Gnawa
The 5 Best Gnawa
Tracks of All Time
Moroccan trance music carried north by enslaved West Africans and played through the night at healing ceremonies: a three-string bass lute, iron castanets, and one pattern held until something gives.
- Origin
- Essaouira and Marrakech, Morocco, 1600
- Tempo
- 70–120 BPM
- Also known as
- gnaoua, guinbri music, lila
- Tracks
- 5
- Updated
- 2026-08-30
Listen to the whole list
Play it through here →One record after another, with the verdicts
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Number 1: Maalem Mahmoud Guinia / Colours of the Night
2013
The master of the guinbri recorded in Casablanca, doing exactly what he would do at a lila. No concession to a listening audience, and it is the most hypnotic record in this part of the corpus.
Number 2: Maalem Mahmoud Guinia with James Holden and Floating Points / Marhaba
2015
A week in a hotel outside Marrakech with two British electronic producers who had the sense to mostly get out of the way. The rare fusion where nobody is being borrowed from.
Number 3: Maalem Mahmoud Guinia / Aicha
1998
Released on cassette, which is how most of this music actually circulated for fifty years before anyone abroad was listening. The unpolished version, and the better one.
Number 4: Nass El Ghiwane / Ya Sidi
1974
Not a gnawa group, and unthinkable without gnawa. Nass El Ghiwane put the guinbri and the ceremony's rhythms into protest songs, and Morocco has not sounded the same since.
Number 5: Nass El Ghiwane / Bouderbala
1976
Scorsese called them the Rolling Stones of Africa, which undersells the strangeness. Percussion, a banjo, and lyrics old enough that nobody is sure who wrote them.
Also on 1976