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Nuits de la Mediterranee 2008: Review
July 1-7, 2008
Review by Elena Oumano
Photos by Michel De Bock and Raul Hernandez
World music fans may have journied to Morocco’s annual world music festivals in Fes and Essaouira, but few are aware of a smaller, equally rewarding and certainly more glam event taking place every summer in the northern city of Tangier. Under the patronage of the country’s forward-thinking monarch, His Majesty Mohammed VI, with the assistance of his cousins, two of ’s famously dynamic and socially conscious princesses, the fifth edition of Les Nuits de la Mediterrane was held from July 1 to 7, in the gorgeous Palais des Institutions, once home to
’s kings and queens. In fact, the festival was even more ambitious than its title suggests, drawing artists not only from the shores of the Mediterranean, but also from south of the Sahara.
The first night kicked off with the festival’s most rewarding surprise, Les 3MA, featuring Mali’s Rallake Sissoko on kora, the Manding harp/lute; Morocco’s Driss El Maloumi on oud (Arabic lute), and from Madagascar, Rajery on Valiha, a bamboo tube zither played by plucking strings, in this case made by bicycle brake cable that had been pried apart into long strands and propped up by small bridges.
Les 3Ma joined forces at the Festival Timitar d’Adgadir in 2006, and after witnessing the magical new musical entity they’ve created by honoring and blending their respective traditions—somehow celebrating differences while conflating them—you’ll wonder why no one thought to do this before. As their set unfolded, the trio weaved increasingly dense and flowing melodies and rhythms, working with a startling range of delicacy and force, as each musician took the lead while the others fell back to create supporting melodies and polyrhythms. Midway through the set, the trio’s deep well of musical imagination was complemented by each musician alternating on lead vocals and proving themselves to be equally enrapturing singers.
The evening’s second part followed a more classical mold: Ihsan Rmiki et l’Ensemble Zamane Al Waxl from Morocco, featuring the standard Arabic orchestral configuration—conga player/percussionist, double bass, violin, with Rmiki, a gorgeous singer who sat demurely, occasionally waving her hands in the air in front of her, as if to mirror the winding phrases of her delicately phrased minor key vocals.
The Festival’s second night was to have opened with Gnaouas de Tanger, who were M.I.A. but not missed, thanks to a lengthy, full-out performance from Cote d’Ivoire’s Dobet Gnahore. First heard via a blast of acapella vocals washing over the audience from offstage—showcasing a voice so resonant with operatic force and shaped by such sophisticatedly nuanced dynamics—Gnahore’s onstage appearance—surprisingly slight, young, with a punkish, razored sides-dreadlocked topped hairstyle—came as a surprise. As the musicians strolled onstage to back Gnahore with a rolling Afropop beat, she took absolute charge, evoking no less a mistress of charisma than Angelique Kidjo. But when this artist danced, she leapt far ahead of any other African singer/dancer, male or female. Defying normal constraints of the human body, this 26 year-old hunkered down into a Russian cossack’s squat and danced from that position with lightning speed, her feet creating lightning-quick rhythms to complement the drums and percussion. With unparalleled athletic grace, she leapt like Nureyev, arching her body into impossible shapes and lines, creating a profoundly African yet highly personalized dance style that bridges all borders, between male and female, tribes, countries, and even evoked at times the stark drama of Western modernist choreography. Gnahore’s galvanizing stage presence, versatile songwriting—in languages unfamiliar to some but clearly brimming with outrage, deep sadness, and joy—along with her skill on the drum (traditionally the province of men only) and other instruments signify the New African Woman. Her promise is not only of her total self but of an imminent future in which more and more bold and gifted females emerge from the Mother continent.
Other nights could hardly be expected to measure up to the first two, but they entertained with classic Arabic music ensembles, salsa from Venezuela, and flamenco, classical and Nuevo. Sunday was a night of Iberian deconstruction, with Le Duo Anna Yerno, featuring a slim wraith of a dancer in a black unitard rather than petticoats, flashing the requisite flamenco hauteur albeit with a sparer, attenuated, even ironic approach to her art. Her sole musical accompaniment, a pianist working in an occasionally atonal modernist mode, also partnered Yerno in the performance’s stylized lover’s drama. She opened by striding onstage and then curling herself into a ball on the floor, from which she unfurled each of her limbs with exquisite slowness—a clean and deceptively simple choreography that requires extreme control. Yerno also has a Nuevo means of creating flamenco’s staccato gypsy rhythms. Using a drum as well as two hard objects on strings that she worked like a high school baton twirler in order to tattoo rhythms on the floor, she enriched and complemented her footwork, making up for the lack of percussionists and other musicians and keeping the focus always on her.
While Yerno’s considerable skills were only slightly offset by the circuslike quality of her various “tricks” and a slight whiff of pretension, the latter quality virtually defined the singer/songwriter/guitarist that followed, featuring Mayte Martin, another Nuevo deconstructionist who takes herself very, very seriously. Capturing all the emotional torture of the flamenco singer but lacking in the perspective that elevates the merely personal into the universal, Martin came off as gifted but overwrought and self-involved.
The Festival closed, fittingly, with a showcase of youth, including leading Moroccan hip hop/break dancing outfit, Break or die Crew and Toumback, an ensemble of young body percussionists, as well as a somewhat older Duo Berimba, featuring Stephane Grosjean on berimba and Beatrice Reuther on guitar.
A glance at Morocco’s packed summer music festival lineup suggests that one could spend an entire three months there, traveling from one music fest to another. It’s a fantasy well-worth pursuing, especially since many of these wonderful artists have yet to cross U.S. borders, and unless needed changes happen soon, we may never have the opportunity to see them perform here.
Contributed by: Elena Oumano
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