2023-06-25 07:46:49
The Gnaoua and World Music Festival in the Moroccan city of Essaouira concluded its 24th edition with loud and varied musical performances that shook the streets and alleys of the historic city overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.
Most of the performance platforms were filled to the brim with the audience, yesterday evening, Saturday, on the last days of the festival, which began on June 22.
In the archaeological tower of Marrakesh, the Palestinian “Trio Gibran” group held a concert singing of love, revolution and land, followed by a concert by the artist Abdel Salam Alikan, one of the “teachers” of traditional Gnawa music, who mixed his music with the music of the German artist Torsten de Winkle and the Moroccan Gnawa artist Hakim Zuhair Amkas.
Gnawa.. African soul music
The Moulay El Hassan platform in the old city center, located 450 km south of the capital, Rabat, also witnessed various performances, most notably a show in which the artist Majid Bagas mixed his Gnaoui tunes with the tunes of Argentine musician Menino Garay, French David Patrois, Moroccan Senegalese Mukhtar Samba and Frenchman of Moroccan origin Axel Camille.
The musician Asmaa El Hamzawy and her band, The Girls of Timbuktu, introduced the audience to the notes of the Cambri, a stringed instrument used in Gnawa music.
The musician and her band also mixed their melodies with the music and rhythms of the “African Amazons” band, which includes artists from different African countries, who sing of love and freedom and support the struggles of African women.
And the “teacher” Hamid Al-Kasri mixed the tunes of his Gnawi band with the music of the American Jalil Shaw and the German Torsin de Winkle, who was present on two platforms.
The Souiri House in the city center also witnessed an impromptu concert between Gnawa music artists Mustafa Bagbou and Said Boulahimas.
Moroccan folklore and African and foreign teams participating in the festival were also distributed on some of the city’s platforms as well as on the Essaouira beach.
The attention of musicians and those interested turned to the art of traditional Gnawa music, which originally had spiritual and ideological associations in some traditional Moroccan circles, following discovering the common roots of Gnawa art with jazz and blues music.
The researchers attribute the reason that these musical colorings are originally from Africa and have links to the slave trade in the past centuries, and thus these Africans transferred their music that sings of their pain and hopes for emancipation and freedom to the countries of North Africa, which formed ports for heading towards European countries and North America following their discovery.
African rhythms contribute to preserving the heritage of the ancestors
The program of the 24th session of the festival included regarding 40 concerts.
In addition to concerts, the festival included intellectual seminars in which intellectuals and intellectuals from inside and outside Morocco participated. It also included music workshops in which young people interested in this type of music participated.
Founded in 1998, the festival is one of the most important Moroccan music festivals, along with the Mawazine Festival of Rhythms of the Year and the Fez Festival of Sacred Music.
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