72 Hours at the Gnaoua and World Music Festival

Essaouira is the spiritual capital of Gnaoua music, and for those who cannot resist its trance-inducing rhythms, the Gnaoua and World Music Festival is a necessary annual pilgrimage. This year, from June 25-27, I witnessed this transformative and spiritual experience on behalf of OkayAfrica.

The Gnaoua and World Music Festival is the biggest gathering of Gnaoua musicians; it has invited the world to witness and collaborate with this Moroccan tradition since 1998. Every year, the maâlems’ (master musicians) rhythms encounter sounds from other places — jazz, blues, rock, reggae, traditional music — to create unprecedented fusions that create bridges to the African diaspora, South America, Asia and Europe. 

Named after an ethnic group living in Morocco who were brought there as enslaved people from West Africa and Sudan, Gnaoua music combines African, Arab Muslim, and Amazigh elements. The Gnaoua have no written history; theirs is an oral, living history that is re-enacted every time they play their music. It is usually played at lilas, a ritual where people in need of physical or spiritual healing gather to witness and move alongside dancing singers. The ritual is held by the mâalem who sings lead on the ceremonial call-and-response chants. Once in a trance, people can become possessed by and communicate with jnun (spirits), which the Gnaoua believe exist around them at all times.

Despite these specific roots, there’s no genre that the rhythmic clacking of qraqeb (iron castanets) and the strings of a guembri (a three-stringed bass lute) cannot fuse with.

Day 1

6 PM

All of Essaouira gathers to welcome the opening parade as it passes through the medina. Each Gnaoua troupe wears colorful garments that are not only visually striking but deeply embedded in Tagnaouite’s cosmology. The musicians are clicking their qraqeb, and some are pounding drums as they dance through the medina, jumping and forming loose circles in choreography. When they see my camera, they smile and click their qraqeb toward me without missing a beat or slowing their song. The Gnaoua troupes are intergenerational; little children walk alongside old men, and every now and then, I see some women. 

8:30 PM

Opening the festival with a free concert, Moroccan guembri specialist Mehdi Nassouli and his troupe grace the main stage on Place Moulay Hassan, a large square hugging the Atlantic. His music converses with several traditions from Rwanda, India, and France. Troupe I Buhoro joins the concert with the traditional Rwandan warrior dance, and Sylvain Barou plays his wind instruments. Moroccan singer Sara Moullablad joins for an electrifying performance that has the large crowd jumping, before Indian musician ganavya amazes the audience with Indian devotional singing. This is the first of many one-of-a-kind performances over the next three days. 

10 PM

I walk around the square to take in the many different people and languages that have come together in this remote town. Moroccan grandmothers are sitting on small camping chairs, undisturbed by the groups of young men and women pushing past them, dancing along to the music of Maâlem Mohamed Kouyou and looking up whenever they hear an unfamiliar language. “It feels like a pilgrimage,” an American music professor tells a fellow American. A French lady scolds a young Moroccan man who shakes his head and says, “It’s always a French person complaining, goddamit.” Image URL: marokko-52.jpg

11 PM

Ethiopian singer Selamnesh Zéméné and Badume’s Band take over the stage. The descendant of a long line of Asamris, Zéméné is the keeper and innovator of a special musical tradition in Ethiopia, not unlike the Gnaoua in Morocco. She is joined by rising star Maâlem Mohamed Montari, who represents a new generation of masters that balance deep-rooted tradition with contemporary musical fusions. 

Day 2 

4 PM

I meet with festival organizer and founder Neila Tazi at the historical fortification Borj Bab Marrakech. “There’s a before and after the first festival here in Essaouira,” says Tazi, who grew up hearing Gnaoua music in her home. “This culture was so marginalized, you’d never see a Gnaoui on a stage or on TV. They’d be playing in the streets or in the houses.”

When she first started planning the festival in the mid 1990s, any international musicians she reached out to for a possible fusion concert immediately said yes. “They were very interested; money was not an issue,” she says. “They just wanted to spend three or four days immersed in Gnaoua music. The message that something special was happening in Morocco spread quickly.” 

This strong interest motivated Tazi and her team to continue organizing the festival, which has evolved from initial jams to world-class concerts, a Human Rights Forum, and several other initiatives, such as an immersive musical training program in association with Berklee College. 

Tazi spearheaded the initial submission to get Gnaoua music inscribed on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. “This is not the end of something; it’s the beginning. You have to preserve this heritage and bring more awareness to it,” she says. “Gnaoua are descendants of slaves. Here in Morocco, they’re the symbol of human development. Getting this recognition means a lot about what you can reach when you do hard work.” 

