Libye: Musiques du Sahara (2001)
8 tracks, 57 minutes
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Tuareg guitar music is great – and you know that already, seeing as we’ve already covered Tinariwen (twice) and Kel Assouf on this blog. Those groups took the pentatonic melodies and loping rhythms of traditional Tuareg music and mixed them with the heavy riffs of rock and reggae to create the unique and, as it turns out, world-beating genre essouf. That’s what you get when a whole generation of Tuareg musicians from northern Mali get obsessed with guitar music. But what if those Tuareg musicians were from elsewhere, and their musical tastes skewed in a different direction?
Enter Chet Féwet, a group from the Fezzan region of south-western Libya. They are Tuaregs, and they play traditional music with a regional twist, but they don’t use the tehardent lute, the imzad fiddles or the tende drums, or even guitars and djembe drum. They’re in Libya: their instruments of choice are the oud, the darbuka and the krakeb. It’s a really uncanny sound: the bare bones of the music is very recognisable as the Tuareg sound, the songs and the oh-so-bluesy tunes and the slightly camel-loped groove, but then everything else is different. The instruments lend themselves to different elaborations on the melodies, and so it sounds more Arabic just from being played on the oud, and the rhythms of the darbuka and krakebs pull in both east and west directions respectively.
I find this album so interesting. It’s like listening to an alternative universe version of a type of music that is so well-known – you feel as if you know it but it’s totally new at the same time. Add in the fact that so little Libyan music is heard outside the country itself – I think I only know of one other Libyan musician, the pop singer Ahmed Fakroun – and this disc offers up so many unexpected delights for the ears and the mind. It makes me wonder what other alternate musical histories that culture clashes around the world have thrown up – things like Uyghur psychedelic folk electric guitarist Ekhmetjan or the 100% Bollywood of Kenyan Swahili singer Juma Bhalo - and all of those doubtless myriad fascinating musical coincidences that I’ve never heard and may never still. What a wonderful world of music we live in.
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