Etran de L’Aïr

April 10, 2023

Take a trip to Agadez, the capital city of Saharan rock, with Arizona Arts Live and Best Life Presents as they welcome Etran de L’Aïr or “stars of the Aïr region.” Playing for over 25 years, Etran has emerged as stars of the local wedding circuit. Their sound invokes the desert metropolis and celebrates the sounds of all the dynamism of a hometown wedding.

Beloved for their dynamic repertoire of hypnotic solos and sun schlazed melodies, Etran stakes out a place for Agadez guitar music. 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 a 21+ event.

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