REVIEW | Bombino
CONCERT
Bombino/Jeff Lang ★★★★
Chevron Festival Gardens | Review by Ray Purvis
Early last year Omara “Bombino” Moctar, the celebrated 35-year-old Tuareg desert blues singer, songwriter and guitarist, bypassed Perth to head directly down south to play at Busselton’s Southbound Festival.
He finally made it to town on Wednesday night when he brought his tight three-piece band to Festival Gardens to burn down the crowd with his hypnotic, hard-riffing electric grooves.
Dressed in a blue robe and looped white scarf, he launched into his set with three gently loping pieces that included Tar Hani from his first album, played on acoustic guitar and accompanied by electric bass, harmonica and two African hand drums.
But it wasn’t until he plugged in his electric guitar and the band locked into the first of the riffs that would evolve and deepen throughout the night that the sparks began to fly.
The Tuareg groove master’s songs are built around sturdy, deceptively simple riffs informed by the electric guitar licks of Jimi Hendrix and other western guitar heroes and rooted in African and Arabic traditions. Synchronised with the propulsive bass lines and rock-steady drumming his flights of soloing on songs such as the melodic Imuhar and the driving Amidinine were both meditative and feverish.
This was desert blues and western rock taken to another level.
Despite the language barrier — his songs about unity, love and cultural preservation are all sung in the Tamasheq language — his trance-inducing music has a universality that speaks volumes to any blues-rock or indie-rock devotees.
It takes on another dimension when you appreciate Bombino’s amazing journey from the war-torn zones of the Mali region of the Sahara to the concert halls of the world.
In no time, the mass of concertgoers at Festival Gardens on a humid, midweek night, were on their feet and pushed up against the front of the stage, weaving to and fro in time with the rolling, circular melodies and rhythms.
This was a performance full of energy and enthusiasm that easily surpassed his recorded output.
On a night full of outstanding guitar playing, blues-folk artist Jeff Lang opened the proceedings with an awesome display of lap steel guitar virtuosity.
He has long been a leading performer in the Australian roots music scene and his almost supernatural slide playing on the Weissenborn was an intriguing counterpoint to Bombino’s electric guitar soloing that was to follow.
The technical detail of Lang’s playing was remarkable — full of screaming notes and delicate trills.
He was inappropriately dressed in a three-piece suit and flat cap but he didn’t let that detract from a set that stretched from reverb-drenched Two Worlds, 12,000 Miles written with the late Chris Whitely, to comic I Want to Run But My Legs Won’t Stand.
No stranger to world music himself — having released the amazing African/Indian fusion albums Djan Djan and Maru Tarang — on Wednesday night he restricted his performance to his folk-blues repertoire.
The selection of songs was bookended by two murder ballads — the last of which was the chilling Running by the Rock about the 1980 disappearance of Azaria Chamberlain.
