fri 29/03/2024

theartsdesk in Fes: The World Sacred Music Festival | reviews, news & interviews

theartsdesk in Fes: The World Sacred Music Festival

theartsdesk in Fes: The World Sacred Music Festival

Sacred and other music in one of the world's great music festivals

The interior world of Morocco seems a magical place where music and words have more power than in the disenchanted, cold light of the North. On the plane on my first trip to Fes I met a businessman, in import-export, wearing a Burton suit. The strangeness of Morocco revealed itself when he started telling me of his current problem, that his daughter has been put under a spell by a djinn (he translated the word as “devil”) residing in a frog. His mother was a member of the Hamdashas, sects who are known to cut themselves, and his grandmother, he said, drank boiling water when under trance. Some djinns are believers, are harmless; others, the non-believers (like the one causing trouble to the businessman’s daughter), are the ones that cause lots of trouble.

Ismael's family were members of two Sufi sects, the Aissawa and the Hamadashas, the latter founded in the 18th century by Sidi Ali Ben Hamadasha. The Aissawa sect is older and centred on the cult of the 15th-century Sidi Bin Aissawa and based around his tomb in Meknes. If you sleep at the tomb, it is said your dreams will reveal the answer to your problems.

06062010fdv_jilalyat05_jilialas_in_dat_taziThese numerous “folk Islamic” groups, such as the Jilalas (pictured right, at Dar Tazi) most of whom make powerful trance music, can be heard late each night during the  Fes Festival in the Dar Tazi, where the Pasha used to live and has become the heart of the Festival. (One Aissawa, the brilliant Said Guissi, told me, “With my music you can become white, you can become black.") At another more sophisticated and cultured end of the spectrum there are many Sufi scholars, Islamic mystics like Dr Faouzi Skali, whose idea the Festival was, initially as a response to the Gulf War of 1990, and who now runs his own Sufi Festival.

Below: watch video of Said Guissi's Aissawa Group





My encounter with the businessman with the frog problems was in 1994. The Fes Festival of World Sacred Music, to give it its full name, is the only Festival I’ve regularly attended over the past several years. I keep coming back because there are always several things on the programme that are surprising or inspiring, and the city reveals itself to you slowly over many visits. It’s not a place you can rush. One of my favourite Moroccan proverbs is “Haste comes from the devil, slowness comes from God.”

There are many names with some resonance in the UK – like the Burundi Drummers (who achieved some fame when their music was used as a rhythmic basis for Adam and the Ants and Bow Wow Wow after Malcolm Mclaren heard a disc of theirs accidentally played at the wrong speed in a Paris library, and now, in a curious cultural loop seem to play faster than in the past) or the peerless flautist Hariprasad Chaurasia, who played some inspired morning ragas one morning, or Dhaffer Youssef’s inventive and joyous French-Tunisian jazz quartet. Headlining on the key Saturday night slot at the Bab Makina, the old gates of the city, were the blind couple from Mali Amadou and Mariam, who have developed one a wonderful, bluesy, forward propelling band, with two imperious girl singers stage left and who won over the crowd in a thrilling show.

Singer Camille improvised unplugged Bach against the Muezzin’s calling of the Faithful one evening in a cramped room at the Riyad Moqri. But the really big names were artists like the top Syrian singers Ahmed Azrak and Mustafa Hilal, who sent the local audience into ecstasies.

Below: Watch video of Amadou and Mariam in Bab Makina (courtesy Mondomix)

{youtube}N3tb3oqxXmM {/youtube}

More profane offerings could be found at the Festival in the City, running parallel to the Sacred Music Festival, which was free and attracted thousands in venues like Bab Boujloud, a square where flocks of starlings swirl about as the sun sets to local rap heroes Fes City Clan, the Casa Crew or Style Souss or the winner of Morocco’s SuperStar TV contest.

The World Cup became an inevitable backdrop to the Festival, with TVs blaring both in the medieval medina and the modern cafés of the Ville Nouvelle and the Festival seemed like a cultural World Cup with its myriad of competing nationalities. (It seems that only the Western Saharans, with whom the Moroccans are in a long-running bitter dispute, and who have a rich musical culture don’t ever get invited – it would certainly be a powerful symbolic gesture were some artists from there to come – perhaps from one of the refugee camps in Algeria).

I saw the US game in my hotel, with excruciating soundtrack of the evening’s entertainment (not in the Festival), a Ukrainian singer with white stiletto boots murdering standards. Even a rousing Gospel set from Sister Kee and the slightly creaky Blind Boys of Alabama couldn’t lift the depression entirely. Admittedly that wasn’t as bad as seeing the England-Argentina match at a previous World Cup where the second half was delayed for several hours due to Friday prayers.

