Womad

Bedouin Jerry Can Band

The desert blues - Sinai, not Sahara

Coming up over the dunes is the Bedouin Jerry Can Band, a multi-membered collective of musicians, poets, storytellers and coffee enthusiasts from Egypt's Sinai peninsula. Unlike those other desert dwellers Tinariwen, these self-styled "Stratocaster-free nomads" have never reached for the electric socket, but neither are they overly sentimental about exclusively deploying traditional instruments. After all, their name refers to their favoured percussive instruments - the unwanted jerry cans and ammunition boxes discarded by the Israeli army during its occupation of the Sinai desert 30+ years ago. Add to these the simsimiyya lyre, desert flutes, reed pipes and the rabab fiddle, and you have an ensemble sound that's both hard to resist and geographically specific, taking you on swift wings of song to the heart of the Sinai. As the good folk at Songlines magazine so neatly put it, prepare yourself for an experience that's both "electrifyingly rhythmic and enchantingly elegaic".

Biog by Nige Tassell