Festival Gnaoua

Faced with the decision of whether to stay in Marrakech or move to Fez, we make the obvious choice; we jump in a car with Nathalie, her boyfriend Remy and friend Jamal, and drive to Essaouira for the weekend to see the annual Festival de Gnaoua.

The festival, now in its 9th year, attracts over 200,000 people and is one of the major cultural events in the country. While Morocco has lots of interesting music, it’s not an easy place to see performances. It seems Moroccans don’t have a big tradition of paying to see live music, and so the major musical events are all free festivals.





Gnaoua is a form of music that comes from African slaves mixed through Arab and Berber traditions in North Africa. The heavily rhythmic form is meant to bring both performers and audience into a therapeutic trance through which evil spirits are exorcised. The snippets of chanting and drumming we’ve heard in Marrakech are quite compelling, though gnaoua seems to attract a certain sort of searching Westerner that we don’t necessarily need to spend the weekend with.




Given our preconceptions, we’re a little dubious about attending, but we’ve been excited about seeing some local music, and if we’ve going to look down our noses at something, better to have a little first-hand experience. Let me say that if you are a white guy with dread locks, you simply can’t afford to miss this festival.





For the rest of us, my recommendations are more qualified. There are eight stages with music playing from mid afternoon till late into the night. The programming is pretty diverse from very traditional gnaoua to jazz-fusion acts and gnaoua-infused raggae.



The festival is attended by tout le monde. There are groups of slightly menacing teens and young men everywhere who regularly start fights with one another for no apparent reason - just minutes after joyfully dancing in a circle together. There are couples of all ages, tourists of every ilk, though leaning towards the hippy, and perhaps most surprisingly families.



During the day there are lots of kids, as what kid doesn’t like a photo-op on a dressed-up pony, though we were surprised to see kids as young as four taking in the concerts at 12:30 at night. Throughout Morocco, we’ve noticed that parents seem much less preoccupied with bedtimes than their American counterparts.



There are also a huge number of elderly women fully veiled. I don’t know what the American version of a 70-year-old veiled woman is, but I doubt she’s taking in Phish concerts with her granddaughter.





As for the music, we took in parts of five shows, and really preferred the more traditional shows to their electric-fusions counterparts. The raw plaintive singing coupled with propulsive rhythms of drums and castanets is indeed powerful. Still, the variety was a little overwhelming; we both wished we had a musical curator with us to guide us through the shows. We kept feeling there was something great on another stage that we were missing.



Will we come back to the festival? Probably not – though I am curious to find a best-of-gnaoua CD to learn a bit more about the form.

And finally, the morning after….