Bombino Announces New Album & Tour

Nigerian musician Bombino has announced the upcoming release of a new album entitled Azel on April 1 via Partisan Records. In addition to revealing the new LP, Omara Moctar also confirmed a tour in support of the record.

Bombino enlisted the help of Dirty Projectors frontman Dave Longstreth to produce Azel which was recorded over 10 days at the pastoral Applehead Studio in Woodstock, New York. Shot at Applehead, video for the album’s first single, “Inar” can be seen below:

Longstreth shared the following regarding Azel:

Back in 2009, somebody gave me a dusty old iPod with a bunch of music from somebody called Omara Bombino Moctar on it. It was an amazing collection of songs, half of them electric and the other acoustic, like Zep III and Bringing It All Back Home. The electric parts were so ecstatically ragged and feverishly modal that it felt like an exorcism; the guitar amp sounded like a blown-out Peavey cab that somebody had knifed. The acoustic parts were so delicately reflective and luminescent that they felt like stargazing. I was intrigued by this range, and more than that, I was intrigued by what this guitar seemed to be saying. The tone, alternately strident and melancholic, poetic and acrobatic and sometimes almost witty, was suffused with a point of view: longing and hope in a tug-of-war.

I finally met Bombino last fall, walking into the sprawling barn studio in upstate New York where we’d record Bombino’s third studio album, Azel. There he was, relaxing on the couch, conversing in Tamasheq with his bandmates behind a barely perceptible smile. He was wearing a blue bubu, the traditional Tuareg formal attire, and bobbing his head along to the playback from studio’s stately Genelecs. Though he speaks Tamasheq, Arabic and French, he rarely speaks at all. Instead, he plays the guitar.

And play, by Jove, he does. Bombino rarely does more than one or two takes, because he doesn’t need to. I’ve seen him lay down a six-minute acoustic improvisation, and then double-track it instantly and flawlessly, with no punches. His playing is effortless, endless. His playing is technical — virtuoso is the right word — but the technique isn’t what you notice about it: what you notice is the feeling, and the tone. It feels punk that way.

According to his bandmate and friend Koutana, who plays percussion and sings backup in Bombino’s five-piece band, the sound of the guitar arrived in Tuareg lands in Niger and Mali from an Algerian refugee camp, via a revolutionary cassette in 1982. Koutana, who was there, says that that cassette sent shock waves through the Tuareg communities, that both the raw sound of the guitar, and its status as a political change agent — allied with messages of revolution and self-determination — made a strong impact on the nomadic Tuareg. Soon electric guitars started showing up in the desert. The Tuareg adapted the centuries-old techniques they had developed on the ngoni, a traditional lute, and the imzad, a one-stringed bowed instrument, to the amplified electric guitars. They crossed them with the sounds of the American and British bands they had heard and loved: Led Zeppelin, Carlos Santana, Jimi Hendrix, Dire Straits. A new Tuareg tradition — Tichumaren, the desert blues — emerged.

Tichumaren, like the blues or the Portuguese fado, is as much a feeling as it is a distinct musical style. Koutana translates for me some of the lyrics of Naqqim Dagh Timshar, the album’s closing track and its emotional keystone:

• We sit in an abandoned place
• Everyone has left us
• The world has evolved
• And we’ve been abandoned.

• The whole world has evolved—
• Why haven’t we?

It’s in Tamasheq, of course, but you don’t need a translation to understand what Bombino’s singing about.

In support of Azel Bombino and his band will tour North America starting on March 22 at the Horseshoe Tavern in Toronto and continuing through April 30 when they play the Imperial Theatre in Vancouver, Canada. The band then heads to Europe for a handful of shows in May and June.