Berklees New Program in Morocco Explores an African Musical Tradition The partnership with the Gnaoua and World Music Festival that helps musicians dig deeper into their artistry and bridge musical cultures.By
Kimberly Ashton
December 9, 2024
A quarter-century ago, Essaouira was mostly a quiet old port on the coastal edge of Morocco, out of the way for anyone not looking for it. Those who made pilgrimages there were mostly artists and musicians, including the likes of Jimi Hendrix and Carlos Santana, who came to explore a style of music that's said to be a musical wellspring from which the blues and other African-diaspora genres later arose.
Essaouira was a very interesting city but was really marginalized. It was like a hippie city, says Neila Tazi, owner of A3 Communications, a marketing and public relations agency that also organizes cultural events. In 1998, she and a group of friends decided the city would be a perfect spot to start a small festival for aficionados who had an interest in the region's distinctive Gnawa (also written as Gnaoua ) music.
Neila Tazi
Image courtesy of A3 Communications
It wasn't music we would see on stages or on TV, Tazi says. In 1999, A3 changed that by launching a free, open-air festival with one stage, and enjoyed a small success. Then word started to spread.
Within two years, nearly half a million people came to Essaouira to attend what some now call the Moroccan Woodstock, a multistage event featuring dozens of concerts. Over time, the Gnaoua and World Music Festival has turned the city into a year-round musical mecca. In December, 60 Minutes aired a 22-minute spot on the festival and the culture it celebrates.
If you say Montreux, you think jazz. If you say Cannes, you think cinema. And if you say Essaouira, you think Gnawa. It's totally linked now, Tazi, who is now also a senator in Morocco, says. And thanks to her efforts and those of her team, in 2019 Gnawa culture entered UNESCOs Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
Maria Iturriaga Martinez
Originally practised by groups and individuals from slavery and the slave trade dating back to at least the 16th century, Gnawa culture [combines] ancestral African practices, Arab-Muslim influences and native Berber cultural performances, the UNESCO inscription reads.
It's this cultural and musical richness that also attracted Berklee, which partnered with the festival in June to launch a concurrent six-day educational program designed for professional musicians from around the world.
Berklee had been looking for ways to further engage in Africa, and the festival had been on its radar for several years but the pandemic had put a potential partnership on ice. In 2022, the festival returned after a two-year hiatus, and last year, when Tazi reached out to Berklee, everyone agreed the timing was now right for a partnership.
Jason Camelio
The Gnaoua and World Music Festival was very much aligned with the values and the history that Berklee also represents, even more so with the fact that Berklee acknowledges in its mission [that it is] founded on the culture and music of the African diaspora, says Mar a Mart nez Iturriaga, senior vice president of Berklee Global.
The initiative ties into the work Berklee Global is doing in engaging with critically important musical traditions, says Jason Camelio, assistant vice president of global initiatives. It's arguable that the roots of the blues come from the Gnawa music tradition. If you really dig into the [Gnawa stringed] instrument-the guembri-and the spiritual tradition of the music, you're going to find that there are strong, strong connections, he says.
Origin StoriesLike distant cousins who share traits inherited from a common ancestor, many African-diaspora genres that later developed across the Americas can trace their lineage back to sounds that still reverberate through Gnawa music.
Leo Blanco
Image by Pamela Hersch
We stay with what is made here in this part of the Atlantic, and it's jazz or rap or you name it in Latin America. But there's not much consciousness among people in the Americas of what's going on in Africa and [that] we got a lot of our music from them, says Professor Leo Blanco, one of the five Berklee instructors who came from Boston and Valencia, Spain, to teach in the program. So I think that bridge needs to be re-established again in a different way.
The original connection Blanco is referring to was established by the slave trade as enslaved people were brought from sub-Saharan Africa to places such as Morocco, and beyond. With them came their music. Some say that the krakeb, an iron castanet that's prominent in the rhythmically rich and complex music of the Gnawa, came from the metal used to shackle slaves. Krakebs, along with a three-string bass lute called a guembri (a potential precursor to the banjo), constitute the genre's primary instruments, along with the voice.
Abdel Kander
Image by Nicolas Lemoine
In Morocco, sub-Saharan rhythms blended with Arabic and Sufi styles to produce a genre steeped in spirituality and used in ceremonies that induce trances, but in North America they took different paths and made their way into blues and jazz.
I try to get the Gnawi in John Coltrane, or the Gnawi in Dizzy Gillespie or in Thelonious Monk, says program participant Abdel Kander, a Moroccan bebop guitarist and Gnawa music enthusiast who works in cybersecurity in Paris. Some of the tunes really [lend] themselves quite easily to that sort of a rhythm and groove.
Anas Chlih, a Moroccan who's been playing the festival for 14 years and who attended the Berklee program, agrees: You discover when you start to research Moroccan music that jazz is in here already.
From left: Javier Vercher, Jamey Haddad 73, Ron
