Algerian Chaabi goes global: El Gusto on tour, Paris, London, Berlin, New York

[Al-khiyal]

September 8, 2007 -- Singing tales of love and exile to the trill of mandolins and the heady beat of an Arab percussion, 40 masters of Algerian Chaabi, a century-old folk music tradition, are to be reunited after decades for a four-nation tour starting.

Dubbed El Gusto - slang for high spirits - the tour is to be followed with an album in October produced by Damon Albarn, frontman of British rock band Blur and long-standing fan of world music, and a film next spring.

It was first dreamt up by Safinez Bousbia, a young Irish-Algerian woman, after she was introduced to the genre three years ago by a musician in the Casbah in the Algerian capital Algiers.

Seized with curiosity about the musical tradition, which saw its heyday in Algiers in the 1940s and 1960s, she decided to set out in search of the artists who made it famous.

"I just wanted to put them back in touch. The idea of the film and the album came later," Bousbia said of her project - a North African version of Ry Cooder's mission to reunite the members of Cuba's Buena Vista Social Club.

As with the Cuban adventure, most of the artists involved in the Chaabi tour, which kicked off Thursday in the Mediterranean port of Marseille before heading to Paris, London, Berlin and New York, are now in their seventies.

Many of the musicians who flew in from Algiers and Paris for the Marseille concert parted ways four decades ago.

"The greatest pleasure is simply to meet again. It's going to be extraordinary to make music together," said the singer Luc Cherki, who was recently reunited with old friends and fellow musicians Ahmed Bernaoui, Rene Perez, Abdelkader Chercham and Maurice El Medioni.

Chaabi - which simply means "popular" in Algerian - first appeared in the late 19th century, inspired by vocal traditions of Arab Andalucia, the home of Flamenco music.

A typical song features mournful, Arabic vocals, set against an orchestral backdrop of a dozen musicians, with violins and mandolins swelling and falling to a piano melody and the clap of percussion beats.

While it shares many set themes with Flamenco - love, loss, exile, friendship and betrayal - Chaabi is part of a deeply conservative tradition, its lyrics often carrying a strong moral message.

"This music is part of the culture of Algiers, it cannot be separated from everyday life there," said El Hadi Halo, the show's conductor and son of the pioneering Chaabi musician Hadj M'Hamed El Anka.

"Even though it doesn't get a lot of media attention, it is everywhere: weddings, circumcision ceremonies, religious festivals," said Halo, who teaches a younger generation of Chaabi musicians at the Algiers conservatory.

In recent years, Chaabi has been largely overtaken at home by Raï, a spicy North African brand of pop music with often explicit references to sex.

The genres overlapped in 1998, when Raï star Rachid Taha scored a hit at home and abroad with a cover version of Ya Rayah, a 1970s song about exile by Chaabi artist Dahmane El Harrachi, who died in 1980.

Organisers hope the tour will help introduce Algerian Chaabi to a wider audience, as El Gusto travels from Marseille to Paris on September 29, followed by London on October 10, Berlin on October 31 and New York next year.

Algerian folk music goes global

[k_s]

My South African colleague knows about Chaabi more than I do.

[Al-khiyal]

September 14, 2007 -- Luc Cherki is a big man. Carrying his guitar, he approaches the microphone with the swagger of Johnny Cash and sings a folk ballad about the dispossessed worthy of the Man in Black that elicits whoops of recognition from his audience. But this is Marseilles, not San Quentin, and Cherki is French. His song, Je suis un pied-noir, tells of having to leave Algeria for France 45 years ago, thus becoming an emigré in his own country.

Accompanying him are the El Gusto Orchestra, veterans of Algerian music’s postwar golden age, when the sound of chaabi united the streets. When the war of independence (1954-62) tore apart the French colony it ripped the heart out of the musical community. For many of those onstage in Marseilles El Gusto is the first time they have seen each other in 45 years.

Now the old friends’ schedules includes a film, a tour by the orchestra, which reaches the Barbican in London on October 10 as part of its annual Ramadan Nights season, and an album, produced by Damon Albarn and released on his label, Honest Jons. “I didn’t know chaabi before I became involved,” Albarn admits. “But after I got the call asking me to contribute to this project I made sure I was well-versed before I got here. Then all I needed to do was to put microphones in the right places and try to capture the rawness of the music. I just told them they were the maestros and let them get on with it.”

El Gusto is the brainchild of Safinez Bousbia, a Dublin-based Algerian. “I was in Algiers in 2003 and saw a picture of musicians on the wall of a shop,” she explains. “The owner told me this was his class in the 1950s but that he still imagined himself playing the music again. At that moment I decided I had to put together an orchestra and make a documentary.”

Bousbia contacted a number of musicians who expressed interest in performing at a concert if she could pull it off. Albarn, fresh from playing the first dates by his band the Good, the Bad and the Queen, leapt at the chance of travelling to Algeria to do more.

