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Africa & Middle East > Morocco > Marrakech > Marrakech > Music > Articles > North African Music

North African Music

by Mark Hudson

At two-thirty precisely, the lights go down, a trio of drummers set up a loping beat for a searing rustic violin, and a large man in a white gown and a demure-looking, rather pretty woman take the stage

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A woman, not three feet away, is going into a trance - stamping heavily, her torso rocking to the rhythm of iron clappers and a booming bass lute. As she collapses to her hands and knees, the clapping and the surging anthemic singing fall away, and there’s just the sub-bass thrumming of the lute, twisting through what sounds like some far-out modern jazz solo, as though the instrument were somehow conducting and controlling the woman’s trance. She begins to shudder and moan, and people rush to pull her from the room.

We’re in a village outside Marrakesh, and this is the music of the Gnawa - the descendants of black slaves, who are called upon all over Morocco, to purify houses after death and to cast evil spirits from the mentally ill.

Western artists as diverse as ‘Sheltering Sky’ author Paul Bowles, left-field New York producer Bill Laswell and jazzmen Randy Weston and Pharoah Sanders, have looked to Gnawa as a means of entering dark and elemental realms. At a time when the concept of ‘trance’ is endlessly and glibly invoked in relation to Western dance sounds, Gnawa music can prove an unnervingly intense experience, even through your domestic CD player.

I’m here with U-Cef, a London-based Moroccan drummer and deejay, at a lilla, a ceremony for the propitiation of the spirits, on the occasion of the Prophet’s birthday. The overhead lighting in the turquoise-painted room is muted by incense smoke, the women seated round the walls adding syncopated clapping and their own fervent nasal singing as the musicians take it in turns to dance, leaping and whirling with a great stave strung with cowries, which keeps whizzing inches from my face.

Long before India and the hippy trail, Morocco provided a springboard into the exotic right on Europe’s doorstep. As Westerners from Cecil Beaton and Joe Orton to William Burroughs and the Rolling Stones came here in search of easy drugs and risky sex, so Moroccan sounds fed into Western pop. Brian Jones’s legendary recordings of the wailing oboes of the Master Musicians of Jajouka, a Berber village in the Rif mountains, were a World Music album decades before the event, while Led Zeppelin’s Page and Plant have been blending Moroccan strings with hard rock since the seventies.

Over the last year or so, there’s been a revival of interest in the region. Rai, the explosive Algerian dance music, whose digitalised rhythms, strident neo-Islamic vocals and message of youthful rebellion dominate the North African scene from the émigré communities of Paris and Marseilles to the depths of the Sahara, has excited Western listeners and musicians since the mid-eighties. The top stars have recently pushed through to a wider audience, with the charismatic Khaled’s million-selling ‘Aicha’, and his rival Cheb Mami performing on Sting’s ‘Desert Rose’.

But the current wave of Western interest considers the region from a much broader perspective: looking at the myriad styles that fed into rai - Jewish crooners and cantors, Arabic country blues divas and the classical music of Moorish Andalusia - and at even older traditions, rooted in the semi-pantheistic culture of the indigenous Berber people, which blend remarkably easily with Western dance music.

“You can put Moroccan rhythms with anything - drum’n’bass, speed garage, house - and it works,” says U-Cef, who has made his own intriguing fusion of Moroccan sounds and cutting-edge London grooves, and who appears at the Barbican Centre as part of the ‘African Roots and Shoots’ season. “Most Moroccan rhythms are loops - just like the digital loops we use in dance music. They just run into each, round and round, to take you to an ecstatic high.”

We find evidence of this later in our journey, in Casablanca, Morocco’s biggest city and the capital of its music industry. Created by the French, the downtown area with its pavement cafes and art deco apartment blocks gives an impression of burgeoning affluence and buzzing commercial activity. But turning off the palm-lined boulevards, you step into an unsanitary backstreet world that combines medieval street commerce with a very modern sense of unease. Tough-looking kids sprawl on parked cars, people stumble past - out-of-it on a lot more than the local kif .

By a hole-in-the-wall autospares outlet we meet Morocco’s leading rap outfit, a couple of amiable youths in baseball caps, who are keen to chat with us in a high-fiving Bronx-English. You would assume they were desperate to jettison the last vestiges of their own culture, yet they call their group Dar Gnawa - the House of Gnawa - and they use gnawa rhythms to underpin their Arabic rapping.

