Nass el Ghiwane - the game changers. Bursting onto the Moroccan musical scene in 1972 out of the slums of Hay Mohammadi in Casablanca, they changed what was possible in modern Moroccan music. Drawing musical and lyrical inspiration from the deep roots of Moroccan art, folk, and religious traditions, Nass el Ghiwane composed and performed new songs that felt traditionally Moroccan but spoke to modern experiences and discontents. It is said that hundreds, perhaps thousands of musical groups were launched across North Africa in their wake by young people who found the Ghiwanian expressive mode potent, timely, and accessible.
I've shared a bit of Nass el Ghiwane's music on this blog, but not a whole lot. I have written about them quite a bit here over the years, often when sharing or discussing the music of other artists. This post is intended as the first of several posts focusing directly on the group and some of the many recordings they released on vinyl and tape from 1972 to the present. This is my attempt to sketch some of the early history of the group leading up to the first recordings of the group for the Polydor label. I'll call the quintet featured on those recordings Nass el Ghiwane 1.0. And I'm delighted to share here my vinyl rip and remaster of their first LP. I think it sounds better than any of the digital versions I've heard streaming around out there on the webs and tubes.
Nass el Ghiwane 1.0: Origins
According to Larbi Batma's memoir Ar-Rahil [1], the initial core of the group was the trio of Batma, Boujmiî Hgour, and Omar Sayed. The three had participated first in neighborhood amateur theater groups and later as actors and singers in Tayyeb Saddiki's professional troupe. Filmmaker Ahmed Maanouni (director of the Nass el Ghiwane documentary film "Trances") says that Saddiki had a grant from a trade union to produce plays using young actors from the poor neighborhoods of Casablanca [2]. By the time the young Ghiwanis were working with Saddiki, he had established a new style of Moroccan theatre that drew themes and inspiration from old literary and oral sources like melhoun poetry and the Sufi poetry of Sidi Abderrahmane al Majdoub. This new theatre movement also drew inspiration from folk performance aesthetics, specifically the halqa circles that form around street performers in places like Djemaa el Fna plaza in Marrakech, interactive circles in which the audience is as much a part of the performance as the performers. The plays were not, however, simple recreations of archaic or folk forms, but dynamic vehicles using deeply held cultural resonances to create new and modern experiences in a new postcolonial era.
Boujmiî Hgour, then Larbi Batma, singing vocal solos in the play "Al Harraz":
Omar Sayed and Boujmiî Hgour singing a duet in the play "Al Harraz":
During their tenure with Saddiki's troupe, Batma and Boujmiî began writing their own original songs and the trio began performing these as a short opening act before the start of the plays. Like Saddiki's plays, these songs drew on archaic, folk, and religious song styles, forms, and lyrics, and wove into them themes that spoke to the lives of their contemporaries. Adding to this tapestry of sources is the fact that the group's neighborhood, Hay Mohammadi, was home to migrants from every corner of Morocco. Omar Sayed has characterized the neighborhood as Morocco in miniature [3]. Thus while he and the other group members from the neighborhood grew up in close proximity, they were raised with linguistic and musical vernaculars from very different regions: Batma from Chaouia, Boujmiî from Tata, and Omar from Aït Baha in the Souss [4].
In addition to their warmup spot at the Theatre Municipale, the trio began performing their songs in cafes and other venues. Eventually they were able to record a performance for broadcast on Moroccan TV, where they made quite a splash, being absolutely different from anything seen before them.
The group's lineup was shifting around in these early days. Allal Yaâla was known to them from their neighborhood as a top-notch musician and music teacher with an encyclopedic knowledge of Moroccan styles as well as a quick learner of songs. Allal accompanied the group on oud for its initial TV appearance, but he did not join them permanently at that time [5]. The earliest photos of the group show the founding trio along with musician Mahmoud Saadi (also an early member of Jil Jilala) playing the bouzouki and Moulay Abdelaziz Tahiri playing the sintir (the Gnawa guinbri).
