/Egyptian sounds of Ali Hassan Kuban, Salamat and Mahmoud Fadl sound as if they come from a quite different world. Separated by three and a half million square miles of sand, in a sense they do, and the contrast they offer is more than welcome. There is also a bonus disc from Mamane Barka.