Tinariwen

Tinariwen
Tinariwen performing in Nuremberg, 2010
Background information
Origin	Tessalit, Mali
Genres	Tishoumaren, world, blues, folk, rock
Years active	1979–present
Labels	Independiente, EMMA Productions, Tribal Union, Wayward Records, Outside Music, World Village Records
Website	www.tinariwen.com

Tinariwen (Tamasheq: ⵜⵏⵔⵓⵏ, with vowels ⵜⵉⵏⴰⵔⵉⵓⴻⵏ, pronounced tinariwen "deserts", plural of ténéré "desert") is a Grammy Award-winning group of Tuareg musicians from the Sahara Desert region of northern Mali. The band was formed in 1979 in Tamanrasset, Algeria, but returned to Mali after a cease-fire in the 1990s. The group first started to gain a following outside the Sahara region in 2001 with the release of The Radio Tisdas Sessions, and with performances at Festival au Désert in Mali and the Roskilde Festival in Denmark. Their popularity rose internationally with the release of the critically acclaimed Aman Iman in 2007. NPR calls the group "music's true rebels,"AllMusic deems the group's music "a grassroots voice of rebellion," and Slate calls the group "rock 'n' roll rebels whose rebellion, for once, wasn't just metaphorical."

Tinariwen was founded by Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, who at age four witnessed the execution of his father (a Tuareg rebel) during a 1963 uprising in Mali. As a child he saw a western film (The Fastest Guitar Alive) in which a cowboy (played by Roy Orbison) played a guitar with a gun. Ag Alhabib built his own guitar out of a tin can, a stick and bicycle brake wire. He started to play old Tuareg and modern Arabic pop tunes. Ag Alhabib first lived in Algeria in refugee camps near Bordj Badji Mokhtar and in the deserts around the southern city of Tamanrasset, where he received a guitar from a local Arab man. Later, he resided with other Tuareg exiles in Libya and Algeria.