[FA Worldmusic] Joe Boyd's Guardian Article about the Fez Festival of Sacred Music

[Evangeline Kim]

Here's a copy of Joe Boyd's fine article about his visit to the recent Fez
Festival published today in the Guardian.

Best,
Evangeline
Plink, plink Fez
Joe Boyd visited Morocco in 1968, the year Brian Jones recorded the 'Pipes of
Pan' in Jajouka. A return visit to the latest world music festival reveals the
challenges of searching for authenticity

Joe Boyd
Saturday June 28, 2008

Guardian

Brian Jones had a miserable trip to Morocco. After Keith Richards stole his
girlfriend, he followed Paul Bowles's advice to head into the hills above
Tangier, to record pre-Islamic Berber trance music in the village of Jajouka.
He made the recordings, but during a night of hashish hallucinations saw
himself as a sacrificial goat ready for slaughter. On his return to Britain,
he was kicked out of the Rolling Stones, then drowned in suspicious
circumstances. As a memorial, the Stones issued his Moroccan recordings on
their label; in my view, it was the first "world music" recording.
Recordings of "foreign" music had, until then, been sanitised exotica such as
the "Banana Boat Song" and "Wimoweh", or exportable indigenous commercial LPs
of Latin dance music, or academic field recordings. Jones was the first to
take an exotic music on its own authentic terms for no other reason than that
he thought it would be entertaining for outsiders.

His motives foreshadowed our own: he felt the Stones had lost their early R&B
edge and gone soft with pop success. In Jajouka, he sought a return to the raw
energy of the blues records that had maddened his parents back in Cheltenham.
The rise of world music in the 1980s was triggered in part by our own
disillusion with pop and a search for the kind of energy we once found in
Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix, Otis Redding, Bob Dylan or even the Stones.

World music festivals today fall into two groups. A quest for authenticity
leads audiences to experience "local culture" at events in the Sahara desert,
Zanzibar, Essaouira, the Spanish and Colombian Cartagenas, Rajasthan, Siberia,
Hungary, Salento, Jamaica and Brazil. Then there are the various Womad and
other festivals throughout the European summer that present as wide a variety
as possible. The first Womad festival, held in 1983 at the ICA in London's
Pall Mall, included a concert that captured the range of the world's music.
The opening "act" was an Aboriginal group from Arnhem Land who chanted while
banging stones together. The second half was a set by the Frank Chickens, a
pair of Japanese women who sang themes from monster movies to backing-track
cassettes.

As enjoyable as Womad is, I try to avoid events where samba follows Afrobeat,
then a bit of Algerian rai hits the stage before some Cajun two-step. Morocco
remains an important centre for world music, and I have long been intrigued by
the Fez World Sacred Music festival, which began 14 years ago in the wake of
the first Gulf war as a government-sponsored gesture to show the all-embracing
face of Islam. Most concerts are single-artist events in the romantic settings
of this ancient city: afternoon recitals, for example, are in an Andalucian
garden beneath the largest oak tree I have ever seen.

Evening showcases are held at the Bab al Makina, a royal entrance to the
medina, surrounded by forbidding serrated walls and lit by the brightest of
moons. The highlight at this venue was the closing concert by Saudi vocalist
Mohamed Abdou, who sang lyrics by Persian Gulf poets in front of an Arabic big
band of strings, hand-held percussion and an unveiled girl chorus.

The Panti Pusaka Budaya dance ensemble brought wonderful costumes and dance
from Bali to the big stage. The gong virtuosi were as thrilling as the
dancing; you could see why Benjamin Britten was astounded by their skills when
he visited the island in 1956. There was an undercurrent of recompense in this
event, as the high Hindu culture of Java had been exiled to Bali in the 17th
century by Muslim invaders.

The festival prides itself on "rencontres", collaborations between artists
from contrasting cultures. The first was an unpromising mix of New Orleans
gospel and Pakistani qawwali. Craig Adams and his backing vocalists gave a
good old-school account of themselves (rescuing "Amazing Grace" from its
mangling by Jessye Norman on opening night) and played memorably with Faiz Ali
Faiz, nephew of the renowned singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. It was intriguing
to watch Faiz counting an eight-bar gospel song in the 16 beats of Indian
classical music. Faiz soared above the gospel harmonies in beautiful sorties
while the girl chorus sang Qur'anic phrases.

