For those of you who love Desert Blues, that loping, hypnotic guitar music that we associate with the Tuareg and the Saharawis, consider this: The electric guitar has reshaped traditional Saharawi music, but the situation in the refugee camps grows more dire every day, with fewer and fewer guitars for young people to play, thus further endangering an already endangered cultural legacy.   
Got an electric guitar that is gathering dust somewhere?  Want to put it to truly good use? Check this out!

Okay, if you've gone to the URL above, you know that this is a great site.
It's maintained by my old friend Angel Romero, and it's a terrific resource for what is going on in world music, and as you can see, what is happening on many tangential levels.

This week we are airing a short profile of the band Tinariwen, and you can also see it here on our website. Usually we indicate the country that a band originates from, but Tinariwen are Tuareg (no, that's not just a car), a nomadic people who have been living in the Sahara for millennia. When you are watching these tall, swathed men playing their hypnotic rhythms, it is hard not to be carried off to an imagined, desert landscape. You can get some feeling for this in the live performance featured in the middle of the profile. The musicians have incorporated the electric guitar into their own tradition, creating a genre now called "Desert Blues." Since they came to prominence on the world music stage, there have been several others following suit. Oddly, all of them have names that start with a "t!" I invite you to write in and tell me who those bands are.