MUSIC
Saha Gnawa’s New Album Fuses Moroccan Gnawa With NYC Jazz
The ensemble honors Moroccan tradition and North African futurism on their self-titled debut album.
The group takes its name from the Moroccan expression “B’saha,” a common toast or blessing that means “health.” Often shortened to “Saha,” the word also carries more informal meanings — such as welcome, enjoyment, and good vibes.
by Justin Lane
A group of musicians meets in a bar in Bed Stuy, sets up, and starts on time. An elderly man begins playing the gimbri, a three-stringed, skin-covered lute. Two singers join him in a call and response chant while clicking qraqeb, metal castanets, between their fingers. Their voices are floating on top of the rhythm, creating a different beat from their hands.
The other musicians chime in with percussion, keys, and the guitar, and at first, they may not be perfectly aligned. They may never have heard this song. However, the group soon falls into a rhythm, discovers a feeling and a way to communicate, and enters into a musical trance that makes it difficult to believe that this performance is not rehearsed.
Introducing Gnawa: a Transcendent Form of Moroccan Music
This is the magic of Morocco’s Gnawa music as it is honored and explored by Saha Gnawa, a New York-based ensemble. They have just released their eponymous first album, a spiritual and experimental song cycle.
“I’ve always loved Gnawa music, ever since I first heard it in the 90s. My hair stood up immediately; it had a huge impact. Like when you hear Aretha Franklin or Umm Kulthum,” Daniel Freedman tells OkayAfrica.
A drummer, percussionist, and composer from New York, Freedman considers himself a student of Gnawa music. “Anytime people hear [it], they feel better,” he says.
Gnawa music is rooted in spirituality and was brought to Morocco and Algeria by the Gnawa people, descendants of West African slaves. The musical tradition is passed down by a maâlem, a teacher/master, who understands Gnawa’s cosmology of colors as they relate to particular songs.
A maâlem must travel all across the country and learn all the traditions, to know how the singing, instrumentation, and lyrics differ depending on the various Gnawa schools.
Freedman spent time in Marrakech and Essouira practicing with the masters. His band colleague, Amino Belyamani, grew up in Morocco, where Gnawa was always at celebrations. “As a teenager, I would try to find the musicians and hang with them instead of being with everyone else at the wedding,” he shares.
When he moved to the US for college, he met other Moroccans who love the genre and realized that he did not merely have to be a spectator. “I was like, ‘Wait, I’m Moroccan. I’m a musician. I should probably also play [Gnawa],’” he says with a chuckle.
The Genesis of Saha Gnawa: A Spiritual Convergence
In 2009, Belyamani also moved to New York. On one fateful summer day, he was terribly ill with the flu. A friend picked him up and took him to an apartment where a group of Moroccans were playing Gnawa with Maâlem Hassan Ben Jaafer. “I was healed that night,” he says. Such all-night rituals are known as lila and are at the heart of the Gnawa tradition.
Nearly two decades later, Belyamani and Freedman play with Maâlem Jaafar as often as they can. Co-led by Freedman and Maâlem Jaafar, Saha Gnawa channels a fusion of jazz, groove, and the centuries-old healing frequencies of Gnawa’s Sufi chants and instruments in Brooklyn.
“For lack of a better expression, Maâlem Jaafar is ‘the real deal,’” says Freedman. “He really senses the moment and what’s gonna happen.” Maâlem Jaafar has mastered a vast repertoire of Gnawa songs and leads the ensemble through ever-new songs in a symbiosis that cannot be rehearsed, but must be felt.
Gnawa music is made up of a wealth of heritage that goes beyond even Belyamani’s grasp. Every song is learned the moment it is first played. “It’s repetition and it takes years.”
“The musicians that would collaborate in that kind of environment have to be really flexible, have big ears, and also have a background in understanding rhythm in a way that fits with this,” says Freedman.
Another member of the group is Jason Lindner, a jazz pianist who did all the synths on David Bowie’s Blackstar. Then there’s Román Díaz, who Freedman describes as “one of the great Cuban percussionists and just a virtual library of information.”
Like his Brazilian bandmates, percussionist Gustavo Di Nalva and guitarist Guilherme Monteiro, Díaz finds direct connections with the flow of Gnawa, Cuban, and Brazilian music.
Belyamani first experienced these kinds of experimental fusions when he used to attend the Gnawa Music Festival in Essaouira as a teenager. Keeping the spirit of the genre at the forefront, the festival invites jazz musicians from all over the world to collaborate with the masters.
These artistic collaborations are about exploring sounds that are bigger than oneself; there is no space for the ego.
Still, Saha Gnawa’s style is unique because of the location where it was born. Moroccans frequently recognize the ensemble's fast-paced energy that is fueled by life in the metropole rather than the desert.
“There’s no maâlem right now in Morocco that is in tune to this audience the way that Maâlem Jaafar is, “says Belyamani. “He’s so flexible and open-minded.”
“For this record, we set up in the studio and played with no headphones, like a gig,” says Freedman. They recorded Saha Gnawa in just one session and added a few extra vocals, a guitar, or, in the case of “Tbal,” a Yoruba prayer that transforms the record into a Pan-African celebration.
“The idea is to let the beauty of Gnawa be the center, and then we keep finding new ways to support and move it,” explains Freedman. “There’s a lot of information in there, but it never takes away from what it is.”
Whether one is familiar with the transcendent sounds of Gnawa music or not, Saha Gnawa conveys an undeniable energy that will be felt by anyone willing to open themselves to its rhythms.
