Indie Vibes & World Tribes: music, film, travel and...

“Hendrix of the Desert:” don’t you just love that name they try to hang on Vieux Farka Toure’, son of Ali, son of Ishmael and Mariam?  Ye...

It’s horrible, of course, the war currently going on in Mali, the desecration of Sufi shrines in Timbuktu, and the disruption of...

What Ali Farka Toure’ accomplished with his Talking Timbuktu album with Ry Cooder, has been consolidated and spread like wildfire through ...

World music can be like a genome project sometimes, except here the DNA involved is an aspect of culture, not biology, and in this case mu...

Mali’s Tinariwen is one of only a handful of artists in the history of modern alternative popular music- The Beatles, Stones, Bowie and El...

It’s always been urban legend that handicapped people compensate for it in other ways, sharpening their other capabilities even to the poi...

I wouldn’t say anything as clichéd as “this is the life” or anything like that, both because it’s not that great here, and clichés are to...

Fortunately for me, Timbuktu is just a metaphor, right? It represents the ends of the Earth, right? We all knew that somehow somewhere ...

The Festival au Desert at Essakane , Mali , outside Timbuktu , is over now. I imagine it was good, but probably nothing like its early ye...

It’s almost like some Dylan song, except that Mobile probably ain’t that bad, nor Memphis that great, probably not that much difference real...