May-June, 2004
Text and photographs by Banning Eyre
The 10th annual World Sacred Music in Fes, Morocco, proved a rich experience for the Afropop Worldwide team. Four of us spent a week in Fes, recording, photographing, filming, and interviewing an amazing array of artists. Our time in Fes gave us material for many radio programs, including "The Legacy of Al-Andalus: Part 2, North Africa and Beyond," and "Part 3: Reverberations," as well as "Youssou's Egypt: Senegal Looks East," and three programs about the festival itself.

The festival takes place over ten days in five venues, each very different, four of them located in one beautiful section of the old city of Fes, the medina. Fes is one of the only remaining cities in the world that still preserves aspects of its medieval life. The city's history goes back to the 8th century, and for over a century now, the medina has been protected as a kind of "living museum." Walking the narrow streets of this dense, interconnected, honeycomb metropolis, you find people pounding metal, carving wood and plaster, painting, laying tile, curing, dying, and stitching leather, and countless other manual activities all of which contribute to the city's amazing visuals. As we learned, there is a complex relationship between the artisinal and musical life of Fes. To begin with, people living in such close quarters have learned to make all the sounds associated with their work conform to unique rhythms. Work itself becomes music. One day, we followed two wandering Gnawa musicians as they roamed through a dazzling array of work zones, entertaining the workers.

Many people we spoke with talked about Fes as a city of artisans, and a place where people live in such close quarters that work takes on an unusual relationship to music. Musicians play for artisans as they work, and have since the dawn of life there in the 8th century. But more than this, the sounds made by workers must meet certain aesthetic standards. Each copper worker has a particular way of hammering so that anyone in earshot will know him by the sound of his tapping. And the tailors who sew the baboush slippers worn by men on the streets of Fes, work their stitching to a very specific rhythm. In short, music infuses every aspect of life in this city of creators. There are no cars and few machines in the city. Even the sound of a sewing machine is a relatively new arrival.

Fes has a longstanding reputation as a place of accord and amity between Muslims, Jews and Christians. It is an overwhelmingly Muslim place--One taxi driver, when told to go to a place near the Catholic church, asked, "What is a church?"--but that history of inter-faith dialogue, deeply related to the legacy of medieval Al-Andalus, is an important starting point for this festival. The World Sacred Music Festival was begun in the aftermath of the first Gulf War, as a way to bring about more dialogue between the world's faiths, and to showcase the beautiful, healing music associated with each of them.

As part of the festival, a series of seminars provided opportunities for literal dialogue between representatives of many faiths and social initiatives, all around the world. Unfortunately, wrapped up in the festival's extensive musical offerings, the Afropop team did not get to cover these seminars--yet another reason to return to this feast-like cultural celebration. There were also workshops and smaller concerts, some only loosely tied to the official festival. Suffice it to say that anyone coming to Fes during these 10 days will be all but overwhelmed with tantalizing choices. There is only so much one, or even four, people can do!

The grandest festival venue is the Bab Al Makina, a royal entrance to the medina built in 1886. Bab means "gate" or "doorway," and stunning, arched "babs," covered with fabulous ceramic work and other adornments, dot the medina's walled perimeter. But the Bab Makina is perhaps the grandest. Bathed in sunset light, fading to luscious stage lighting during an evening concert, it made as splendid a setting for the festival's headliners, including The Whirling Dervishes of Konya, Youssou N'Dour and Fathy Salama, Meher Ali and Sheher Ali (Qawwali musicians from Pakistan), Miriam Makeba, Sabah Fakhri and others.

Afternoon concerts took place under the generous, bird-filled arms of a spreading tree in the outdoor courtyard at the Batha Museum in the medina. These were more intimate events featuring, among others, The Dancing Monks of Tibet, Hussein Al Adhami of Iraq, and the Orchestra of Fes with guest singers Françoise Atlan and Aïcha Redouane. Between the official afternoon and evening concerts, there were a set of concerts free to the public, the so-called Festival in the City. This has proved a great innovation at the festival in recent years. The official concerts are quite expensive, far beyond the means of most residents of the medina. So the idea was to include these people in the spirit of the festival by offering some of the featured acts, and others, in public concerts that anyone could attend.

In a vast space near the Bab Boujloud, people poured out of the medina each afternoon to see and hear, among many others, the Fes Malhoun Orchestra, Hussein Al Adhami, The Taktouka Songs of Mohammed Gorfty (Jbel music from Morocco's northern mountains), and on the final afternoon of the festival, the Arc Gospel Choir of Harlem. These concerts had a rowdier feel than those in the Batha Museum, the Bab Makina, or the single concert that took place at the Volubilis Roman ruin, some two hours drive outside Fes. For the Afropop team, the Bab Boujloud concerts were especially satisfying, though. One really felt the presence of the people of Fes, in full celebration, and that was hard to beat.

