Hailing from Agadez, a city in Niger known for its style of African desert blues, Etran De L’Aïr was formed by nine-year-old Agahaly Migi in the mid ’90s. Quickly recruiting his brothers and cousins, their bright melodies – anchored by a trio of electric guitars – are a love letter to the rich culture of their city. Fluctuating between five and nine numbers depending on the performance, the intricate sounds of No. 1 – an album recorded entirely on a mobile phone – led The New Yorker to name the record as the best album of 2020, despite it being officially released two years prior.

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Toubouk Ine Chihoussay

Etran De L'Aïr

This Event is General Admission - Standing Room Only

Doors open at 7pm

Event starts at 8pm

Etran de L’Aïr (or “stars of the Aïr region”) welcomes you to Agadez, the capital city of Saharan rock. Playing for over 25 years, Etran has emerged as stars of the local wedding circuit. Beloved for their dynamic repertoire of hypnotic solos and sun schlazed melodies, Etran stakes out a place for Agadez guitar music. Playing a sound that invokes the desert metropolis, “Agadez” celebrates the sounds of all the dynamism of a hometown wedding.

Etran is a family band composed of brothers and cousins, all born and raised in the small neighborhood of Abalane, just in the shadow of the grand mosque. Sons of nomadic families that settled here in the 1970s fleeing the droughts, they all grew up in Agadez. The band was formed in 1995 when current band leader Moussa “Abindi” Ibra was only 9 years old. “We only had one acoustic guitar,” he explains, “and for percussion, we hit a calabash with a sandal.” Over the decades, the band painstakingly pieced together gear to form their band and built an audience by playing everywhere, for everyone. “It was difficult. We would walk to gigs by foot, lugging all our equipment, carrying a small PA and guitars on our backs, 25 kilometers into the bush, to play for free…there’s nowhere in Agadez we haven’t played.”

This is an all ages event

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