Another successful pairing revealed how Mary and Jesus are venerated by Middle
Eastern Sufi Brotherhoods. Julian Weiss, who conceived the Christian-Islamic
Stabat Mater, is a classically trained Frenchman who moved to Syria to master
the qanun, a plucked zither that decorates much of Middle Eastern music. His
Al-Kindi Ensemble combined with Greek Orthodox singers and musicians to
produce a fascinating evening of liturgical music that made clear the common
roots of both traditions. Two dervishes whirled while a black-robed chorus of
bearded monks chanted venerations to Mary.

These connections were even more movingly expressed by Ghada Shbeir, a
Maronite from Beirut who gave a recital of ancient Christian songs,
accompanied by qanun under the giant oak. Her voice at first sounded Arabic,
with inflections typical of the region, but it was possible to detect the
signature intervals of early European music. Many songs were in Aramaic, the
pre-Hebrew language of Palestine spoken by Jesus.

I first visited Fez 40 years ago, the same year Brian Jones recorded in
Jajouka. I was refused passage on the Gibraltar-Tangier ferry because my hair
was too long. So I sat for three days, furious and shorn, awaiting the next
boat and contemplating the collision of hippies and the developing world. As
Morocco was trying to modernise, along came a horde of westerners saying "turn
back, don't waste your time, you're fine just as you are".

Such conflicts have recurred often in my years as a record producer:
traditional musicians have had to be dissuaded from "updating" their music.
They are told that the world music audience wants not slick production using
the latest gadgets, but authenticity, spontaneity and virtuosity, recorded
like a classic Blue Note jazz LP.

These thoughts came to me as I watched the third "rencontre" crash and burn.
Ismakl Lt, like fellow countrymen Baaba Maal and Youssou N'Dour, prefers to
combine the mbalax rhythms of Senegal with mid-Atlantic modernity. When the
advertised collaboration with a local Sufi ensemble fell flat, Lt's soft
reggae and rap drove away most of the audience.

Audience unity was patchy: Moroccan and Lebanese vocalists who owed more to
Ciline Dion than to Oum Kalsoum failed to hold the foreigners' attention,
while hometown crowds were largely absent from Vietnamese and Indian recitals.
The audiences came together most convincingly at the free Sufi concerts in the
garden of Dar Tazi at the end of each evening. Foreigners watched as the
locals joined the tariqas in singing the ancient texts, all swaying back and
forth in time. One night, the women of the Tuareg nomad group Tartit began
chanting and playing hand drums while one of their number moved to the front
of the stage and sat opposite one of the men. The rhythm was stark yet supple,
complex and, once you got the hang of it, sensual. The pair at the front began
to move from the waist up, arms extended in delicate gestures, shoulders
vibrating in time to the music. All were dressed in shiny, voluminous robes,
the men veiled by desert scarves, the women's hair elaborately beaded above
indigo-decorated faces. The audience sat transfixed as this erotic song
continued for 20 minutes.

Another potentially unifying concert was sadly under-promoted by the
organisers and attended almost exclusively by local youth. The Moroccan band
Nass el Ghiwane have been around since the 60s, rebels influenced by rock, but
with a passion for their country's traditions. They have retained a mass
following and their free concert at Bab Boujeloud was packed. As the sky
turned pink, and swallows swooped over the walls of the old city, packs of
kids tossed each other skyward and roared along with the choruses like a
football crowd. With red-cloaked Gnawa-dancing sidemen, soaring unison vocals
and ecstatic rhythms, they were a group to dazzle foreigner and local alike, a
Moroccan Rolling Stones.

It is tempting to imagine that musical meeting points such as Fez can play a
role in fostering improved international understanding. But rap music is the
real soundtrack of world culture today; it provides a style touchstone for
gangs in ghettos and favelas the world over. The world music represented by
the Fez festival has perhaps a similar status to the Slow Food movement,
Greenpeace or the various bodies set up to preserve architectural heritage.
Yet little by little, I hope, mankind is being forced to pay attention to the
best kind of old-fashioned ways.

In Fez, I got to know a young Moroccan who restores houses - and loves
traditional music. Most of his neighbours in the medina, he says, long to move
to a modern apartment in the Nouvelle Ville outside the walls. But many who
have moved there now tell him they want to come back. He, meanwhile, trains
young craftsmen in the techniques that built this magical city, where the
urban clamour includes everything imaginable save the sound of the engine. It
may not change the world, but I can recommend sitting under an ancient oak
listening to even older vocal and instrumental techniques as a way to gather
inspiration for the struggles to come.

7 Joe Boyd is the author of White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s
(Serpent's Tail). He is writing a book on world music.

guardian.co.uk ) Guardian News and Media Limited 2008