L'Orchestre National Mauritanien
Radio Martiko (68 mins)
A never-before-released record of a once-famous, almost-forgotten group who were the progenitors of their very own style: this album is a crate-digger’s dream. It’s also a record that might even rewrite music history – label Radio Martiko announces that it ‘mark[s] the birth of the genre that is known in the West as Desert Blues.’
Ahl Nana were some of the first stars of modern music in Mauritania in the 1960s and 70s – a family band from the country’s Arab-Berber population, their music combined traditional Berber styles with modern sensibilities and cosmopolitan influences from across the trans-Saharan trade route. To add to the novelty, they substituted traditional instruments for Western ones: the one-string rababa fiddle became a violin, and the tidinit lute sat alongside electric guitar, with a conga-type drum and tambourine standing in for the tbal (kettle drum) and daghumma (rattle). The songs composed by the group’s violinist, leader and matriarch Debya mint Soueid Bouh became known across the Sahara.
Despite the group’s success, their performances remained the domain of concerts and radio sessions, rather than commercial records. A royal invitation to Morocco finally persuaded the group into the studio in Casablanca in 1971; they had fun, but that was the last they heard of the recordings. Records were pressed but never sold, and the Nana family never even saw a copy until Radio Martiko found some in a Moroccan backroom and arranged this reissue – it’s lucky for us that these recordings are finally reaching ears.
It might be cliché, but this music really does echo the Saharan environment: the guitar is distorted as if its amp is covered in grit, and the heterophonic melodies of the voices, violin and guitar jangle like howling winds. The performances sound informal, as if occurring in a family living room, which gives everything an enjoyable looseness and allows the songs to be expanded up to the ten-minute mark. And yes, sometimes it does sound really bluesy – some of the tracks could definitely host a harmonica solo without anything sounding out of place – but there are surprises, too: the album’s opener is a version of the Bollywood classic ‘Aajkal Tere Mere Pyar Ke Charche’, sung in the original Hindi with a distinctive Saharan edge to its rhythms. The broad international influences, the combination of traditional and contemporary, the radiant cool of it all and the high-quality recording all add up to an album that sounds much more modern than its 1971 creation.
So what about the claim that this is the birth of the ‘desert blues’? Well, that awkward term is always an imposition from a Western perspective – it’s a label that encompasses many different styles from many different cultures, only linked by a passing similarity to the American-born blues. Asking whether something is or is not desert blues is usually the wrong question. Nevertheless, Ahl Nana’s music does seem to have deep resonations throughout Saharan culture. In a fascinating interview included in the album’s sleeve notes, singer Mouna mint Nana mentions that her family’s success influenced other groups to make music that was not only modern and international, but indelibly Mauritanian as well, an aesthetic that spread out across the Sahara. Important and hugely popular musicians such as Tinariwen and Youssou N’Dour took Ahl Nana’s songs into their repertoire, and their own impact has reached around the world.
In the end, issues of rarity and questions of historical impact are all secondary to the music itself. And this music is lovely, made at a crossroads between cultures and between tradition and modernity, and throwing up a unique and sometimes surprising sound that is deeply Saharan. This reissue is an honour to the legacy of Debya mint Soueid Bouh and her family.