Whisked away to the Sahara by Tinariwen

A November chill fell on drizzly Chinatown streets Wednesday, but inside the Trocadero, Saharan blues heated up the night.

Abdallah Ag Alhousseyni, one of the two frontmen for the transfixing Tuareg guitar band Tinariwen, wore a white Tagelmust head scarf as he stood center stage and offered the crowd a succinct greeting, with four of the handful of words spoken in English on this transporting evening: "Welcome to the desert."

For a decade, the members of Tinariwen have been the best known and most widely touring musical representatives of the Tuaregs, the African desert nomads who inspired the name of a Volkswagen SUV spelled with an added "o."

The six-man band's meditative and mesmerizing show - in support of the new album Tassilli, which features superfluous guest performance from members of TV on the Radio, Wilco, and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band - was its first-ever appearance in the 215 area code. For the occasion, Ag Alhousseyni added some new stage patter to go with "Merci beaucoup" and "It's OK?": "I'm happy in Philadelphee. It's nice."

The droning, modal quality of much of the great music from arid West Africa carries on a musical conversation across continents, with the Islamic desert blues speaking a language shared with, and shaped by, the sorrowful sounds of the Mississippi Delta.

Tinariwen's music - sung by Ag Alhousseyni and the band's Afroed elder statesman, Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, who was the only Tinariwenian to not wear a scarf - is performed in the native Tuareg language of Tamashek. So few, if any, members of the two-thirds-full house at the Troc could say what the patiently unfolding yet dramatically evocative songs that filled the 80-minute set were really about, though I'll take the word of the liner-note writers and ethno-musicologists who say they're statements of fierce rebel pride.

No matter. Lyrics are overrated anyway. Tinariwen gets its message of unyielding perseverance and dignified identity politics across with understated elegance. There's enough space in the arrangements to allow each note to reverberate, as the spidery guitar lines played by either Ag Alhouusseyni or Ag Alhabib, who were rarely on stage at the same time, hung in the night sky.

A left-handed, fleet-fingered electric bassist and one-chord-playing electric guitarist - each keeping to the back of the stage, their faces covered by black scarves - established the hypnotic rhythms. Those rhythms were enriched by a lone percussionist's hand drum accents, and a hand-clapping cherubic male dancer, who moved like a marionette and had more mysterious hand signals at his disposal than a third-base coach.

Unhurriedly, and with practiced skill and theatricality, the sextet moved the incantatory songs from a haunting starting place on an ever-intensifying journey to near-ecstatic release. Among other things, Tinariwen is a dance band, and makes music that makes you want to get up and move, just as the Tuaregs themselves have been doing, for centuries.