Sometimes an artist will reach out of the past to grab you, shake you free of your normal listening routine and wake you up to a much wider world. I remember back in the 80s when Paul Simon’s Graceland came out that my friends were over the moon at the discovery of Ladysmith Black Mambazo, which in turn led to discovering the rich desert blues of African artists like Ali Farka Touré, Fela Kuti, Tinariwen, and others. That discovery and exploration has exploded over the last few years, and when my friends turned me on to Abdallah Oumbadougou it was another gravity-defying moment. I would normally hesitate to put a compilation up in my list of the best albums of 2024, but AMGHAR – The Godfather of Tuareg Music, Vol.1 is so good, so fresh and intoxicating that I had no choice. As the first retrospective of Oumbadougou’s work, it’s an essential album for anyone looking to explore ishumar, the specific desert blues style that originated and proliferated in the Sahara.

Oumbadougou was only 62 when he passed away in 2020, has a beautiful, melodic tone in his playing, and his status as “The Godfather of Tuareg Music” is well founded, having been a key player in developing the ishumar sound while being exiled in Algeria and Libya. The highly political music was banned, and so became a nomadic tradition as those who practiced it moved from place to place. Hearing tracks like the gorgeous driving “Afrikya” and the groovy blues bending of opener “Illilagh Teneré” you can get a sense of that travel, of being on the move and letting the pulse of the percussion and the way the guitar syncopates the melody lines to give the sense of movement, of progressing to something new.

This sense of movement, of experiencing a very different world is encapsulated across each of the compilation’s 13 tracks, with some stretching back to the 1990s, all meticulously restored and remastered by Michael Graves. It sounds phenomenal, putting you squarely in the middle of the instruments, feeling every hit of the percussion and feeling the years in Oumbadougou’s delicately powerful voice. The vinyl has some additional unreleased tracks and detailed liner notes from Andy Morgan who captures Oumbadougou’s life and influences beautifully.

It’s hard for me to talk intelligently about Oumbadougou’s music. In many ways I’m still a neophyte to this, always enjoying and luxuriating in the sounds but never really diving deeper into the history, the other artists – both in music and other creative endeavors – who paint such a rich and vivid portrait of modern African life and experience. Listening to AMGHAR – The Godfather of Tuareg Music, Vol.1 is simply one more step in changing that. I’ll end on one more quick note that was vital to my love for this album: the translation of the lyrics, which allowed me to get even closer to the themes Oumbadougou drives to in his songs. So I’ll leave this entry with the lyrics to the southern-fried rock of “He Teneré” which comes from Oumbadougou’s Desert Rebel DVD from 2005:

I am in the Tenerê, land of Solitude
We live here among beasts
Accompanied only by our voices

Wild and defiant against injustice
We have been thirsting for justice for years
And now there is hope

The martyrs believer it and thanks to them we believe it even more
So many people crisscross the Teneré
Among them are revolutionaries and other people no one knows
So they are nothing to us