The 5 best Gnawa tracks of all time
Gnawa
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.
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Maalem Mahmoud Guinia / Colours of the Night
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.
Maalem Mahmoud Guinia with James Holden and Floating Points / Marhaba
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.
Maalem Mahmoud Guinia / Aicha
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.
Nass El Ghiwane / Ya Sidi
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.
Nass El Ghiwane / Bouderbala
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.
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