Instead of poring through the Lomax collection yesterday, I decided to pore through a stash of about 75 cassettes I inherited from a friend recently. Separated out the Maghrebi music tapes from the Middle Eastern ones and the Islamic lectures. I was still jonesing for some chaâbi, and scored with a swell tape of El Bhiri. Yala.fm describes him as a chaâbi artist from Casablanca. The tracks here stay mostly to the aita side of the chaâbi field, with the exception of track 5, which is more of a call-response percussion band-style rave-up.
The tape is missing the first couple minutes of track 3, where someone inadvertently (or advertently?) taped some interesting but completely non-sequitur Middle Atlas tamazight song on top.
Here's El Bhiri on TV:
Get it here.
That's cool, Tim.
ReplyDeleteIt's Aita (العيطة also spelled in Arablish-Arabizi as 3ita) music; some kind of chaabi music from the mountainous (Jbala) regions of Morocco. The plural is 'aiot' or عيوط. I think there were so many Moroccan aiot artisans like Al-Bahiri Abd-Al-A'al (his full name by the way. Arabic: البحيري عبدالعال).
Al-Hajj El-Gheathi was the most famous of these singers, in addition to Al-Mukhtar El-Laroussi. Other newer ones are Al-Hassan El-Meskini (his songs are styles after the Aita Kharibka -عيطة خريبكة rhythm), Sheik Bouazzaoui (whose sons are still singing as Ouled El-Bouazzaoui), Shiek Ahmad El-Karfathi (here's an .rm audiofile to listen to http://www.midouza.net/so/gorfti.rm ), and Khadija Maroum with Ould Souba (DailyMotion vid: http://www.dailymotion.com/swf/x3hqwz_w-soubamargoumli-brha-habibo_music&related=1%5Dwidth=500%20height=450 ).
I shall lastly, give you a huge audiobook-like link that has some streamable MP3s (For the uninitiated: a simple FlashRip would render these audio-files into downloadable MP3s directly to your compooper), for the best Aita musicians in Morocco:
http://www.al-fann.com/path/Morocco/3ita
Enjoy it to the max, Tim. I guess you have just got yourself another 'Stash' there... Dig it!
Fe 5'atir Marrakesh!
H.H.
Note: there's another Egyptian chaabi singer from Al-Bahira region in the north of Egypt whose name is also Al-Bahiri Abdel-A'al. No relation whatsoever to the Moro-Bahiri.
this is absolutely stunning. thanks for sharing man! you always post stellar albums.
ReplyDelete@Hammer - whoa! I'd found some of that stash at http://www.settatbladi.org/
ReplyDeleteBut there seems to be even more from this source. Shukran!
@burntoutsavannahs - thanks! Glad you dug this one!
this stuff is wild, i love it, thanks for posting
ReplyDeleteWonderful stuff, really digging it.
ReplyDelete