New Jeblia Selections is probably a better translation, but New Mountain Variety (which Google gave me as a translation of منوعات جبلية جديدة) sounds like something you'd find in the Stash.
And a nice variety it is, too, provided by the artist Al Boudali Ahmed, about whom I can find absolutely no trace on the interwebs. Side A is a nice long track of taktouka jabalia, and side B contains two tracks of Jbala-flavored chaâbi. Here's a pinch:
I picked up this tape during my visit to Tangier in 2001. Find additional varieties from Northern Morocco in my 2013-14 posts here and here.
Al Boudali Ahmad الفنان البودالي احمد Visa Disque cassette 10 ڤيزا ديسك A1 Taktouka Jbalia A2 Bonus Derdeg B1 Moulay Bouchta B2 Jibouli Ezzine Nchoufou
Salaams, good people! Sorry for the long dry spell. All's fine here at Moroccan Tape Stash, despite the generally befuddling times.
If you’ve visited Moroccan Tape Stash before, you know that your humble curator loves chaâbi tapes from the days of drum kits and electric guitars. How about we add some saxophone to that mix! Here’s a vintage gem from the stash - an early tape by Khalid Bennani, picked up on my first trip to Morocco in 1992.
According to his biography at Ournia, Bennani performs primarily for “private parties such as weddings and engagement ceremonies”. I have the greatest respect for a good wedding band - being able to satisfy folks old and young, from near and far, is not always easy. And if we’re talking about Moroccan weddings, that means having a fresh, diverse, and extensive repertoire that will give rhythm to a party for hours, often deep, deep into the night.
In addition to wedding work, Bennani continues to record prolifically and to give concerts outside of Morocco. (Apparently he performed some dates in Texas earlier this year!)
Bennani is based in Casablanca but is a native of Taza (between Fes and Oujda) and plays a Fessi repertoire, including melodies reminiscent of the Arab Andalusian and melhun repertoire, devotional strains from the Aïssaoua brotherhood, and tunes evoking the Jbala region of northwestern Morocco.
Fessi chaâbi is usually too smooth for my tastes. I prefer things more raucous, à la Casablanca or Marrakech style. This album, though, manages to achieve a texture that is somehow both smooth and raucous! Maybe it's those snare drum punctuations from the drum set along with the syncopated electric rhythm guitar, a darbuka prominent in the mix.
Enjoy!
Khalid Bennani خالد بناني
Oscariphone (اسكارفون) cassette 11
ca 1992
1) Lhwa Bia - Ma Ândi Zhar لهوى بيا - معندي زهر
2) Yom l-Miâd - A Latif يوم الميعاد - ألطيف
3) Ana f-Ârek - Daba Tendem Âliya انا فعارك - دابا تندم عليا
Here's a vintage stash of folk music field recordings made and released in the 1950s and 1960s by one Jean Mazel, a French cinéaste and ethnologue, about whom I can find little information online. Most of his published recordings (and a disambiguation with anamesake) can be found here, and a number of his publications are listed here.
Jean Mazel
The recordings presented here were originally released on one 10-inch album (33 RPM) four 7-inch EPs (45 RPM). They have been resequenced and made available for streaming/download by the "UK-based one-man trancedental-drone band" Tuluum Shimmering:
In addition to being offered in their raw form, the Moroccan recordings have been incorporated into 3 CDs worth of Tuluun Shimmering's psychedelic recordings, also available from their Bandcamp page, or as CDs from their homepage.
The original 10-inch album features linking narration in French. If you're interested to hear it in its original state, check the YouTube clips below. (I'm happy to have the narration removed in Tuluum's version. It reminded me of the
pretentious voiceovers I heard between acts at the Folklore festival in
Marrakech in 1995.)
I went looking online for the original artwork/notes, and to see where the original tracks fit into Tuluum's sequence. If you're interested in that sort of thing, you can find the images I collected and my crosswalk spreadsheet here.
Thanks to tape aficiondo and old Berkeley pal @boxwalla for calling my attention to this.
The last of my Jbala offerings is some relatively trad taktouka jbaliya from Abdelhak Lâaroussi. I say "relatively" because the ensemble does feature a light keyboard bass in addition to the traditional bendir, darbuka, tar, oud, viola and guinbri.
About the genre, Ahmed Aydoun writes that the name taktouka jbaliya, while commonly used, is contested and that purists still prefer the name âita jbaliya. He continues:
"This rather particular âita is placed by its practitioners under the spiritual guidance of the patron saint of theBeni Âros and the Jabal al-Âlam, the [spiritual] pole Mulay Abdessalam Ben Mshish. There is no âita in which he is not cited." (1)
I love the little guinbri. You can see it held by the gentleman at the far left in the photo above. I own one and play it when I have a chance. A violin-playing colleague dubbed it the "plinkophone" because of its distinctive "plink plink plink" timbre.
I also love the loopy 9/8 (3+2+2+2) rhythm (also heard in my previous Jbala posts). In a full performance of taktouka, the 9/8 gives way to a 5/8 section and ultimately ends up in 6/8. You can hear this progression on the Musique du Monde album "Maroc: Taktoka Jabalia", in particular on the track "Aita Jabalia". On my tape, you don't get that progression, but you do get 40 glorious minutes of non-stop 9/8
More love - theJbala rock the brown jellaba, wearing one sleeve on and one sleeve out. What a great look!
