Jazz at Berlin Philharmonic XVII: Gnawa World Blues

Jazz at Berlin Philharmonic XVII: Gnawa World Blues

CD / Vinyl / digital

Majid Bekkas guembri, oud & vocals
Nguyên Lê guitar & backing vocals
Hamid Drake drums

Three continents, three musical world citizens. Morocco-born Majid Bekkas, Franco-Vietnamese Nguyên Lê and American Hamid Drake have combined their astonishing musicality, their origins and their global experiences to create a captivating live concert programme encompassing desert blues, Gnawa trance, Middle Eastern jazz, sixties rock and Far Eastern serenity.

Voice, oud and guembri (bass lute)...electric guitar with a wide spectrum of shimmering timbres...a percussion arsenal between subtlety and physicality – these are the tools deployed here by three remarkable, world-class, globe-trotting protagonists... Majid Bekkas's innovations have cast a wholly new light onto the fascinating music and culture of the Gnawa minority in Morocco, and he has also worked with jazz greats such as Joachim Kühn, Archie Shepp and Pharoah Sanders, and, most recently, with the Magic Spirit Quartet, whose recordings for ACT have built a bridge between Nordic and African sound worlds. Among the very great guitarists of our time, Nguyên Lê stands out as one of the most exciting and individual personalities, having developed a unique style in which Southeast Asian melodies, complex jazz harmonies and highly virtuoso excursions into rock naturally co-exist. Chicago-born Hamid Drake, with his intuitive feel for many of the world’s percussion traditions and his background of varied collaborations from Don Cherry over Peter Brötzmann to Melba Moore, provides an improbably wide range of rhythmic impulses.

The repertoire which the three performed so memorably on 10 November 2024 reflects a tremendous wealth of ideas which fuse and coalesce. The opening track ‘Gore Blues has a reflective blues melody played in unison by oud and voice over a strumming guitar... then we hear an animated, five-note ‘trialogue’ between lute, electric guitar and delicate cymbal work. Then, with ‘Mrahba’, the trio enters the realm of traditional Gnawa music: here are Lê and Drake creating a rocky, funky mood, while Bekkas’s powerful incantations over a rearing bass riff create a trance. ‘Boom Boom’ - in tribute to John Lee Hooker - gets going like a heavy, rolling, yet organic blues machine – the way in which Bekkas breaks away from his roots here is utterly astonishing. 'Ascending Dragon' offers a meditative interlude... thumb piano… a melody thoughtfully hummed, Nguyên Lê ornamenting the melodic line brilliantly. Then, as a high-spirited antidote to this, Bekkas, Lê and Drake interpret Jimi Hendrix's ‘Purple Haze’, initially very close to the original, before the new middle section recalls the guitar hero's journey to the Gnawa stronghold of Essaouira in July 1969. ‘Tair’ starts as a free oud improvisation, which then stimulates the interplay of the two string masters. And in the finale “Sidi Bouganga”, the trio ignites the joyful side of the Gnawa language with a hymn-like, exuberant tone.

Three stellar musicians have drawn on their musical heritages – and created a celebration of human kinship which is breathtakingly alive.

Credits:
Recorded live at Philharmonie Berlin on November 10, 2024
Recorded, mixed and mastered by Klaus Scheuermann
Cover art by Mohamed Melehi © 1969 (untitled), Casablanca Art School © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2025