Yobadi

How can you justify subjecting the raw power of traditional Moroccan Gnawa music to a pernickety, pimple-picking, over-intellectualised version of jazz, which sucks all the power out of the original and turns it into a pale, grinning, distant cousin of Weather Report clad in pastel T¬shirt and espadrilles? There’s nothing inherently wrong with marrying Gnawa to other kinds of music. Just look at fine hybrids by Orchestre National de Barbès, Gnawa Diffusion and a legion of others. And if you consider the granddaddy of them all, Nass El Ghiwane, well the case is well and truly closed. It’s just that noodling jazz is not a suitable bedfellow for Gnawa. They simply don’t belong to the same musical spirit worlds. One is a self-conscious test of musical virtuosity and wit, full of convolution and complexity; the other is a trance music in which all notions of virtuosity and complexity are subsumed in the collective transcendence, the simple unstoppable forward thrust of the music. It’s not supposed to be a place to show off your musical skills, but rather go beyond and forget all about them.

I’m treading on thin ice here. Karim Ziad is a highly respected jazz drummer and a director of the massive annual Essaouira Festival, the world premier showcase of all things Gnawa. Hamid El Kasri is one of Morocco’s most successful Gnawa masters. And some parts of this album actually work, but they tend to be the parts where the jazz is servant of the Gnawa rather than the other way round. And what’s happened to the krakesh – the metal castanets that give Gnawa its glorious clattering energy? They seem to have been smothered under a duvet of minor suspended fourths and stuttering drum breaks.