Tkitikate! Tkitikate! Party Time! Excellent!

I tell ya, some of the best fun I've had in Morocco has been at parties in Marrakech where a tkitikat group comes to play. I'm surprised I'm 10 years into this blog and I've never really written about tkitikat. Well, I guess it's 'cos I didn't have any straight up tkitikat tapes (other than possibly the great Pokémon tape). Now, thanks to Mr. Tear (late of the esteemed Snap, Crackle & Pop blog, and currently hive master at Hive Mind Records), I've got a reason to write about it, 'cos he sent along this fine tape rip!

Tkitikat is a style of music played by men's percussion and singing groups. (It was always played by men, in my experience, but I haven't been to Morocco for a while, and perhaps there are female tkitikat groups now.) The primary venue for this music is at parties.

Repertoire - like a good wedding band (another type of party band), a good tkitikat group has dozens of songs in its repertoire that originate in various styles and historical periods. To end up in the tkitikat repertoire, though, they ought to share a few key elements:

• They ought to be in that 6/8 chaâbi rhythm (or close enough that it fits)
• They ought to be songs that lots of people know OR they ought to have short catchy refrains that people can learn easily and quickly SO THAT people can join in singing
• Bonus points: When a song's verses are simple enough that you can make up additional verses that were not in the original. (cf. Najat Âatabou's "Hadi Kedba Bayna")
  

Ensemble - the group will have a variety of drums. The group here is using a tar (tambourine), a darbuka, and some tâarijas. As opposed to female percussion and singing groups like âouniyat or houariyat who perform seated, the tkitikat groups play while standing, sometimes facing each other in a circle, sometimes broken out and moving around the room interacting with partygoers. And unlike a wedding orchestra, which typically features one primary lead singer, the tkitikate group tends to feature any or all members of the group as lead singers.

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Gender and percussion groups: I wonder why the female percussion groups like âouniyat or houariyat typically perform while seated, whereas the men's groups like tkitikat and âbidat errma perform standing 🤔 ... Perhaps it's because the male groups are the sorts of groups that one might also encounter in an outdoor halqa performing circle, whereas the female groups are more exclusive to indoor private parties.

Etymology and regionality: I wonder whether tkitikat is something that originated in Northern Morocco. The word is a diminutive of taktouka, which in Morocco refers most famously to the taqtouqa jbaliya - the taqtouqa of the Jbala region of northern Morocco. (We shared a tape of that a while back.) When I was living in Marrakech, a friend who played in a tkitikat group was excited when his group was able to learn some songs and rhythms particular to the North, so there is certainly a Northern tradition. In fact, I remember the groups in Marrakech going less often under the name tkitikat and more often under the name dqiqiya. The latter is a diminutive of daqqa, which is a musical form specific to Marrakech and Taroudant 🤔 ... 

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To my mind, tkitikat groups seem like an active repository of Moroccan musical memory. Or like a jukebox - so many songs to choose from, and designed so that everyone in the crowd should find an old or new favorite song to please them and entice them to dance and be merry. The current tape is no exception. Track 1 has a Gnawa sound to it. Track 2 is an old Houcine Slaoui song from the 1940s. Track 3 is a version of Khiffat Rjel (better known as Ach Dani), Ismail Ahmed's classic 1960s hit, sung here with the words transformed from a song of unrequited love to a comic song about different kinds of food, and track 6 is a straight up version of the Jbala standard Ain Zora. Ranging wide across the regional and temporal map!

Well, while I was searching for some nice tkitikat video to share, I actually found a clip from this very album! 👆 It looks like the cassette is the soundtrack to a VCD, which dates this to probably the mid-2000s to early 2010s. And it turns out that on the first track, the lead vocal is taken by none other than the well-known Gnawi Mâalem Abdelkbir 'Lechheb' Merchane! I understand that many years ago, he was a member of Hamid Zahir's group. And Hamid Zahir's music is basically tkitikat with an oud added, so this is some old familiar musical territory for him! Abdelkbir is one of 3 lead singers on this album. He sings track1, the last bit of track 3, and tracks 4 and 7. A comic-oriented singer is featured on track 2 and most of 3, and a third singer is featured on track 6. Track titles listed here are my best guesses.