In the morning a high-powered talking shop discussing weighty matters like globalisation and cultural identity with titles like The Interior Voyage, a lot of it hot air admittedly, just to have constructive exchange between those of radically different faiths and none is valuable, and it’s the meetings after the talks that seem to have the most impact. Nevertheless, they could be missing a trick. If they initiated a Fes Prize to some projects that embodied the spirit of the festival (something like the rebuilding of a music school in Kabul, for example) they could probably get a Bono, who came a couple of years ago or a Prince Charles (who says he wants to come) to give it.

Last year they had an Israeli-Palestinian collaboration (see video below) and this year they had a Turkish group, Gulay Hacer Turuk, playing outside the old Jewish synagogue (this in the month after Israel’s tragic and brutal attack on the Turkish boat heading to Gaza) and a cool bunch of Afghans headed by Ustad Gholam Hussein.

Below: Watch the Fes 2009 film about an Israeli and Palestinian collaboration (directed by Seema Mathur)



You realise (and you are humbled by your ignorance) that Fes was a centre of learning back in the ninth century - three centuries before Oxford and Cambridge - when the Karouine University was founded. The University (founded by a woman, incidentally) and the city itself was always a great meeting place, for those of different faiths at the frontiers of knowledge. Pope Sylvester II, who was Pope from 999-1003, studied in Fes and is said to have been responsible for introducing Arabic numerals to Europe, the great Jewish philosopher Maimonides taught at the University, and Fes was the refuge for many Muslim and Jewish intellectuals who were expelled from Spain in 1492. This year I managed to get access to the library at the University, and saw rows of diligent students head down among their books, as they have been for over a millennium.

Somehow in Fes time seems permeable – in much of the old Medina, the largest medieval city still extant, with its winding alleyways too narrow for cars, and taking care to avoid the laden donkeys while distracted by things like the chameleon sellers (eat a chameleon and transform yourself) you could simply have wondered through a sci-fi worm-hole and ended up half a millennium ago. The city always attracted many holy men whose tombs are still revered – a couple of years ago I ran into Meher and Sheher Ali, a superb Qawwali group, who I had met in Islamabad. I saw them by accident wondering in the Medina on their way to the tomb of the city’s founding saint Moulay Idriss. Their minder told me later only after they had absorbed the energy of that saint were they in the right frame of mind to perform.

Below: Watch the Royal Ballet of Cambodia, opening ceremony 2010 at Bab Makina

Weird, alien, visionary, a vortex to another world and time



Synchronicities, which Koestler felt was merely evolution trying to impose order on chaos, seem to happen on a daily basis or perhaps the energy of the city makes you aware of them. The Arts Desk’s Howard Male’s excellent forthcoming novel is based around the notion of synchronicity and is based in Morocco. Two examples: in London I’d put out a request on an internet chatroom for information about the Sufis of Afghanistan – hated by both the Soviets and the Taliban. I received an enigmatic answer: “You need to talk to Arnaud Desjardins.” A couple of weeks later at Fes, the man next to me having a mint tea at the Palais Jamai hotel introduced himself as Monsieur Desjardins – he’d made a film on the subject of Afghan Sufis.

This year I was reading Gavin Maxwell’s book The Lords of The Atlas, about the El Glaoui dynasty, who were the last great Pashas, harem, enemies heads on spikes and all, when I read a line about one of his sons who had become a painter. The same day I got an invite to see the son Hassan's fascinating exhibition of painting and met his wife, who was a Givenchy model in the 1960s and the painter himself, now 88.  

It takes a few days to get into the different mode of Fes, but by about day four, your ears are open to types of music you never thought they would be. Centuries-old choral music from Corsica from the Barbara Furtuna group in an unlikely pairing with some Iranian classical musicians in the peaceful evening of Fes was utterly exquisite. Medieval Tibetan song and dance which came to lamas in dreams? Weird, alien, visionary, a vortex to another world and time. Bring it on. Then you end up chatting to a charming French guy who spent 35 years in Tibet and talks about inner technology and it seems more extraordinary than anything the modern world can magick up. Like any great festival, it’s those unexpected moments away from the main events you often remember the most. You find yourself one night till 3am listening to the dull thud of gnawa bass and castanets in an old Palace in the Medina, mixed with the sound of the splashing of the fountains. I wrote in my notebook, “For a while you are someone else, someone good.” I think it’s a Lou Reed lyric.

 

Share this article

Add comment

newsletter

Get a weekly digest of our critical highlights in your inbox each Thursday!

Simply enter your email address in the box below

View previous newsletters