8:30 PM

The roof of the Borj turns into a stage with carpets laid out all over. We are here to see Asma Hamazoui, the daughter of Maâlem Rachid Hamzaoui and the first female maâlema. In a tradition that is overwhelmingly male-dominated, she has opened up space for women’s practice with a deep voice and stage presence that send chills through the audience.

11 PM

At the Dar Souiri cultural center, a beautiful riad built in 1907, I finally get a sense of what a real lila might look like. Maâlem Aziz Soudani and his troupe of six men, wearing royal blue jellabas with orange turbans and belgha ( pointy yellow leather slippers), initiate the audience into the night with their singing and clanking qraqeb. Soudani is old and thin, but he plays the guembri with impressive fervor, signaling to his troupe when to change rhythm, move, or sing in a certain way. 

Next, a second troupe led by Maâlem Najib Soudani takes over, wearing red jellabas and chachias, colorful hats adorned with shells. Soudani is from Essaouira, and his style is funkier than most others, so they wake us from our trance and start a party within minutes. One of the musicians dances, invites the people in the front row to join him, and suddenly everyone’s jumping, shaking their hair, singing along to all the songs. When you listen closely to the lyrics, there is consistent praise of Prophet Mohammad and reverence for God; this ritual is a fluid, playful worship that is not to be witnessed, but to be experienced through participation. 

Before we know it, they end their performance and make space for the third maâlem of the night, Abdelkadir Amlil. His troupe is wearing brown and green jabadors and sirwels, green hats, and belgha. They build on the heightened energy that the last troupe cultivated and immediately get people up and dancing. It is past midnight, and I have had a long day, but I cannot get myself to leave. When they tell us to dance, I do, and when I sit back down on my poof, I close my eyes and feel the strings of the guembri resonate in my chest. I feel myself entering a meditative state, focusing only on the music.

Day 3 

4 PM

I begin the third day at The Talking Tree, a dialogue series of intimate encounters between maâlems and international musicians held on the roof of the French Institute. There, I sit down with Maâlem Abdelslam Alikane, one of the founding pillars and the festival’s primary artistic director.

“The festival’s goal is to share as much as possible of this tradition,” he says. “Right now, we’re only sharing about 50 - 70% of the Gnaoua tradition, and the road is still very long.” The festival has helped create an ecosystem that connects the maâlems and musicians, providing a framework through which they can work to preserve this living heritage. 

When Alikane plays at festivals around the world, he meets musicians whom he invites to Essaouira to collaborate with Gnaoua musicians. “Gnaoua music is like a chameleon,” he says. “If you are professional and you listen well, it can adapt to any other music, because music is a global language that we can speak to each other with even when we don’t know each other.” 

Do these fusions risk the purity and sacredness of Gnaoua tradition? “No,” says Alikane. “The tradition exists and continues in the houses and the families.” 

7 PM

Back at Borj Bab Marrakech, Lebanese alternative music legend Yasmine Hamdan delivers an emotionally charged concert. Alongside a band of three, her electronic music envelopes the audience in an eerie soundscape punctuated by her voice. She sings a Palestinian song and a tribute to Beirut that makes several people cry. In the spirit of the festival, she invites three young Gnaoua musicians on stage, who seamlessly blend their clanking qraqeb with her band’s instruments.

11 PM

The final event I attend is the most spiritual and transformative. Away from the main stages, I walk through narrow, winding roads to Zaouia Sidna Bilal, a discreet 18th-century building with a beautifully yellow-and-red-tiled courtyard. It is the only permanent sanctuary for the Gnaouias in the whole of Morocco and is named after Bilal, a freed slave who became Prophet Mohammad’s first black follower and Islam’s first muezzin. 

Maâlem Nourredinne Mdoula is playing with his troupe, who are sitting on cushions on the floor, unlike the others, who are standing behind their microphones. The musicians are wearing red trousers, blue jellabas, and red tarbouches with blue tassels. One of them gets up to dance and invites the audience to step in front and move with the sound. Several people make their way through the crowd and start dancing, clapping, and losing themselves in a trance. Some women wave their long hair so intensely that others have to steady them to make sure they don’t collide with the wall. When the song ends, a man lightly slaps a woman’s face to bring her consciousness back into the present moment.

Maâlem Mokhtar Gania, or, as one man introduces him to me, “The Michael Jackson of Morocco,” continues the night with his troupe. His guembri is painted in funky red, gold, green, and glitter. It’s past 1 AM, and I am tired again, leaning my back against the wall and feeling the music move through my body. I doze off - or am I meditating? Then I come back to myself, get up, shake my head, dance with a group of women around me, and sit back down. I do this for another hour, and when the lila finally concludes, I am filled with gratitude, joy, and a profound sense of serenity.