The Cedar Presents
TINARIWEN with Lone Piñon
Saturday, August 3, 2024 / Doors: 7:00 PM / Show: 8:00PM
All Ages
Standing
❗SOLD OUT❗
This is a standing show with an open floor. To request seating or other access accommodations, please go to our Access Page.
General Admission tickets are available online.
LISTEN
ABOUT THIS SHOW
Last seen here in 2018, the Grammy award winning collective of Tuareg musicians from the Sahara Desert region of northern Mali and pioneers of desert blues - TINARWEN returns to The Cedar stage in celebration of our 35th Anniversary and the release of their ninth studio album, Amatssou.
Lyrically and thematically, the band explore the continuing political, social, humanitarian and environmental problems faced in their home country and continue their pledge to highlight the issues of the Tuareg people through their mesmeric music. Tackling the climate catastrophe and the ongoing conflicts that have dogged Mali since it gained independence in 1960, this free-spirited collective of exiles and former rebel fighters will light up our Cedar stage with their wonderful musicianship, soulful presence and prowess.
“Alghalam Tiglistarha, Arajghiyine, Tidjit, Anemouhagh” Full Performance (Live on KEXP). Video courtesy of KEXP’s Official Youtube Channel.
TINARIWEN
Tuareg nomads and cowboy drifters. Camel trains and mustang horses. The timeless horizon of the endless Sahara and the wild frontier of the Old West -and when the day is done, guitars around the campfire, singing songs of loss and longing and ‘home on therange’. Several thousand miles of ocean may divide the desert blues of Tinariwen and the authentic country music of rural America but the links are as palpable as they are romantic.
Despite a discography stretching out over two decades, restless international touring and recognition, as well as collaborations with a host of US and European musical pioneers, some things remain exactly the same: Tinariwen are still at their core a desert band, with only certain aspects that the Western music industry can ever hope to capture.
Their music has a remarkable timeless quality, with songs coming together as they would back in Mali, played late at night around the fire. Deep into the evening the musicians bring out their guitars, chat, recall old songs and just let the music come at its own pace. In those moments, the music rises like a shower of sparks and without premeditation, revealing stories of friendship, community, nature and a shared history.
To learn more about Tinariwen:
Lone Piñon
Lone Piñon is a New Mexican string band, or “orquesta típica”, whose music celebrates the integrity and diversity of their region's cultural roots. With fiddles, upright bass, guitars, accordions, vihuela, and bilingual vocals, they play a wide spectrum of the traditional music that is at home in New Mexico.
The Norte has long been a crossroads of cultures, and centuries of intersecting histories, trade routes, migrations, and cultural movements have endowed the region with an expansive and rich musical heritage that weaves together Spanish, Mexican, Indigenous, European immigrant, Anglo-American, and Afro-American musical influences. The oldest strands of this tradition have survived in continuity, renewed by each new generation’s contribution to core style and repertoire that has been passed from musician to musician, in some cases over many centuries. Though rapid cultural change since the ‘50s has led to these sounds becoming scarce in their home territory, they never fully disappeared--thanks to the elders and past generations that lovingly and tenaciously carried them forward, renewing the voice of their musical ancestors at each step into changing circumstances.
The musicians of Lone Piñon learned from elder musicians who instilled in them a respect for continuity and an example of the radicalism, creativity, and cross-cultural solidarity that has always been necessary for musical traditions to adapt and thrive in each generation. In 2014, Lone Piñon was founded as a platform for creativity around the oldest sounds of traditional New Mexico string music, sounds that had all but disappeared from daily life in many Northern New Mexico communities. Through relationships with elders, study of field recordings, connections to parallel traditional music and dance revitalization movements in the US and Mexico, and hundreds of local and national performances, they have brought the language of the New Mexico orquesta típica back onto the modern stage, back onto dance floors, into a contemporary aesthetic/artistic conversation, and into the ears of a young generation.
The musical landscape of Northern New Mexico bears the record of interconnecting musical movements that cross state, national, generational, and ethnic borders. Lone Piñon’s active and recorded repertoire reflects that complexity, and has included a wide range of regionally-relevant material (Western swing, conjunto, New Mexican Spanish and Mexican ranchera, Central Mexican son regional, country, onda chicana, etc.) around the core New Mexican violin and accordion-driven polkas, cunas, inditas, valses, and chotes learned from elders.
To learn more about Lone Piñon