Morocco's Gnawa music, deeply rooted in ancient African traditions, has captivated audiences worldwide, from blues enthusiasts to renowned musicians. This unique folkish genre reflects the profound impact of black African culture on Moroccan society, evident in its dances and the distinctive garments worn by its performers.
Gnawa musicians performing in Essaouira. Image source: Wikimedia Commons
Simply put, Gnawa is the music of formerly enslaved black Africans who integrated into the Moroccan cultural and social landscape, and founded a model to preserve the traditions and folkloric music of their ancestors. Rising to prominence from a marginalised practice to heal people possessed by genie spirits, it is one of the most popular styles of North African music.
Origins in Slavery
It is said that the name Gnawa originated from the word Guinea, a place known for its slave trade during the 11th century. The components of Gnawa songs and dances incorporate references to the singers’ origins and enslavement, as well as displacement and misery. Gnawa bands come mainly from the cities of Marrakech and Essaouira, which are historically known for slave trade with trans-Saharan countries.
A Gnawa master performing at the Gnaoua Festival in Essaouira. Image source: Wikimedia Commons
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The roots of the music are recognisably African in the drumming, the unique metallic castanets, the three-stringed bass lute (guembri), as well as the mosaic gowns and caps worn by musicians mostly decorated with cowry shells.
The African touch is clearly reflected in the dances and the garments the singers wear. “This music is a part of ancient and rich African heritage, which has been growing and prospering for centuries as a thriving music project in Morocco. It is a fascinating combination of poetry, music and dancing. Its secret also lies in its religious, spiritual dimension, which gives it a kind of therapeutic power,” said Anass Fassi Fehri, Professor Assistant at Fes Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah University.
The Essence of Gnawa Music
Gnawa music is a mixture of African, Berber and Arabic religious songs and rhythms. It combines music and acrobatic dancing. Gnawa music is both a prayer and a celebration of life. Though many of the influences that formed this music can be traced to sub-Saharan Africa, and specifically, the Western Sahel, its practice is concentrated in North Africa, mainly Morocco and Algeria.
The Gnaouas are descendants from the black brotherhoods of slaves that were taken from Mali, Guinea, and Ghana to be transported by traders along the Caravan Route. Originally, their purpose was to serve as guards to Morocco’s sultans, however, the story states that when Bilal cured Mohammed’s daughter Fatima by singing her a song, their role gradually changed from guards to that of ‘musical doctors’ or those who heal the soul.
The Gnaoua combine elements of African tradition with Islamic folklore during their nighttime trance rituals called lilas. Lilas generally last throughout the night and are filled with dancing, chants, and other ceremonies to encourage spirits inhabiting a human body to connect with and cure the soul. In a Gnaoua song, similar to American pop music, one phrase or a few lines are repeated consistently regardless of how short or long the song may be; although most are quite long surpassing twenty minutes.
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In fact, a song may last up to several hours non-stop. To many who are unfamiliar with the Gnaoua, their performances may appear to be one long song when actually they are a series of spiritual chants. The chants sung by the Gnaoua describe the various spirits so what seems to be a 20 minute piece may be a whole series of pieces, a suite for Sidi Moussa, Sidi Hamou, Sidi Mimoun or the others. However because the songs are suited for invoking a state of trance, they go on and on.
Almost all Moroccan brotherhoods, such as the Issawa of the Hamadsha,relate their spiritual authority to a saint. The ceremonies begin by reciting that saint's written works or spiritual prescriptions in Arabic. In this way, they assert their role as the spiritual descendants of the founder, giving themselves the authority to perform the ritual. Gnaoua, whose ancestors were neither literate nor native speakers of Arabic, begin the Lila by bringing back, through song and dance their origins, the experiences of their slave ancestors, and ultimately redemption.
The Gnawa Festival of Essaouira
The music has become so popular that it prompted the Moroccan government to organise a yearly festival in the southern coastal city of Essaouira, featuring Gnawa as part of the country’s cultural heritage that forms an important part of the kingdom’s oral literature. The three-day musical event is held every May or June and features a host of Gnawa masters along with jazz, fusion, blues and contemporary world artists.
