L’Bnat

The second album by Gnawa maalma Asmâa Hamzaoui and her all-female group Daughters of Timbuktu is a bass-lute thudding, qaraqab-clattering, tagnawit (Gnawa-ness) flexing tour de force. One of two daughters born to renowned Casablanca maalem Rachid Hamzaoui, Asmâa grew up immersed in the music and healing rituals of Morocco’s Gnawa Sufi brotherhoods, absorbing a tradition that melds elements of West African, Arabic and Amazigh (Berber) cultures – and whose practitioners are almost exclusively male. As her 2019 debut Oulad Lghaba (Children of the Forest) demonstrated, Asmâa and her group – which includes elder sister Aicha Hamzaoui on vocals and qaraqab – challenged the Maghreb patriarchy with a finesse since further polished with international tours and headline slots. L’Bnat (Daughter) finds Hamzaoui wielding her wood-and-goatskin gimbri, her living instrument, in ways fiercer and tighter while still sounding wild and free. Producer Andreas Unge again wisely stays hands off, allowing all ten fusion-free tracks to pulse with a sort of organic spirituality lent further agency by Hamzaoui’s astoundingly rich, impassioned alto and the calls-and-responses, sometimes measured, sometimes frenzied, of her band. With nine tracks titled with the prefix ‘Lalla’ (an Amazigh address for women) to celebrate women and a tenth bonus track honouring the late great Gnawa maalem Mahmoud Gania, this is powerful, transporting stuff.