Bombino sings in Tamasheq, and many of his lyrics highlight the Tuaregs’ profound connection with the desert, their ancestral home. The music itself mirrors the desert: The guitar pyrotechnics of his live show pay tribute to the Sahara’s powerful storms, and the loping rhythm of many of his songs echoes the odd meter of a camel’s gait. “An important thing to know is the desert is a very vast open space,” Bombino said. “Sound and music there carries a power with it, so you get the feeling when you’re holding an instrument in your hand and playing it, you’re completing a picture that was otherwise incomplete.”

In the mid- 1990s Bombino found work in Libya as a shepherd, spending long periods of solitude with just the sheep and his guitar. Hanging out with friends, he honed his technique by watching DVDs of two of his most fervent inspirations. He was mesmerized by the interplay of Dire Straits: “The kind of familial sort of exchanges they would have musically, it touched me in a profound way,” he said. And he was moved by the emotional playing of Hendrix. “Watching Jimi with his guitar is like watching a mother with her baby,” he said. “When the guitar is crying, he’ll calm it down. The sentimentality between him and his guitar is very powerful for me.”

Back in Agadez in his later teenage years, he began building a reputation as “the Hendrix of the Sahel” while working as a tour guide. In 2006, he chaperoned Angelina Jolie on a six-day journey through northern Niger, accompanied by her camera crew. “We went out to the desert,” Bombino said, “I would play, and she would dance.”

The country’s tourism industry is long gone now, a casualty of the second Tuareg rebellion in 2007. During the first Tuareg uprising, rebels had used concerts for recruitment, gathering people and inciting dissent; when the second revolt started, Tuareg music was considered rebel propaganda. To be labeled one of “les guitaristes” was dangerous; two of Bombino’s band mates disappeared and are assumed to have been executed by the Nigerien army.

Many of Bombino’s friends and colleagues were joining the rebellion, but he made the difficult decision to flee Niger again, this time for Burkina Faso. “I never saw the need to take up arms for the rebel cause, I always believed that there was a path out through music, so that’s why I decided to take my guitar and go,” Bombino explained.