Place Moulay Hassan in Essaouira, a key venue for the Gnaoua Festival. Image source: TripAdvisor
Travel To Morocco For the Gnaoua (Gnawa) Festival in Essaouira The mysterious music of the Gnaouas is celebrated each year in June at the Gnaoua Festival in Essaouira. Essaouira is an Atlantic seaside resort town and has long been considered as one of the best anchorages of the Moroccan coast. The Medina of Essaouira (formerly "Mogador") is a UNESCO World Heritage listed city, as an example of a late 18th century fortified town.
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The Gnaoua Festival attracts a cosmopolitan audience of 500,000 festival-goers annually and offers a rich program, reaffirming its goal to emphasize the Gnaoua heritage in all its variety and to invite the best world and jazz artists to come and perform in the unique and magical town of Essaouira. This popular four day festival features art exhibitions and Gnaoua style music. International musicians and groups from Tangier, Marrakesh, and Essaouira perform their Gnaoua sounds at the Place Moulay Hassan and other spaces in the medina and outside its city walls such as Bab Doukkala, Bab Marrakech, Dar Souiri, Chez Kebin, Zaouia Gnaoua, Place Khayma and the Marche Aux Grain.
Morocco's hypnotic Gnaoua Music Festival
The festival recently honored the Gnaoua musicians with a new stage, which is dedicated to them at Bab Doukkala, allowing the ardent supporters of the Gnaoua rhythms to meet with the stars, from Hamid El Kasri to Abdelkébir Merchane. This stage was created for 100 % Gnaoua concerts, as well as the traditional lilas in the exceptional Gnaoua Zaouia (trance performances) every evening at midnight for the purists.
World and jazz musicians perform on the new stage Bab Sebaa and The Moulay Hassan stage is kept for the famous groups of very diverse styles. On the smaller stages in the medina, the new generation of maâlems performs, and fans of electronic fusion and contemporary Moroccan music now have two new dedicated areas: the Pepsi stage and the Méditel stage.
The Gnaoua Festival offers 10 concert sites from which everyone can choose according to their taste, 10 different but complementary programs forming the details of a unique puzzle, that of a pioneering and cosmopolitan festival. The quality is excellent as ever. Each evening is usually broken down into a few parts. In the first part, the Gnaoua musicians perform between six and nine pm. After this portion ends, the audience will hear the sounds of the other non-Gnaoua jazz musicians. The favorite of many is when Maâlem (Master) Gnaoua and their bands begin to play, around the eleven pm.
Gnawa Muallems (Masters) pride themselves on being able to keep the audience hooked, fascinated and moved through a distinctive spiritual practice that turns noise into melody.“The fact that the main musical instruments are the drums and ‘ganbri’ is very significant because they symbolise and reflect the beating of the dancers’ hearts,” Baddouri said.
For many, Gnawa is enchanting in a way that only spiritual music can be. It uses drums as the main background and relies on refrains that take one into a swirling movement.
Musical Instruments and Techniques
The Maâlems have venerable stringed-instrument traditions involving both bowed lutes like the gogo and plucked lutes like the gimbri, also called hajhuj a three-stringed bass instrument. The hajhouj, a guitar like instrument made of camel's leather. Its strings come from the roots of trees combined with dried, twisted sheep or goat colons. The hajhouj gives Gnaoua music its distinctive bass sounds.
Gnawa hajhuj players use a technique which 19th century American minstrel banjo instruction manuals identify as "brushless drop-thumb frailing". The "brushless" part means the fingers do not brush several strings at once to make chords. Instead, the thumb drops repeatedly in a hypnotically rhythmic pattern against the freely-vibrating bass string producing a throbbing drone, while the first two or three fingers of the same (right) hand pick out, often percussive patterns in a drum-like, almost telegraphic manner.
The Gnawa hajhuj has strong historical and musical links to West African lutes like the Hausa halam, a direct ancestor of the banjo. The Gnawa also use large drums called the ganga or tbel and krakebs large iron castanets in their ritual music. At the festival, the Maâlems begin to chant in Arabic or Gnaoui. The message is usually something spiritual or religious that has the power to heal.