After 11:00 pm each night, at Dar Tazi, the intimate locale of the festival headquarters, a truly remarkable concert took place. Sufi Nights! It has been said that before the French arrived, Morocco was a jigsaw puzzle of Sufi sects, or tariqas, literally "ways." The ins and outs of Morocco's Sufi orders today is a vast and complex subject, but these concerts, each featuring a different group, gave some insight into the diversity. Tariqa Jilalia of Fes featured flutes, following the spiritual prescription of an Iraqi Sufi mystic. Their concert wound up to ecstatic peaks at which point some rose to dance with the lead drummer. The Kamria Sqalliya gave a far more subdued a capella performance at which no one danced. Tariqa Aïssaouia gave the wildest performance we saw at Sufi night, where the dancing circles and singing along on the part of the young Moroccans present triggered an orgy of flash photography and video camera waving that some found unseemly--certainly not sacred. But the energy that night was astounding. The last Sufi group we saw, Tariqa Harraquia, pulled the pieces together, combining the spiritual slow build of the other groups with the use of oud and violin, elements from Andalusian music. In plain musical terms, it was among the most beautiful concerts of the entire festival.

Afropop Worldwide will present a total of three programs drawn from material gathered at the 2004 festival. These programs feature beautiful performances recorded at five different festival venues, as well as some private sessions, particularly those recorded at an amazing architectural and cultural enclave called Fes Hadara. Fes Hadara was once an Andalusian palace, and it is being meticulously restored by its owner, master plaster carver and cultural visionary Abdelfettah Seffar. We owe a great debt to Abdelfettah for his hospitality. He invited us into his fantastically beautiful home for an all night Gnawa lila, a house-blessing, and also for an unusual concert in which Andalusian and Gnawa musicians performed in a single ensemble. We also enjoyed a number of amazing conversations with artists, presenters, and thinkers we met along the way. Below are some excerpts from our interviews:

Jonathan Shannon is a musicologist specializing in Andalusian music. After much research in Syria, Jonathan was living in Fes with his wife Deborah Kapchan, who studies the Gnawa. We interviewed both of them. Here are some of their comments.

Jonathan Shannon. On the Fes festival: "This is a wonderful festival and you hear some great music here. Whether it's sacred or profane is besides the point because it's beautiful. It was the brainchild of Faouzi Skali 10 years ago, and it's developed over the last 10 years to become this remarkable worldwide event. What I mention this idea of profane music versus sacred music, the Fes Festival in itself in many ways undermines this distinction, the same way that the traditional music in Fes itself undermines any distinction between them. When you're hearing a religious group performing a religious ceremony on a stage at a great place like Bab Makina here in Fes, this is not the original location of the so-called sacred music. So it's in a sort of profane environment, a festival stage in front of the audience.

A number of the performers do not perform traditional sacred music alone. But I think for the founder, all music is to some degree sacred if it appeals to our higher instincts, if it moves us to joy and to contemplate the beauty of the world, and I think that about all the performers at the Fes Festival in to do this in one way or another, whether they are the dancing monks of Tibet or Sabah Fakhri or Youssou N'Dour, or Miriam Makeba or any of these wonderful artists who are coming. What brings them all together is that they are performing music that is joyful and that is meant to bring us out of our profane state, however temporarily, to a state of excitement, a state of Joy, a state of contemplation, whatever happens to be. So I think that is perhaps the most important message of this Festival.

On Moroccan Sufism: "In Suni Islam, Orthodox Islam, you have the Koran, prophetic traditions and a group of cheikhs, or holy men who are responsible for disseminating Islam learning. There is very little mediation between the individual and God. In North Africa, they have these holy personages, inappropriately called saints--that's a Christian term--or friends of God to have followers, who get spiritual blessings or "barika" and who have followers who get spiritual blessings through them, even after that persons deathSo in Moroccan Islam you have something very different what you will find in Syria or elsewhere. You have these Sufi orders that are based on personages such as Sidi Ahmed Tijani, that don't have to be particularly ancient. They can be a 150, 200 years old. They have their own rituals, their own liturgies, song styles and genres and so forth. In Morocco you have many of them. Tijaniyya. You have the Hamadja, Aissawa, Jilala. The Gnawa themselves are sometimes considered to be among these, although some do not consider them that way. But they are also a certain ritual ceremonial group. Very much a part of a North Africa tradition of worship that is somewhat different for much of find in the Arab east.

