Two Borders, One Dream (Deux Rives Un Reve)

Idir has for 20+ years been the griot bringing news from behind the Arabic Curtain of what has become of glorious Algeria since the revolution that banished the French colonialists got hijacked by the Nasserist Wave that swept across multi-tribal Tamazgha. Tamazgha is the native name for "Maghreb" or "North Africa" and means in the suppressed Tamazight language "Land of Free Peoples." Tamazight language regional dialects (Taqbaylith in Kabylia,Algeria where Idir is from) are the mother tongue for some 30 million sub rosa native North Africans yet to be able to study their language in school or use it in open official public life.

This import is an earlier French edition of Idir's collection and opens with one new song, a French language collaboration with Jean Jacques (J.J.) Goldman written in the wake of the November 2001 flood and mudslides that claimed over 800 lives. For critical weeks after this catastrophe the Algerian regime of U.S. and French-backed Generals as well as their sponsors in the Arab League, were nowhere to be found with any kind of humanitarian relief effort. The poetic song named "Pourquoi cette pluie?" honors all the victims of the natural disaster and unnatural silence that followed a 'National Prayer for Rain,' ironically led on state television and radio by President Abdelazziz Bouteflika in his pre-deluge bid to appease the Islamist insurgency that annually rampages across the Mitidja Plain during the holy month of Ramadan. On the new English-booklet edition this new Idir recording ends his career retrospective.

The other French song that was included in France's edition of this otherwise all-Tamazight (suppressed Berber language) lyrical wreath is a lame number by France's old chansonmeister, Georges Brassens, named "Trompettes." And boy did a trumpetard really foul the air on that rare lapse of good taste by Idir. Thankfully Brassens' Gallic ditty has been dropped from the current English-booklet edition. Substituted in its stead is a truly vital song from early in Idir's career. The replacement song is "Tuaregs" wherein Idir calls out the Euro travel agencies and tourist industries of the colonially-backed corrupt regimes, whose wintry Northern European dreary walls are lined with bright tourista & faux exotica posters of Kel Tamasheq.

Idir turns his Tamazight phrases with the wry irony of a survivor of genocides, who has witnessed and is witnessing regeneration of an ancient Afro-Mediterranean culture that spent the 20th Century having its classical identity overlaid by Gas & Oil lines across their Saharan homeland, charted on 19th century maps by its native name of Azouad, or The Hot Place (now overlapping the lines drawn in the sand and labelled Algeria, Morocco, Mali, Mauritania and Niger).

Idir sings of these Tamasheqt-speaking Imazighen (plural of Amazigh) as the Free Peoples. That is the way this wandering sub-set of Amazigh people prefer to call themselves and to be known, rather than the 'Touareg' name they were tagged with at the time of the Islamic Conquest, when invading Arabs used an old pre-literate Arabic phrase "Targiyya" referring to those "Abandoned by the Gods" to describe the linguistically and culturally mysterious Saharan nomads who possessed their own written script, now banned across Libya, named Tifinagh.

Other highlights of both the French and newer English-translated lyric summary-filled booklet editions include Idir's vocal collaborations with co-writers Brahim Izri (think John Turturro as a native North African poet & balladeer) and Maxime LeForestier on "Tizi Ouzou/San Francisco." This majestic, if, painfully melancholy anthem looks back at what Utopian idealism wrought in Kabylia's grand Atlas Mountain capital of Tamazgha once the bloom faded on the Che Guevarra-inspired 1960's. For native Algerian Imazighen (Berbers) that was actually the beginning of an ethnic cleansing campaign targeting all none Arabo-Islamists as a threat to Algeria's national unity. The melody on "Tizi Ouzou" is at once ancient in its echo, yet as emblematic of the struggle of the revolutionary Imazighen to build a free and egalitarian Algeria as any Nuevo Cancion tribal melody turned into folk anthem by Chile's martyred songwriter laureate Victor Jara.

The version of Mohammed Ben Hammdouche & Idir's biggest World Music hit "A Vava Inouva/Hey Little Daddy" found in the English-booklet edition is the original, a tender Tamazight duet with the gamine Mila. It is not the remake "A Vava Inouva 2" that appeared on his IDENTITIES CD and then this French-booklet version featuring a sweeping Gaelic duet with Celtic Capercaillie singer Karen Matheson. Other Breizh-Celtic-Kabylie collaborations found here include "Isaltiyen/The Celts" with Dan Ar Braz, Alan Stivell, and Gilles Servat. The intimate and irrepressible acoustic guitar fingerpicking by Idir on the original "A Vava Inouva" is then followed on the newer English-booklet edition by the tune that it stormed into on his original album. "Isephra/Journey" is swept along by the amazing Kabylian percussionist Rabah Khalfa twinned with drummers A. Ceccarelli and Arezki Broudi curled into an electric bass line by Hachemi Bellali that could be Jaco Pastorious if you close your eyes and ressurect him in your aural imagination. Again Mila delivers a sensuous countermelody in her vocal harmony that swells lovely as the Beach Boys surfing through the Straits of Gibraltar. This track too is NOT found on the French-booklet edition of Idir's retrospective titled DEUX REVE, UNE RIVE, and makes an excellent case in and of itself for choosing the newer English-booklet edition now titled TWO BORDERS, ONE DREAM (though more poetically delivered as TWO SHORES, ONE STREAMING DREAM).