The appearance of the musician Mdou Moctar on the Alavés campus of the UPV/EHU had a long journey, apparently, on Wednesday. From her native land, Abalak (Niger), on the southern shore of the Sahara, the caravan that once crossed the desert came through the Sahel. Today, there are many Africans who want to come to Europe to cross the Sahara.

He has come a long way and his music as well. Tamax sings in the language about love, education, peace and Islam. In the 2000s, he recorded his songs for the first time, going to Nigeria, and that work would be called Tahoultine. However, instead of selling the album, as is usual in the Sahel, their songs spread through mobile phones and SD cards, and they have come to our ears as one of the most successful musicians in the area, along with Tinariw, Bombino and Tamikers.

The two guitarists of the band joined the stage with the clothing of their town, Tuarega da Mdou, and the battery joined the Western fashion suit. Completing the trio, they performed songs from the four collections that have been edited. All songs very similar in their structure: from playing with the guitar until someone realizes, they had already built the backbone of the song; from time to time, most of the time, making melodies with the guitar; the members of the group, for their part, made a simple and elegant accompaniment of the soloist.

Moctar realized that the left played the guitar, which had a great instrumental talent: most of the time with melodic and calm, sometimes with pride and nervousness for the speed of Yngwie Malmsteen throughout the concert. With humble gesture, looking at the viewers from the bottom to the top, he said only one word to Thank You Mercis, who was there.

Songs have a kind of mantra that, most of all, gets the rhythm and melodies that repeat over and over again, and you can dance the stiffer waistband. But there was no dance session until Wednesday.

A sticker with the Sahara Rock glued to your guitar. That's how they've defined this style, or the Sahel Rock. I dare not do so. I think it is exaggerated to try to define with one name all the music of a territory that is two or three times Europe.

They say that on one occasion they gave an old American bluesman a song by the Malian musician Ali Farka Toure that seemed to him a blues earlier than his. They called him African Blues, forgetting the path of slavery. The navel of so-called “first worlds” is greater than Sahara itself.