[beat]

My personal passion is the "desert blues" music that's mostly Tuareg. Start there with Tinariwen and Bombino. They're widely available in the West without much effort. They also tour heavily in the US, so keep your eye out for concerts!

From there, the Sahel Sounds label puts out a lot of obscure and interesting music on Bandcamp.

I can recommend two films as well. The first is "Akounak Tedalat Taha Tazoughai" (Rain the Color of Blue with a Little Red in It), which is a Tuareg remake of Purple Rain, the first fiction movie in the Tamashek language. The second is the documentary "They Will Have to Kill Us First", which is about Malian musicians living in refugee camps due to the civil war in northern Mali.

That documentary leads to the band Songhoy Blues, who are from the same area but Songhoy rather than Tuareg. They are young guys who met in a refugee camp, and managed to score a British record contract. Upon seeing them live, my spouse said it was like seeing a young Rolling Stones. Very accessible, compared to more raw music like Tinariwen.

There's a lot more, but this is a good start.

[trisomy21]

Great recommendations. Thanks for sharing!