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The Festival Gnaoua y Músicas del Mundo of Essaouira is a festival that attracts artists and fans from all over the world. From its creation in 1998, the Essaouira Festival has turned into a huge and relevant cultural event, thanks to international music shows that have performed here and an evergrowing public audience. In its first year, this festival had about 20,000 people in attendance, and last year the number was around 400,000, most of them foreign sellers. The cross of exchanges and dialects makes for a megacultural environment, adding to the magic that the best musicians in Essaouir are making.
The Gnaoua are the descendants of ancient African slaves. Organized into brotherhoods throughout Morocco, the Gnaoua are considered to be wizzard musicians, snake charmers, clairvoyants, mediums, etc. Their practices are musical, therapeutic, and focused on the Cult of Jinn (spirits) and their rituals contain numerous parallels to African cults of spirit possession. The most important ceremony and the most spectacular of Gnaoua is that of Lila, whose function is essentially therapeutic. During the celebration, the "maalem" accompanied by his/her people, ask the saints and the supernatural entities to take possession of a body, and that person enters into a trance. This ritual is comparable to the voodoo of Haiti or the macumba of Brazil. The result is an intense encounter between the inheritants of a secular tradition, and the artists from all over the world.
In this extraordinary laboratory of musical fusion, the Gnaoua masters invite jazz musicians, pop, rock, or world music interpreters from all over, to explore new directions. The instruments that are mainly used are the lau´d, the three-string drum, the rattle, and the congos. |