Nass el Ghiwane 0.9
L-R: Omar Sayed, Larbi Batma, Moulay Abdelaziz Tahiri, Mahmoud Saadi,
Boujmiî Hgour
Unlike the rest of the group, Tahiri, whom we've profiled here before, hailed from Marrakech. He did two years of study at the prestigious Conservatoire National de Musique, de Danse, et d'Art Dramatique in Rabat, after which he returned to Marrakech and worked with several local theatre troupes [6].
I believe Tahiri relocated to Casablanca due to his Marrakech theatre work. He had played the role of Mahmoud in the Wafa troupe's production of Abdeslam Chraibi's "Al Harraz". That play was later produced in Casablanca by Tayeb Saddiki (see video embedded above). I read somewhere that Tahiri helped Saddiki's troupe with the melhun vocal styles used in the production. It was here that the Ghiwane group got to know Tahiri and appreciate his talents.
By sometime in 1972, Mahmoud Saadi had left the group [7] and they reached out to Allal Yaâla to join. The addition of Tahiri and Allal increased the group's scope exponentially on the strength of the stringed instruments they could bring to the songs as well as percussion and vocals. Both musicians were steeped in the melhun tradition and various other styles. It is this quintet that we hear on the group's first recordings, pictured here on the back of their first album:
Nass el Ghiwane 1.0
Left to right:
Allal Yaala - banjo (snitra), vocals
Omar Sayed - percussion, vocals
Larbi Batma - percussion, vocals
Moulay Abdelaziz Tahiri - sintir, percussion, vocals
Boujmiî Hgour (aka Boujemaa Ibrahim) - percussion, vocals
Nass el Ghiwane 1.0: Recordings
Nass el Ghiwane 1.0 existed from 1971 or '72 to 1973 or early '74. As far as I can tell from the world wide web in 2026, they released five 7-inch singles and one 12-inch LP during 1972 and 1973. Two songs from the 1973 singles also appear on the second Nass el Ghiwane album in 1974. By the time that album was released, Tahiri had left the group and Abderrahmane Paco had joined to begin the brief era of Nass el Ghiwane 2.0.
Here is a detail of the releases by NG 1.0 while they were together:
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Some concert recordings of Nass el Ghiwane 1.0 were released commercially in the 1980s. I have not included them in this list, but I am planning to devote a blogpost to them sometime this year.
Disque D'or: A spurious album title, but golden nonetheless
The album cover for the first Nass el Ghiwane LP reads prominently "Disque D'or 1973". In his memoir, Larbi Batma writes that this gold record award was announced by the record company Phillips (I think he means Polydor) but the group never saw or received an actual prize. He eventually asked someone about it and was told that the record company just wrote Gold Record on the album for publicity [8]. Despite this unawarded award, the record will always be gold in my book. It's a collection of groundbreaking, classic songs with inventive arrangements, sung passionately and with an urgency that leaps off the record over 50 years later. Here are a few of my subjective takes and random thoughts:
- El Madi Fate (The Past is Gone) - leading off the album with a bold, anti-nostalgic declaration of a new (cultural) moment.
- As Siniya (The Tea Tray), the group's first single and probably their most well-loved song, a complaint sung to a tea tray, the tea tray being the physical artifact around which a ritual of sociality and belonging is enacted - the preparing and sharing of tea. A complaint about the state of the singer's tea glass among other glasses on the tray. Language evocative - unspecific about what has brought on this condition, but universally resonant in Morocco by virtue of its imagery. And with a rousing refrain declaring departure and that "bahr al ghiwane ma dkhaltu bil3ani بَحْرَ الْغِيوَانْ مَا دْخْلْتُ بَلْعَانِي" - the ocean of Ghiwane - I didn't enter it intentionally. The cryptic term "Ghiwane" which of course became synonymous with the group itself - Nass el Ghiwane = People of Ghiwane - something to do with song, something archaic, something that one does not simply walk into by design but that one falls into. The references to trance were here from the very beginning of the group, even before the Gnawi Abderrahmane Paco joined them. (See also the name of the group in English on their first 2 singles: New Dervish.)