This tape again comes from my 2001 visit to Tangier. All the Jbala tapes I picked up were issued by companies based in Fes, which is not part of the Jbala region, but is apparently far enough north to be a center for the recording and production of Jbala music. Interestingly,
I also picked up a few Riffi tapes on the same trip (coming soon to the
blog), and those were all issued by companies based in Nador.
This particular tape was issued by "Disque Les Fêtes de Fes". Can anybody tell me what this logo signifies? It looks like a craftsman's hammer of some kind. I will update this post if I figure it out.
Regarding the artist Abdelhak Lâaroussi, most examples of his music that I find online are in a chaâbi mode, though with a Jbala flavor. Yala has several recent albums of his. I'm happy to be able to show a different side of his work.
Abdelhak Lâaroussi - Taktouka Jbaliya - Moulay Abdeslam (Disque Les Fêtes de Fes AF11) excerpt from Track 1 (of 4)
More sounds from northern Morocco this week. It's Ghaita Jbaliya:
ghaita = oboe (shawm, double reed instrument...)
Jbaliya = of the Jbala people/region
Oboe and drum ensembles are found all over North Africa - it's a perfect ensemble for outdoors, where the shrill piercing tones of the ghaita (or zorna in Algeria and further east) announce the presence of festivities. The typical accompanying drum is the tbel barrel drum, as shown below. (The bendir pictured on the j-card above seems to be a mistake.)
The Stash has previously featured some ghaita music in a post on Aissawa music here. Ghaita and tbel groups can be found all over Morocco, and the particular music played depends on the surrounding regional traditions. Thus ghaitajbaliya features melodies and rhythms particular to the Jbala region. Dig, for example the characteristic 9/8 rhythmic pattern that opens track 1 (embedded at bottom of page).
Though ghaitajbaliya is a regional folk tradition, it was, curiously, one of the first Moroccan musical genres to be exported and consumed in the West, courtesy of the Master Musicians of Jajouka and the Bryon Gysin/Brian Jones/Rolling Stones connection. (See Philip Schuyler's article "Joujouka/Jajouka/Zahjoukah. Moroccan Music and Euro-American Imagination" for the definitive analysis of that story/phenomenon.)
By the way, if you've wondered about the images of rifle-wielding turbaned horesmen seen on this cassette and others (e.g., here, here, and here), that's a representation of tborida (also called "fantasia"). It's a type of performance that takes place at tribal gatherings (moussem-s), and sometimes at very big weddings or other social gatherings. In my understanding, it stands as a symbol for Moroccan Arab rural-ness.
And lastly, I love the cassette imprint of "Sawt Bouhlal" (the voice of Bouhlal) - Bouhlal is a mountain in the region of Al Hoceima (n the Jbala region, of course).
My stash is stocked mainly with tapes from central Morocco - Marrakech, Beni Mellal and Rabat being the primary triangle points of my Moroccan travels. However, I do have a handful of tapes from northern Morocco. The last time I was there was in 2001, and I tried to pick up things that were unavailable further south. I know much less about the northern artists and traditions than I do about the central and southern ones, so I relied on friendly tape vendors to steer me toward what the north has to offer. I'll do what I can to provide some context for these tapes.
I'll start with a nice tape from the artist Hajji Srifi. According to Yala.fm, he was born in the 1940s, has been recording since as early as the 1970s, and is based in the area of Al Hoceima, on the Mediterranean coast.
Most tracks on this tape (except track 6) fit into the basic 6/8 groove structure found across Morocco. And the prominence in the mix of keyboard, violin and percussion set it within a typical chaâbi soundscape. However, a Jbala tinge can be heard through a few sonic markers drawn from a couple of Jbala musical genres: Taqtouqa Jbaliya and Ghaita Jbaliya (more on these in the next few posts).
In the title track (embedded toward the bottom of this post), for example, the opening keyboard timbre mimics that of a ghaita (oboe), such as one would hear in the ghaita jbaliya genre (made famous outside of Morocco by the Master Musicians of Jajouka). The vocal melody of this track reminds me of the mode and contour of taqtouqa jbaliya melodies (see YouTube video below, starting around 2:04).
Elsewhere on the tape, other Jbala signifiers can be heard. The oud and small guinbri (or gnibri) used in taqtouqa jbaliya can be heard here and there. (Listen to the very very beginning of track 4 to hear the high-pitched little guinbri.) And something about Hajji's style of vocal vibrato seems typically Jbala to me. See especially the intro to track 6 to hear this vocal quality. Track 6 finishes out the album in the loopy 9/8 taqtuqa rhythm.
As you can see from the video above, Hajji Srifi performs not only in chaâbi-style but also in more traditional modes (and costumes) than this tape and his suit-and-tie photo alone might suggest. Yala.fm has a large number of his more recent albums streaming and downloadable here. Some are more traditional sounding, others incorporate the trappings of modern chaâbi, But all of them are rooted in that Jbala sound. Moroccan Tape Stash gives a big thumbs to this great sound, and thanks those tape vendors in Tangier for doing me right!
