The concert is part of the collaboration Fasching X Selam
Tartit is one of the leading bands on the Tuareg music scene, and one of the few groups composed mainly of women. The band’s members come from the Timbuktu region of Mali but met in exile in a refugee camp in Mauritania, where their music became a way to survive the economic, social and political struggle in the region.
The band plays hypnotic desert blues, partly in the footsteps of Ali Farka Touré, but with more focus on the vocal cords. The female singers play the traditional one-stringed instrument imzad and tende, the drum made of goat skin stretched over a regular mortar. The compass of the male musicians on the West African lute ngoni and electric guitar.
In 1995, Tartit gave her first concert in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, and then played at the Festival of Women’s Voices in Liege, Belgium. The group has toured Europe and North America. They have performed with Ali Farka Touré and Afel Bocoum, with Tinariwen, Robert Plant, Oumou Sangaré and Baba Salah. They have also collaborated with an Irish singer Susan McKeown.
Five of the group’s female singers, accompanied by two guitarists, come to Fasching with music from their latest album, Amankor / The Exile, side by side with other more traditional songs from the band’s rich repertoire.
