These two albums form a fine intro­duc­tion to a world of music which is now famil­iar to Euro­peans, but still hid­den from most lis­ten­ers in North Amer­ica. The Sahara Desert has often been com­pared to a sea ― blend­ing influ­ences and stim­u­lat­ing the dis­parate cul­tures along its shores. The sailors are the tribes of the desert: the Tuareg, the enig­matic Teda, and the var­i­ous “arab” tribes, such as the Ikoku Nema­di, Bithan, and She­wa (these last all speak vari­eties of Ara­bic incom­pre­hen­si­ble to stan­dard Ara­bic speak­ers, and even to the speak­ers of col­lo­quial Maghribi Ara­bic in Moroc­co or Alge­ria. Cul­tur­ally and bio­log­i­cally, they are of the Sahara, like the Tuareg, not mere­ly trans­planted badawī [ بدوي ] from Arabia.).

If you have read Frank Herbert’s Dune, you can get some notion of the Tuareg. The Fre­men tribes in that nov­el were pat­terned on them. They speak lan­guages in the Berber fam­ily, dim­ly relat­ed to Ancient Egypt­ian. “Berbers” refers to the seden­tary peo­ple who inhab­it ancient towns and cities of North Africa (St. Augus­tine was the most famous Berber), but the desert Tuareg are relat­ed to them lin­guis­ti­cally. Noth­ing can real­ly con­vey the stark sever­ity, and the poet­ry of life among the “peo­ple of the blue veil”, but you can get a hint of it from the band Tinari­wen, who aban­doned desert war­fare with the cease­fire at Tim­buktu to start a record­ing career in the late 1990’s. Oth­er Tuareg groups, Chet Féw­er, Kel Tin Lok­i­enne, and the Tar­tit Ensem­ble, are also present on the album. They rep­re­sent tribes far dis­tant from each oth­er. Some of the “Arab” tribes are present, as well. The towns on the shore of the sand are rep­re­sented by a vari­ety of groups and singers (Mal­ouma, Com­pag­nie Jel­louli, Sahraoui Bachir), and there is one singer in the Song­hai lan­guage from Tim­buktu, Seck­ou Maï­ga. The remote Teda of the Tibesti are not rep­re­sented ― a sad lack, because their evoca­tive “call and answer” odes, between female singers and male play­ers of the stringed keleli are haunt­ingly beau­ti­ful. But the Teda have not been drawn into the glob­al com­mu­nity in the way that the Tuareg have sud­denly been, and still remain inaccessible.

All this stuff is much more exot­ic than the Raï music and the Egypt­ian pop music on the Puta­mayo World Music col­lec­tion North African Groove. Dis­cos all over Europe have become filled with Raï’s won­der­ful back-beat-heavy com­bi­na­tion of tra­di­tional North African musics with Amer­i­can funk, sal­sa, French cabaret, and every­thing else imag­in­able. Super­stars such as Cheb Mami (singing the delight­ful “Viens Habibi”) and Khaled are rep­re­sented on this album, and it is a good intro­duc­tion to the North African pop scene.

If you lis­ten to these two albums one after the oth­er, you will get a sense of the intri­cacy and his­toric depth of this musi­cal land­scape. It would be like play­ing an archa­ic moun­tain dul­cimer bal­lad from West Vir­ginia, “Saint James Infir­mary”, “City of New Orleans”, Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven”, and a Hen­drix solo, one after another.