Bombino

Bombino is the stage name of Omara Moctar, a Tuareg singer-songwriter from Agadez, Niger, born in 1980. He also uses the given name Goumar Almoctar. He is a member of the Ifoghas tribe, part of the Kel Air Tuareg federation, and is raised in a Tuareg Muslim family. His upbringing takes place between the nomadic encampment at Tidene and Agadez, with his grandmother playing an important role in his childhood and education in Tuareg values.

Early life and musical beginnings

Bombino grows up in a large family of seventeen siblings, including half-brothers and half-sisters. After refusing school at first, he later attends a French-Arabic school but leaves after three years and returns to his grandmother. During the Tuareg unrest of the early 1990s, he leaves Niger with his father and grandmother for Algeria. There, relatives leave two guitars with the family for a time, and he teaches himself by copying the guitar lines he hears in ishoumar songs. He later receives a guitar from his uncle Rissa Ixa, a Tuareg painter, and begins lessons with Haja Bebe, the best guitarist in the Tuareg political party band, eventually joining that group.

Career in Niger and exile

Bombino becomes a working musician in Agadez, performing at rallies, weddings and other ceremonies. He also appears as an extra in the French film Imuhar: A Legend, filmed in the desert near Agadez. In 1996 he travels to Algeria and Libya, where he plays with local musicians and studies the guitar by watching performances and videos by artists such as Jimi Hendrix and Mark Knopfler. He also works as a herder near Tripoli while practising alone in the desert. Back in Niger, he plays with several local bands and records his first album with help from a Spanish documentary film crew; the album becomes a local hit on Agadez radio and establishes him as a regular performer for tourists and local audiences.

When the second Tuareg rebellion begins in 2007, Bombino joins the uprising and then goes into exile in Burkina Faso after two of his musicians are killed. In 2009 filmmaker Ron Wyman finds him in Ouagadougou and brings him to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to begin recording the album Agadez in his home studio. Wyman later completes the album and a related film in Agadez in January 2010. The project includes a concert for peace at the base of the Grand Mosque in Agadez, allowed by the sultan of Agadez and attended by more than a thousand people.

Collaborations and recordings

In 2006 Bombino tours California with the band Tidawt on a trip organised by a non-profit organisation. During that visit he records a desert blues version of the Rolling Stones song “Hey Negrita” with Keith Richards and Charlie Watts. The track appears on Stone’s World: The Rolling Stones Project Volume 2, an album organised by Rolling Stones saxophonist Tim Ries. In the same period he serves as a guide for Angelina Jolie during a visit to the Niger desert region, introducing her to Tuareg music and nomadic life.

Style and role in Tuareg music

Bombino is known for music that combines traditional Berber and Tuareg rhythms with rock energy, and for songs concerned with peace, identity and the situation of the Tuareg people. He speaks Tamasheq, Haoussa, French and Arabic fluently, and advocates education in those languages for Tuareg children. His work is closely tied to Tuareg political history, including the use of song in rebellion and community education. He is associated with the ishoumar tradition and with desert blues, blues, rock and singer-songwriter styles.