Deborah Kapchan, on the Gnawa: "Asking how the Gnawa relate to Islam is like asking how fish relate to water. They are Muslims. They have been Muslims for a very long time. Many of the people who originally came from sub-Saharan Africa were already Islamisized. They weren't pagan. Some were, however the misconception of the Gnawa as being somehow outside of the purview of respectable Islam is a misperception to a large degree, and this is why. They constantly invoke the Prophet Mohammed. They constantly sing praises to God. They sing praises to the saints of Islam. So it is extremely respectful in terms of its religious invocation. There are some elements, just as there are elements in Christianity, of pagan ceremonies, just as there are elements in most major religions that have filtered through, and those are the ones that are usually harped on in the press, both to make the Gnawa extremely exotic, to somehow separate them from notions of codified Islam, and to demean them at times. I think the Gnawa take offense at that, because they are Muslims, they are pious. It is a sacred ceremony, and it is a sacred Islamic ceremony for them, and has been since as far as historical memory exists in Morocco. So how do they relate to Islam? Just as any other Muslim relates to Islam. They have a particular ritual life, which is distinct, but there are many many Sufi paths in Morocco that also have their own way of praising God. The Gnawa do it in one particular way, and the Aissawa do it in another."

Various members of the Sufi group Tariqa Jilalia: "As with Gnawa, Hamadja, and others, this is therapeutic music. If people are sick psychologically, and ask for a lila, and through music, playing on colors and things, they're getting out the bad spirits. By remembering God, instead of going to the doctors, they can be healed by music."

"The heart of the music is the flute. You can't learn it. It's either you have it or you don't have it. It's like the legend of the man who was in front of the sea. The jilali came to him and told him to remember God using the flute. Playing the flute is remembering God. What the speech can't reach, the flute can."

"When I was 19 years old, I was down near the river, here in Fes, and a little girl appeared to me. She was taking a language that I thought was French, but then I looked at her feet and he saw that she was not human. At that point, I felt I was touched, and so the flute came to me. It was something given to him. My house was on the bank of the river, and I saw the girl going inside the river and disappearing. I thought she might be a siren, so I didn't want to follow her, but the result was that three months later, I became sick and went into a trance, and that led to my first experience with the Jilala. Then I took the flute and started to play, and when I came to the city, I met this man, and he was playing exactly the same tunes as I was."

Abdelfettah Sefar: is a master plaster sculptor and owner of Fes Hadara, a restored, Andalusian-style palace that he has made into a self-styled cultural center. We spent a lot of time Abdelfettah, and he shared with us his passion for Fes.

On plaster work: "It's a very ancient art, traced back to Byzantine and Roman times. Muslims took it and pushed it to be a highly abstract art. So there's no figurative representation. Its language is playing on geometry, floral design and calligraphy, all highly symbolic. You really have to work hard to penetrate its meaning. There's a technical side of it and symbolic side of it. Sufi culture, which is the fruit of the civilization, is dividing the world into "the apparent" and "the hidden." So this is the rhythm of the hidden. It's like a veil. God will only reveal Himself when the veil is lifted.

"The plasterwork is sometimes that veil. And through it the people will seek the experience of light and God. And plaster is almost this perfect material to express that because we find it in the heights. It's elevating; it's floating. So if I can show you, for example, in the courtyard of this house how the plaster is making the upper building look as if it's floating. Plaster is both a spiritual material and its dust. We are created from dust. God has fashioned us from dust. I have been doing pieces of plaster which have took me so many hours that they are priceless. So here we are from dust to something very valuable. The artisan of Fez is almost an alchemist--it's taking available materials and transforming them to be very, very expensive, and symbolic of course."

On artisans and musicians: "The history of the music in Fez is to be found in what we call the artisan mode. At the turn of the century when the French came, they found that 80 percent of the population of Fez were artisans. An artisan would be working with his hands, and to take pleasure, he will go to the music. Music was kind of a social thing; it wasn't professional. Music was actually the gathering of all the skills. For example, when I enter into my courtyard and I see the plasterer and the woodworker have worked together like a symphony. So the link between the visual and the music would be found exactly in the society of the artisans. If we take, for example, the babush (leather slippers), and we count the stitches we may find there are 365--everything was calculated, everything has got a rhythm.

On Fes: "I read that if you came to Fes for a day, you can write a book. If you stay a week, you may write an article. If you live in Fes, it's impossible to write anything. Fes is an organic city. Nobody has thought the city through--it was like everybody bringing something and adding it to the melting pot."

First published: www.afropop.org