Bombino

Exile and a guitar

Omara Moctar was born in 1980 in Tidene, a Tuareg encampment north-east of Agadez in Niger, one of seventeen children, and largely raised by his grandmother. When the first Tuareg rebellion began in 1990 the family fled to Algeria, where relatives left a guitar behind and he taught himself. Back in Agadez he joined the band of the guitarist Haja Bebe, where as the youngest player he was called bambino, the Italian for little child. He kept the name, slightly altered.

In the late 1990s he travelled in Algeria and Libya, working as a musician and herder, and studied videos of Jimi Hendrix and Mark Knopfler; he also learned from pirated cassettes of Ali Farka Toure and Dire Straits. He returned to Agadez in 1997 and turned professional. He sings in Tamasheq, the Tuareg language, and speaks Hausa, French and Arabic as well.

Rebellion

In 2004, working as a desert guide, he played evening sessions at Agamgam in the Tenere for a Spanish film crew; the two days of recordings later came out as Agamgam 2004. In 2007 Hisham Mayet of Sublime Frequencies recorded his electric band at a wedding in Agadez for Guitars from Agadez Vol. 2. That year the second Tuareg rebellion began. The government banned the guitar among the Tuareg as a symbol of revolt, two of his musicians were killed, and he went into exile in Burkina Faso.

The filmmaker Ron Wyman found him in Ouagadougou and brought him to Cambridge, Massachusetts to record. In January 2010, with the Sultan's blessing, he returned to play a peace concert at the foot of the Grand Mosque in Agadez before more than a thousand people, the climax of Wyman's documentary Agadez, the Music and the Rebellion. Agadez, the album, came out in 2011 and went to the top of the iTunes world chart.

Nashville and after

Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys saw clips of the Agadez concert and invited him to Nashville. Auerbach said that where Ali Farka Toure was behind the beat, Bombino pushed it forward, with almost a punk rock energy. Nomad (2013), recorded at Auerbach's Easy Eye Sound, went to number one on the Billboard world albums chart; Rolling Stone said it introduced a new guitar hero and NPR called it a landmark in African rock music. He toured America that year, from Bonnaroo and Newport Folk to an NPR Tiny Desk concert, and opened for Robert Plant.

Azel (2016), produced by David Longstreth of Dirty Projectors in Woodstock, brought in a reggae lilt he called Tuareggae. For Deran (2018) he went back to Africa, recording in Casablanca at a studio owned by the King of Morocco. It was nominated for the Grammy for best world music album, the first nomination for a musician from Niger. His rhythm guitarist and singer Illias Mohamed died in 2020, and Live in Amsterdam, recorded the year before, is dedicated to him. Sahel, produced by David Wrench, followed in 2023.

Standing

The New York Times called him the Sultan of Shred, and NPR's Banning Eyre one of the most in-demand African musicians around. He still tours Europe and North America most years. Of the road, he told RFI in 2025 that the Tuareg say travel is the best school in the world.