The sounds of slavery

Music Every year the town of Essaouira in northern Morocco hosts the Gnawa Festival of Music, one of Africa's finest musical movements.

Gnaoua musicians perform during the opening of the 11th Gnaoua Festival and Musics of the World of Essaouira on June 26, 2008. The festival, taking place from June 26 to June 29 will honour the Gnaoua musicians and world and jazz musicians who will perform on 10 concert sites. Gnawa are the descendents of slaves originating from Black Africa who established brotherhoods throughout Morocco. They are made up of master musicians (ma‚Äölem), metal castanet players, clairvoyants, mediums and their followers. AFP PHOTO/ ABDELHAK SENNA
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"There is a special magnetism about Essaouira," says Jane Loveless, who bought a home here in 1994. "I mean literally. All the fishing boats in the harbour are fitted with a lead device because the earth's magnetic field is so strong here." We're talking in the beautifully restored open-air courtyard of the Riad Medina, a hotel in the old town. More and more of these old riads are getting the boutique treatment.

"People who come to Essaouira have a tendency to get stuck," she laughs. "I did. A lot of people do." For the last few days this beautiful fishing port on Morocco's Atlantic coast has thronged with literally hundreds of thousands of visitors, drawn by the annual Festival of Gnawa Music to a town with a population of less than 70,000. Every normally quiet thoroughfare becomes a sea of humanity shuffling to and from the various stages and concert platforms dotted about the town. The air is filled with the sounds of the 21st-century African street - snatches of shaabi alongside Berber grooves, Tinariwen's unmistakable desert blues, and everywhere the deep rumbling bass of the ghimbri, the hefty three-stringed lute of the Gnawa - black Moroccans descended from slaves - and the high, ­rattling percussion of their krakeks, iron castanets that take the beat quotient into the stratosphere. All this pumping out at distortion level from stalls hawking cassettes and CDs of the heavy African trance music that a little more than a decade ago was largely ignored, indeed barely acknowledged as music at all.

Loveless's first encounter with the Gnawa was in Essaouira in 1991. "I came across someone playing the ghimbri and just loved the music," she remembers. "I arranged for him to play with some of his group on the top floor of a Berber cafe, and I was amazed. It connected with something that was already there in me, and it just opened the gates." On returning to London, she arranged a British tour for the Gnawa she had befriended, and the following year settled in Essaouira for good. The town's magnetism had exerted its power. "I was going through a difficult personal time and they put on a Lila ceremony for me, and I really felt the healing power of it - and I'm usually a pretty cynical person."

Lilas are the Gnawa healing ceremonies that progress through a combination of chants, scents, dances and music that goes on through the night. In Gnawa cosmology, there are seven "saints" or supernatural entities, each associated with seven colours and scents, one or more of which can manifest to those who fall into trance. The music, and particularly the ghimbri, leads the listener into the trance state.

Until the Festival of Gnawa began a decade ago, most Moroccans viewed Gnawa in the way that most English view Morris Dancing - really, just don't go there. Loveless organised the first festival in 1998, determined to give this music she had fallen in love with a platform. "Educated Moroccans didn't want anything to do with it," she remembers. "A distant relative may have owned one as a slave, but they were seen as spooky and primitive. People were scared of them."

The slave market in Essaouira only closed in 1912, and until the festival began, the music of the Gnawa could be witnessed only as part of private Lila ceremonies, or perhaps by the small, ragtag groups of Gnawa banging away in the great square of Jmal El Fnar in Marrakech. Along with Casablanca and Marrakech, Essaouira has long been one of the traditional centres for Gnawa music. Ironically, it was Gnawa slaves who actually built Essaouira, stone by stone, to the plans of the French architect Theodore Cornut in the 1780s.

Their presence in Morocco goes back way before then, though, and before the arrival of the Portuguese and their slave ships in the 15th century. It was the Portuguese who built the town's impressive ramparts, and it was those ramparts that drew Orson Welles here in 1951 to film much of his Othello. The great director is honoured with his own garden square set out behind the Place Moulay Hassan, the social centre of the town. Moulay Hassan is a beautiful, expansive space of whitewashed walls and blue doors, shaded cafes and open-air fish stands serving up the freshest catch ever to hit a plate, and all in earshot of the booming and crashing of the Atlantic waves.