“Gnawa music is something we’ve grown up with,” says one of them, Naima. “It comes from black Africa, but it’s something that every Moroccan, whether rich or poor, can relate to - deep down. So we’re telling the world that we’re Moroccan - and we’re also African.”

The railway into Casablanca is lined with mile after mile of earth and corrugated iron shanties. The city’s rapid and chaotic growth has given rise to extraordinary musical forms like chaabi, a politicised urban folk that greatly influenced Algerian rai. But dropping in on a middle class dinner party, we’re assured there’s nothing musically interesting happening in the city - the young people only want techno and Whitney Houston… Unless of course we count cheikhat.

The cheikhat - ‘ladies’ - are a traditional sub-culture of female entertainers, who in the transposition to the urban world have become inextricably associated with low-life. Like the Algerian folk diva Cheikha Remitti, the so-called old Grandmother of Rai, the cheikhat smoke, drink and sing about sex in the frankest terms… But to hear this music you have to be prepared to stay up late.

Along Casablanca’s mist-laden corniches are any number of dodgy, over-priced ‘Oriental Cabaret’ joints, with vomit swilling on the toilet floors and rowdy young hookers shaking their mini-skirted loins on stage. We try several, all with the same line-up of pan-Arab synthesizer band, Egyptian-style crooners and a spot of belly dancing - and all at brain-splitting volume. We won’t find anything of the remotest integrity here.

Then at two-thirty precisely, the lights go down, a trio of drummers set up a loping beat for a searing rustic violin, and a large man in a white gown and a demure-looking, rather pretty woman take the stage. Demure-looking until she starts singing - bellowing into the microphone as though she’s got a grudge against it, alternating Islamic-sounding exhortations and sexual grunting, in a rasping whiskey growl, while the man responds in a hoarse woman’s wail.

We’ve not only found one of the roots of rai, but a phenomenon that tells the story of much of the world’s most exciting music - of the collision of traditional styles in the melting pot of the big city. But rather than being commercialised and digitalised for the world market, cheikhat has remained an underground people’s music.

After two numbers, the club suddenly closes. As the punters stagger for the doors, I try to interview the singers. But he isn’t interested and she seems distracted - to say the least. What, I wonder, do her family make of her singing this kind of music? She shrugs. She’s putting two children through university - and she leans to whisper in U-Cef’s ear. “You have to give her another hundred dirhams,” he says.

Back at the Gnawa ceremony outside Marrekesh, it’s time to eat. As we seat ourselves with the other men round a great tagine of lamb and olives, an old woman goes into trance, her son cradling her, as her frail body is shaken by violent spasms. She’s part of the family who have called the event. Is it for her benefit - to drive out some malignant spirit? Or are we here for that robust-looking woman in her thirties, in the headscarf and the surprisingly fashionable glasses - the one who was the first to go into trance? No one has told us, and it doesn’t seem polite to ask.

We came here by a circuitous route, with two members of B’Net Houariyet, a Berber’s women’s group, whose raw and powerful music was one of the hits of the 1998 WOMAD festival, and who U-Cef and I both greatly admire. Amina - lively and in her late thirties - and Fatma - ample, with henna-stained hands - are both extremely warm and friendly. But they don’t look like the women I saw at WOMAD. Are they the same group? “Of course,” says U-Cef. He’s sure? He shrugs. “Pretty sure.”

I feel a shiver of excitement as Amina, Fatma and their friends begin beating on drums, tambourines and what looks like a steel hub-cap, their throaty exultant voices falling into an endless re-echoing round. Whether or not these are the women I saw at WOMAD, the music has the same blood-stirring rawness, the same Homeric sense of grounding in ancient rock and earth. As women perform hip-twitching dances back and forth across the room, U-Cef learns that these are not the women who went to Angleterre, but the ones who went to Belgique. “It doesn’t matter,” he says. B’Net Houariyet - ‘girls’ music’ from the Houara region - is, apparently, a style, not a group.

Finally, the doors are closed, everyone settles themselves and the booming pulse of the lute - the sintir - and the smoke of incense again fill the room. It is time for the event to start. Start? It’s nearly two in the morning. We’ve been here for hours.

The rhythms of the iron castanets begin to build, and with them an atmosphere of fervour and expectation. A round, chuckly woman who earlier gave us her business card - ‘Breaker of Curses’ - is one of the first to start trembling. Then Amina throws herself before the bowl of smouldering incense, inhaling deeply. “From now on,” says U-Cef, “things will become very trancey.”