- Allah ya Moulana - cooling down with a heartfelt supplication to God and the Prophet ﷺ in the form of a legitimate earworm, complete with an unforgettable wordless singalong wo-wo-wo melody before the Dan-Dani part of the song.
- Side two expands the discourse to more philosophical and ethical matters, leading off with Ya Bani Al Insane (Oh Children of Man) - my condition, my promise, today pushes me, I want to pose a question and say it in the tongue of Ghiwane, Oh Children of Man, why are we enemies?.
- An ecstatic, quick paean to love and beauty in Yamna/Joudi Berdak with terrific long held high vocal notes from Omar while Allal goes wild on the banjo.
- Then finishing up with two more philosophical questions: Fin Ghadi Bya Khouya (Where are you taking me, brother) on individual connection and blame in a time of social and cultural rupture - with an eerie ethereal vocal harmony placed a fourth above the main melodic line, and Wach Hna Houma Hna (Are We Still Us?) on the existential effect of greed and inequity on society and humanity as a whole.
I'm so happy to be able to share this good sounding vinyl rip. My copy of the LP is far from the cleanest in the world, but the recent addition of stem splitter capabilities to Logic Pro X allowed me to isolate vocals on one track while the pops and clicks got shunted onto another track, which I could then mute during the a capella passages. TLDR - it sounds really clean where it counts the most. And it sounds better than any streaming digital version I've heard.
I am of course conflicted about the use of AI tools in this work and in general. They are resource-hungry, and as much as we are being told we will not lose jobs, we will definitely lose jobs, which is terrifying in a society where existing rips and tears in our social safety nets are being widened in order to make oligarchs imperial again. I hope my limited use of these tools to restore a work of beauty does not exacerbate the situation. I'm sure a professional could do a better job at this than I have done, but until that happens, please enjoy this new version of this historic LP.
Nass el Ghiwane ناس الغيوان
Disque D'or 1973 نال اسطوانة الذهب السنة
Polydor 2.944.007
1973
A1 El Madi Fate الماضي فات
A2 As Siniya الصّينية
A3 Dane Dany (Allah Ya Moulana) أدَانْ دَاني - الله يَا مُولانَا
B1 Ya Bani El Insane وايّى يابني الإنسان
B2 Yamna جودي برضاك
B3 Fin Ghadi Bya Khouya فين غادي بي خويا
B4 Wach Hna Houma Hna واش احنا هما احنا
NOTES/SOURCES CITED:
[1] Larbi Batma. Ar-Rahil. This book has not been translated from Arabic, but there is a monograph in English that examines the work in depth: Lhoussain Simour's 2016 book Larbi Batma, Nass el-Ghiwane and Postcolonial Music in Morocco. To date, this is probably the best source in English about Nass el Ghiwane, but keep your eyes open for the results of research in progress by Alessandra Ciucci.
[2] Ahmed El Maanouni. “Transes”: The Resonance of Nass el Ghiwane in Morocco and Beyond. Presentation in conversation with Alessandra Ciucci, Columbia University, New York, March 9, 2023.
[3] Omar Sayed, interviewed in ناس الغيوان - الجزء الأول (Nass el Ghiwane - Part 1), Al Jazeera Documentary. Directed by عمر كاملي بن حمو Omar Kamli Benhamou, 2010.
[4] Simour, p. 115.
[5] Batma, p. 158-9.
[6] Omar EL ANOUARI. "Moulay Abdelaziz Tahiri : Pourquoi la chanson marocaine n'est pas exportable ?". La Gazette du Maroc, 2006-07-31.
[7] In his memoir (p. 168) Batma refers obliquely to some interpersonal conflicts stoked by an unnamed person from Marrakech, ostensibly someone from Jil Jilala or their circle.
[8] Batma, p. 171