During the festival audiences here can swell to the 60,000 mark, many of them Moroccan teenagers working themselves into a collective frenzy. There are undoubted stars of Gnawa these days. Essaouira's Mahmoud Guinea and Ahmed Bekbou from Marrakech are celebrated on the street as the greatest Gnawa Malaams. During Friday's midnight set on the Moulay Hassan stage, Bekbou rips into his instrument like a Hendrix of the ghimbri, pumping out John Lee Hooker riffs distilled to atomic density that feels like an explosion in your gut - Gnawa is an intensely physical music, as well as a spiritual one - and once experienced up close, you understand how and why it overwhelms the crowd. Mahmoud Guinia, striding on sometime after midnight on the Saturday with his Gnawa Brotherhood in all their red-and-gold finery, has a blues holler to match Howlin' Wolf, a voice and a bass line that holds like an anchor, and it's a music that simply doesn't stop - one song can extend to 20 minutes or an hour, hitting peak after peak of rhythmic density and release, often fuelled by the crowd's syncopated hand-clapping.

During late-night Lila performances at the Place Al Khaymer or nearer the spice souk and the butchers stalls on Place du Mache en Gratin, more than a thousand revellers crowd the open courtyards. A flashing triangle of lights behind the stage matches the colours sacred to the Gnawa - blue, green, azure, yellow and red - and the whole crowd chants the words while pogoing and throwing themselves about with abandon. Hearing teenage audiences chanting the Gnawa liturgy - some of it long-dead languages no one understands - is like hearing an English football crowd chanting the verses of Tam Lin. On the edge of the crowd, a young girl headbangs wildly with her mates. For these young Moroccans, Gnawa clearly opens up the same doors of perception it opened in Loveless.

Everywhere you go there is music - drummers marching down a street, filling a square, creating a storm. You're caught in the centre of overwhelming surges of energy and movement, but the genius of the crowd is that it moves without fracture, with one body and mind. You can feel a web of community here. The music centres as well as excites. When a man in the crowd slips into trance, falling about with the jagged movements of the mosh pit, he's unaware of where, who or what he is. The people around him handle him like fragile cargo, pushing him back and forth to ease him back to the normal world. It may sound far fetched, but it's a part of reality here.

The ghimbri's power is matched by its simplicity - frame, hide gut; three strings and a handful of notes. It's the mother of all basses, akin to the ngoni of west Africa, the instrument brought to international fame via the award-winning virtuosity of Bessekou Kouyate - and who is one of the Saturday night headliners, along with the genius of Mali's Toumani Diabate. When Loveless first set up the festival, she invited 10 international musicians and 10 Gnawa groups. The numbers of performers are much greater today, but the spirit of interaction remains the same.

"Essaouira was so important in the 19th century as a big trading post with Europe and England," she says. "It represented an historical link between black Africa and Europe; I thought it was a perfect place for fusing African music and European." The likes of Rachid Taha, Asian Dub Foundation and Joe Zawinul have all played here. This year, guest artists ranged from Justin Adams (Robert Plant's guitarist and Tinariwen's producer) and the Gambian master musician Juldeh Camara, to the Palestinian oud trio Joubran, the international Afrogroove collective, and artists from Spain, Argentina and Norway.

But the most challenging fusion was probably Friday night's set from Wayne Shorter and his quartet. The great American jazz composer and saxophonist had flown in the previous day for his first-ever appearance in Morocco. "My wife once attended a five-day wedding in Casablanca," he says, talking in his beachside hotel the morning before his concert. "But Morocco is exotic to me, this whole mix of sounds I'd heard on old Folkways records. But I can feel there is some magic here in Essaouira," he adds, as if detecting the same magnetism Loveless talks about. "You just have to be still and let it come in."

Shorter and his quartet end that night's set of cerebral, beautiful jazz with the Gnawa Brotherhood of Malaam Hyat joining them in a thrilling demonstration of seat-of-your-pants improvisation. "We don't rehearse," Shorter had said of his quartet, "so I don't know what we'll play. But we have a piece of music called Zero Gravity, about how you live in the world facing the unknown. So we say, 'let's not rehearse'. We get together and it's like, 'OK, let's go'. Taking chances." He laughs. "Trouble can be an opportunity."

Though Gnawa is a music born of the suffering of slavery - the head dance is said to stem from the slaves being shackled hand and foot, so that all they could move was their heads - it is undoubtedly a celebratory music, and one that to all intents and purposes is a music without beginning or end. Shorter's response to Gnawa on the night is instinctive, that of a fellow musician rather than a student of the form steeped in its arcana, as he says, "In music, I look for the sounds of the celebration of life, of eternity."