At one point in the songs, an instrument making “krakeb” sounds places the audience into a trance as both musicians and the audience begin to sway. After the Maâlem, between 12am and 2am in the morning, there is a fusion of sounds between the spiritual Gnaoua music and the multi-cultural sounds of non-Gnaoua jazz musicians playing European, American, Rock, and African Blues. The late morning concerts are a fusion between these artists.
Notable Performers
Great musicians who have performed at The Gnaoua Festival since its first edition in 1988 are: Trio Joubran with bluesman Justin Adams, Toumani Diabaté, Eric Legnini, KyMani Marley, Wayne Shorter, the National Orchestra of Barbès, Hassan Hakmoun, Will Calhonn, Adam Rudolf, Sussan Deyhim, Steve Shehan, Yéyé Kanté, Adam Rudolph, Mokhtar Samba, Yaya Ouattara, Jamey Haddad, Jacques Schwarz-Bart, Randy Weston, Adam Rudolph, The Wailers, Pharoah Sanders, Keziah Jones, Omar Sosa, Doudou N'Diaye Rose, the Italian trumpet player Paolo Fresu and Ramon Valle.
The new generations of Gnaoua maâlems who have performed at the Gnaoua Festival are: Saïd Boulhimas, Midnight Shems, Darga, and Rif Gnawa. The established maâlems who have performed are: Allal Soudani, Saïd El Bourqui and Abdeslam Belghiti, Maâlem Abdallah El Gourd de Tanger. Maâlem Abdeslam Alikane et Tyour D’EssaouiraMaâlem Amida Boussou de Casablanca, Maâlem Brahim Balkani de Marakech, Maâlem Mahmoud Guinea d’Essaouira. Maâlem Abdelhatif Al Makhzoumi, Maâlem Allal Goubani, Maâlem Cherif Regragui, Maâlem Hayate, Saïd Boukri , Al Belghiti, Maâlem Abdallah El Gourd de Tanger, Maâlem Abdeslam Alikane et Tyour D’Essaouira, Maâlem Amida Boussou de Casablanca, Maâlem Brahim Balkani de Marakech, Maâlem Mahmoud Guinea d’Essaouira, Maâlem Abdelhatif Al Makhzoumi, Maâlem Allal Goubani, Maâlem Cherif Regragui, Maâlem Hayate, Saïd Boukri and Al Belghiti.
Some of the most famous Gnawa performers include:
- Mahmoud Guinia (the King) or Gania - He has performed with Pharoah Sanders and Caros Santana.
- Brahim Belkane (The traditional)- He has performed with Led Zeppelin, Robert Plant, Adam Rudolph, Randy Weston, and Jimmy Page.
- Hamid El Kasri - He is one of the biggest stars on stage and is particularly renowned in Morocco for his great voice.
- H'mida Boussou (The grand master) - As a child H'mida immersed himself in Gnawi culture as taught him by the Maâlem Ahmed Oueld Dijja, and became a Maâlem himself at the age of 16.
- Abdellah El Gourd - He learned Gnaoua as a young man, while working as a radio engineer in his hometown of Tangier Gourd has collaborated with jazz musicians Randy Weston and Archie Shepp and blues musician Johnny Copeland.
- Abdeslam Alikkane and Tyour Gnaoua - He is a Berber from the region of Agadir who how to play the krakebs at the age of 9.
- Abderrahman Paca- He is one of the founding members of the group Nass El Ghiwane.
- Mokhtar Gania - Son of the great Maâlem Boubker. He is the younger brother of the legendary Mahmoud.
- Abdelkader Benthami- He owes his education to some of the greatest Maâlems such as Zouitni.
- Said Boulhimas - He is the youngest Gnawi to play at the 7th edition (2004) of the Gnaoua festival.
- Hassan Hakmoun- He is a powerful, soulful and charismatic "Master" musician who has been performing since childhood on the streets of Marrakesh, Morocco.
Gnawa Music and Creolization
"Through their ceremonies, their songs and gatherings, these people made restitution not of an “imagined community” but a real one to reconcile a fragmented past. The Gnawa provide a fascinating story of how they re/constructed their identity against a broken cultural continuity." - Dr.