Chaabi reflects Algiers’s status as a crossroads. In the ancient Casbah, black African and Berber rhythms mixed with Andalusian flamenco and Latin flash; the Jewish, European and North African residents brought their roots to the mix. “The Americans brought us many things during the war and afterwards,” explains the 79-year-old pianist Maurice El Medioni. “From them I heard jazz and blues. My right hand played Algerian music, my left hand played boogie-woogie, and I could integrate the two.”

He laughs: “Just like we played together, the Jews and the Muslims. It was natural.”

In the 1940s it was a scandalous sound, thriving behind closed doors. By the late 1950s, however, it had become the people’s music, played at weddings and religious festivals, and Mohammed El Anka, “the father of chaabi”, ran courses at the Algiers conservatoire. But the war of independence meant Europeans and Jews fled to Europe. It would have been difficult to replace such talents as El Medioni and Castel, but the Arabs who remained were forced to play only a classical repertoire. When the Casbah started to fall apart through neglect, the musicians were sent to live in outlying suburbs and music lessons ceased. Chaabi was dying a slow death and Algeria slid slowly into a civil war that would make it off-limits: musicians were seen as legitimate targets by hardline Islamists and murdered.

With the arrival of a shaky peace and wary visitors in 2002, there was a revival of interest in the old music. Bousbia’s determination to produce a concert in the Algiers Opera House has probably saved chaabi from dying out.

Now, in Marseilles, the touring orchestra is demonstrating how resilient it and its songs are. Introduced to the stage by a rabbi and an imam, who trade verses in song to wild applause and then leave the stage hand-in-hand, these are the former students of El Anka. Some stayed, others fled, all had lost their music but kept their dreams alive. When they reach the emigrants’ anthems Algeria, Algeriaand Ya Rayah, songs laden with untold layers of significance, the strength of emotion on stage and in the audience has to be witnessed to be believed. Memories flood back, old acquaintances are renewed; the musicians just don’t want to stop.

One such musician is Robert Castel. An acclaimed stage and film actor for nearly 50 years, he also left Algeria in 1962, after the end of the war of independence ushered in an Arab government. Castel, a Jew whose father, Lili Labassi, was one of the most revered writers of chaabi before the revolution, shakes with emotion as he sings the blues. He accompanies himself on the violin, perched upright on his lap in the Arab style, backed by a 40-strong orchestra of musicians who remember when their homeland had a thriving nightlife in which Jews, Muslims and Frenchmen played music together after dark.

Ahmed Bernaouio walks to the stage slowly, with the aid of a stick. He sits stiff and straight in his chair and has to have his lute handed to him. But when he starts playing, a deep primal blues of inspiring authority fills the auditorium, his voice as rough and compelling as Tom Waits’s. “Fifty years ago, I was among the first to play chaabi in the conservatoire,” he remembers, beaming. “Before that, this was the music of the streets, the brothels and the coffee shops. After the war it was banned, so to be playing it again after so many years is just beyond belief. It was the reason for my existence, and now I am here to keep it alive.”

But the proudest of all is probably Abdel Hadi Halo, the orchestra’s musical director and the son of El Anka. “I am keeping my father’s work alive, you must understand how important it is to me. This must have been what it was like in the Casbah 50 years ago. When we played in Algiers last year we were not able to bring over our Jewish friends, the circumstances were still not right, but now . . . soon . . .”

El Gusto play the Barbican, London EC2 (0207-638 8891), on October 10. The album, El Gusto, is released by Honest Jons on October 15

Once more, with El Gusto

[Al-khiyal]

Abdel Hadi Halo, usually known as 'El Hadi'.
The son of Hadj Mohammed El Anka, the founder of Chaabi music in Algiers.
El Hadi is a pianist, mandole player and singer and proudly carries his father's name


The violin section of the El Gusto Orchestra rehearse.
Though the violin is sometimes played under the chin, it is traditionally,
like the majority of stringed North Africa instruments,
played upright and on the knee


Rachid Berkani dons his shades to play his lute


Mustapha Tahmi is a guitarist
and the narrator of the upcoming feature documentary 'El Gusto: The Good Mood'


A Mahshasha, built by Abderrahmane 'Manou' Guellati (the banjo player)
to remember the Mahshashas of old times.
Mahshashas were smoking cafes where friends and musicians gathered
to jam and to share the good mood


Mamad Hader Benchaouch, known as Hadj Mamad.
Violin player, he now teaches Chaabi violin to the new generation of musicians
at the Conservatoire of Music in Algiers


Liamine Haimoun, usually known as 'Cheikh Liamine', is a singer and Mandole player


Cheikh Namous. He is the oldest of the El Gusto Chaabi musicians.
Unfortunately he wasn't able to travel to Marseille for the concert.
He plays Gambar, a little string instrument made from a turtle shell

[Al-khiyal]

El Gusto - Min Yaati Kalbou Lil Melah

[Al-khiyal]

El Gusto - Lalla Fatima

[Al-khiyal]

Marseille, France, September 24, 2007:
The El Gusto orchestra performing at the Theatre du Gymnase