Tkitikate Marrakech Volume 2 التقيتيقات المراكشية
Société CHAMUSIC cassette شركة شلموزيك

1 Sidi Musa Âri Âlik
2 Ahdi Rasek La Ifouzou Bik Al Qouman Ya Flan (and suite)
3 Ach Dani L-Bibi Tani (and suite)
4 Mellit Lghram
5 Malou Itghagha / Ana Mellit Lhoub
6 Âin Zora (and suite)
7 Wa Lhiha Wa Lhih
8 Qefla

320 | FLAC

L'Hajja L'Hamdaouya and her Âita Big Band

Here's another vintage album from âita pioneer L'Hajja L'Hamdaouya. These are some classic âita marsawiya and chaâbi tunes here, the sort you would hear typically with a small ensemble (oud, viola, derbuka, bendir) such as that of Bouchaib el Bidaoui. Hamdaouya performs them here with a larger ensemble including several violas, flute, and tar (tambourine). Interesting to hear the âita-style viola riffing with multiple violas, and the nice looooooose heterophony and prominent tambourine give these recordings an almost Arab-Andalusian âla vibe in places. And on top of that, it also manages to rock!

Some of these songs can be heard by other performers elsewhere in the Stash. "Ma Cheftou Leghzal" appears by Bouchaib el Bidaoui here. And "Elghaba" appears (in a version about 7 times faster) by Hamid Zahir and Alfarqat Almarrakchiya here. Enjoy!

L'Hajja L'Hamdaouya - TCK647
01 Errabta 1

02 Errabta 2
03 Essa'diya
04 Elghaba
05 Ma Cheftou Leghzal

Get it all here.

Taktouka Jbaliya with Abdelhak Lâaroussi

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 the Beni 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 - the Jbala 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)

Get it all here.

(1) Aydoun, Ahmed. Musiques du Maroc, Casablanca: Editions EDDIF, 1992, pp. 111,  my translation.

The contemplative side of Hamid Zahir

 

Most of Hamid Zahir's oeuvre is pretty formulaic, and it's a formula I love: uptempo, singalong Marrakchi party tunes with light, catchy, often humorous lyrics, an insistent percussive drive from darbuka and tar (tambourine), interlocking syncopated handclapping, call-response vocal punctuations, and Zahir's funky oud. This album, at least to my ear, deviates just slightly from that formula - most of the familiar ingredients are the same, but tempos are just a tad slower, the melodic modes tend toward the minor (track 3) or rast (tracks 1 & 4) rather than the major, and the lyrics seem somehow a little more world-weary than usual. Not as obsessive and bluesy as Rouicha's work, but more contemplative than the typical Hamid Zahir tape.

Speaking of tapes (and ignore this if you're not interested in how I edited the album), I own 2 cassette copies of this album, both of which have incorrect pitch - one too high and the other too low. (I wonder if I perceive this album as contemplative because for years I listened to a tape that ran lugubriously slowly.) I found what appears to be a CD rip online. I planned to use that to find the correct pitch. But the CD also contained "extended" or full versions of a couple of songs which faded out early on the cassettes. Conversely, one of my cassettes contained several extra phrases of Zahir's fantastic oud soloing at the beginning of two different songs, where the CD cuts into the solos late.

So here is my edit of the CD rip (which had better audio quality overall than my tape) with the missing opening phrases appended to the beginning of tracks 1 and 3 from my cassette, with pitch correction. Whew...

1) Tiqi Biya Rak Âziz
2) Haram Âlik ya Dunya
3) Mali ou Mal Ennas

4) Daba Iferrej Allah

Get it here.