Over the centuries, the Gnawa people were gradually freed, whether through running away or their masters granting them freedom. They gradually formed their own communities within Morocco, where they were able to develop their own traditions. The Gnawa people practice a mystic, spiritual version of Islam, combining Islam with sub-Saharan West African traditions.
"The Gnawa have, over many generations, productively negotiated their forced presence in Morocco to create acceptance and group solidarity. Unlike the conventional question in Black America, “Who are we?,” the Gnawa ask, “Who have we become?” Similar to the model of “creolization” - the integration of freed black slaves into the French cultural landscape of the American state of Louisiana , the Gnawa have created a model of their own creolization and integration into the Moroccan social landscape. " - Dr.
Because of the Gnawa's interaction with the spiritual realm, they were for many centuries a marginalized and often discredited religious group within Morocco. However, Gnawa music has gradually become more popular. Gnawa music has become more secularized in recent years.
The Gnaoua Festival of Essaouirahas changed the face of the original Gnaoua ritual music by fusing its core spiritual music with similar genres like jazz, blues, reggae and hip-hop. The famous musicians that participate each year exchange and mix their own music with Gnaoua music, creating one of the largest public festivals in Morocco as well as one of the best and most exciting jam sessions.
Gnawa performers have turned to tourist and outdoor performances, as well as collaboration with blues and jazz artists from the United States."As the racially-marked other in Morocco with a clear African genealogy, the Gnawa attract the attention of European, American and African-American musicians who have been coming to Morocco for decades in search of "authentic" African music.
Gnawa music's influence on jazz and blues. Image source: YouTube
Deborah Kapchan on Gnawa Music
Deborah Kapchan is a professor of Performance Studies at New York University, and the principle voice for Afropop Worldwide’s Hip Deep program, Traveling Spirit Masters: The Gnawa of Morocco. Professor Kapchan has been doing research in Morocco since 1990. In 2007, she published a book on her work with the Gnawa, Traveling Spirit Masters: Moroccan Gnawa, Trance and Music in the Global Marketplace (Wesleyan University Press). Banning Eyre interviewed her in her office in New York in 2009.
Kapchan notes that the origins of the Gnawa are not completely homogeneous. The Gnawa came from different parts of Africa. Many, the most, came during the 15th and 16th centuries under the Saadians who went to Timbuktu and basically brought captives from the Songhai Empire to Morocco to work as soldiers. But the West African sub-Saharan population in North Africa has been in Morocco for a long time.
Now as a metaphor for possession, first off, the spirits, the possessing spirits are called mluk, the owners. So one is inhabited by spirits, but also possessed, owned, by spirits. The trauma of slavery, on the other hand, is something that can be worked out in ceremonies such as possession ceremonies. People are going into trance, and there are a lot of mortification rights. For example people slash themselves with knives. People burn themselves with the flames of candles, but while in a very different state. That is, they are performed as if they were possessed as slaves, but they are in a transcendent state where they are not vulnerable. In a sense, they can go from being the victim of a spirit to what they call "working the spirits," a kind of mastering of the state of possession. The ceremonies are healing ceremonies. That's what they are.
Kapchan also notes that the Gnawa are part of the African diaspora. We see that, for example, Randy Weston goes back to Africa in 1967 to look for his origins, and he finds the Gnawa, who were also slaves brought from elsewhere, but who never left Morocco. He finds commonality with the Gnawa, through this worldwide African diaspora. It connects both of them to a more global movement, a global diaspora, and a global identity. Essaouira was a slave port. That is a major site for Gnawa activity.
Traditionally, the Gnawa passed on their knowledge as an oral tradition, in the body-through dance or trance, through music and ritual. It was mostly passed on from father to son. I should say that the musicians are men in the Gnawa tradition, but the women are extremely important. The main overseer of the ceremony is called the mqaddema. She's a woman, and a large majority of the people who bring the Gnawa to their homes are women, so women are very important to this equation.
The ceremony is called a lila, which means night, because it starts at night, sometimes not until ten or even midnight, and goes till early in the morning, sometimes 7, 8 am. It was not professionalized until relatively recently. The Gnawa used to work for meals and a few dirhams that would be exchanged over the course of the ceremony.
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