The 1960s author and painter Brion Gysin thought hearing the music of Morocco was enough to make anyone become a Muslim. The Rolling Stones, friends of Gysin, didn’t go quite that far, but they did dress in jellabas and team up with the Master Musicians of Jajouka: following guitarist Brian Jones’s album Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Jajouka, which was put together in 1968, the Stones recorded the track ‘Continental Drift’ with the Moroccan group for their 1989 album Steel Wheels.
Keith Richards summed up the extraordinary sounds of the Jajouka pipes and drums as follows: ‘It sounds a bit like modern jazz, like John Coltrane or Ornette Coleman, although it’s really pagan trance music.’ Other ground-breaking artists inspired by the eclectic sounds of Morocco include Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Ry Cooder and The Beatles.
Street music.
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Feel the beat
Wherever you go in Morocco, you are likely to be assailed by wonderful rhythms, whether it’s the most common musical phenomenon – the voice of the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer – or the stereos of music shops pumping out the latest rap and pop. Possibly it will be the ululating calls of women celebrating a wedding or the beat of the bendir drum and the trance-like rhythms of the guembri that characterise Morocco’s famed Gnaoua music, or haunting melodies of the Berber ribab. Moroccan music is characterised by its diverse influences: sub-Saharan African, Arab, Western and Berber, and increasingly today by its fascinating forays into, and adaptations of, modern Western music.
Chabbi is a popular form of Moroccan music. Akin to the folk-music traditions of Europe and America, it started out as music performed by travelling entertainers. These days, chabbi has moved onto the radio and the television. Abdelwahhab Doukali and Hamid Zahir, two of the most popular singers of this type of music, began their careers, respectively, in Bab el Makina in Fez and in the Jemaa el Fna in Marrakech.
Morocco’s big music festivals like Boulevard and Mawazine are attracting an increasingly stellar list of celebrities – Rihanna, David Guetta, Shakira, Kanye West and Kylie Minogue have all performed in recent years.
Inevitably, traditional Moroccan music and instruments have modernised and become electronic, and interesting fusions between the contemporary and the traditional – between Gnaoua and funk, chabbi and pop – are common. Much of this you will hear on the radio, wafting from restaurants and as mobile phone ring tones. In contemporary raï music, too, which originated in the border towns of the Rif and western Algeria, style and lyrics have come a long way from their Bedouin roots – raï’s preoccupations these days tend to be sex, drugs and cars.
Festival fever
There are around 300 music festivals in Morocco every year. Immensely popular, the larger festivals such as Boulevard in Casablanca and Rabat’s Mawazine – the country’s biggest – tend to feature a mixture of contemporary Moroccan artists alongside major international stars.
Musicians in Marrakech.
Clay Perry/Apa Publications
The annual Fez Festival of World Sacred Music, established in 1994, is also an internationally acclaimed event that has featured, in past years, Ben Harper, Youssou Ndour and artists and orchestras from India to Brazil and beyond. The festival that possibly best encapsulates the diversity of Moroccan music is the Gnaoua World Music Festival in Essaouira. It remains one of the most popular festivals and its Gnaoua music has inspired many Western artists and is increasingly becoming a major draw for travellers. This festival has undoubtedly helped to spawn the next generation of gatherings, such as Tanjazz jazz festival in Tangier (for more information, click here).
The Gnaoua
The Gnaoua brotherhood is descended from black slaves brought to Morocco from Mali, Mauritania, Guinea and Ghana in the 1600s and originally, so the story goes, from Bilal, an Ethiopian who was the Prophet’s first muezzin. They dress distinctively in blue robes and caps trimmed with cowrie shells, and their music, inducing a healing trance-like state, is fundamental to their rituals intended to placate spirits (djinn), whether good or evil. Today their music has evolved into a form of expression that, outside of wedding celebrations, is likely to be heard all over Morocco, but especially in Marrakech.