Tarrwaysin & Rrways: A Journey into the Realm of Amazigh Wandering Poet-Singers

Tarrwaysin & Rrways is a landmark collection of new performances of more than 50 itinerant Amazigh (Berber) poets and singers was put together by Brahim El Mazned, who is the founding director of the Visa for Music expo in Rabat and the artistic director of the Timitar Festival of Amazigh music in Agadir, and who describes the release as representing ‘90% of the remaining interpreters of this itinerant art.’ Embracing poetry, song and dance, the music's known roots have been traced back to the 19th century, and it finds its future imperilled by 21st-century modernities and the fracturing of the master-disciple relationships upon which secure transmission of the itinerant poetry and song tradition in Amazigh culture depends.

The tradition's original singers and poets once criss-crossed the Souss, the western High Atlas and the Anti– Atlas, itinerants of the countryside rather than cities, though all would converge, at some point, on the Djemaa el Fna in Marrakech. The artists recorded for this luxurious boxed set of ten CDs and 100 songs, accompanied by booklets featuring an illuminating history and examinations of the Rrways music and tradition, as well as biographies of all of the featured singers, are drawn not from the countryside but from the cities of Agadir, Inezgane, Marrakech, Casablanca, Essaouira and Ouarzazate. Each was recorded over a two-year period at Hiba Studio in Casablanca, with a 16-piece band that includes ribab (fiddle), lutar (long-necked lute), gimbri (lute), flute and percussion. The songs featured here are a mix of the sacred and secular, focusing on love, God and nature, but embracing hardships, too, such as the battle for independence and the scars of immigration.

The female singers – the Tarrwaysin – are outstanding and unforgettable. The likes of Fatima Tabaamrant and Aicha Tachinwit deliver performances to shake the foundations and raise the life force. Their performances often begin with lone ribab or flute, a tremulous prelude before the shaping, guiding rhythms of the musicians kick in. Produced by the Atlas Azawan association and Anya, this gargantuan set will absorb lovers of Moroccan music for, well, the rest of their lives, and it comes with a preservation order for Morocco's younger musicians, poets and singers – do not let this amazing Amazigh tradition die from neglect.