On November 26th I went and saw Bombino, a young guitarist from Niger. The circumstances and consequences of that evening were remarkable, so please permit a little more narrative indulgence than is usually meet and seemly for a music blog.
Let’s start with the hardcore stuff, though. Bombino is a survivor of some serious political turmoil in his homeland, having been forced to flee the country (apparently more than once) for his ethnic and even musical affiliations. Apparently the guitar was so associated with rebellion against the regime that it was banned. So what we’re really talking about then, is rock n’ roll.
And indeed this was my impression of the music. As I mentioned to a friend standing next to me at the show, “it’s like surf-rock but without the water. Just sand”. We have a lead electric guitar with a standard backing rhythm-section (bass, drums, second guitar), taking cues simultaneously from Hendrix and Phrygian-like folk modes. The feeling is analogous to an English-speaker hearing another Latinate tongue: there are familiar elements, but it is still enigmatic, exotic.
The political implications of Bombino’s music are obvious but far too complicated to delve into here. I’m not going to claim to have any experience in West African politics, but I do suggest you check out the film “Agadez, the Music and the Rebellion” for some mo’ learnin’s on the subject of Bombino as cultural figure.
Anyway, the man can play. With a grin that betrayed his youth, Bombino blazed across his fretboard and through his set, compelling almost everybody to get down with their bad selves on the dance floor. It’s hard for a band to guide me to transcend my anxious, awkward white-boy self, but hot damn if I wasn’t cuttin’ a rug.
“World” music as a genre is impenetrable, golem-like to me in its austere hugeness. Bombino helped me break things down a bit though that night, and I am grateful. Genre distinctions may be the province of nerdy bloggers, but when I experience the music organically it defies description, and again and again I am simply floored. This is an old platitude: the holiness of the “live-in-concert”. Yet, it remains untarnished by the cliché. It’s just true, and it was especially true on that chilly November evening.
Now, what framed the concert is kind of interesting as well. By a number of crazy circumstances, my friends and I were invited to the show by none other than Win Butler and Régine Chassagne, the husband-and-wife masterminds of a band Arcade Fire, which you may or may not have heard of. To be honest, I’ve never really had the chance to give Arcade Fire an involved listen: they took off so fast it seemed as though they didn’t really need my fandom, and the few tracks I heard didn’t grab me the way other Montreal bands from that same time did. It’s been kind of a popular game to shit all over AF after the whole Grammy thing, because they’re total sell-outs man, or whatever. I, however, was really impressed by Win and Régine as people though, for whatever that’s worth. They made an effort to be conversational with me beyond the call of usual social grace, touchingly doing their best to negotiate whatever awkwardness fame necessarily injects into such a situation. They were decidedly not holier-than-thou, and they even went out for tacos with us afterwards at Nouveau Palais, and drove me home that night. Of course, I cannot claim to “know their soul” after such a brief encounter, but suffice to say that they seem like good folk and probably didn’t steal dude’s basketball after all.
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