Jedba: Spiritual Music from Morocco
Banning Eyre
Abdesselam Damoussi and Nour Eddine
2019 Arc Music, B07KH8794X, $18.99 cd.
Musician/producers Abdesselam Damoussi and Nour Eddine have recorded and accompanied musicians from various parts of Morocco in this captivating album, crafted in Eddine’s 15th-century home-turned-studio in Marrakech. Some tracks work around found elements—an impromptu jam session in the Marrakech madinah, an old beggar’s prayer, a chance encounter with a local imam. Others are more deliberate, such as Yemdeh Selem’s electrifying vocal from the Moroccan Sahara, accompanied by blazing electric guitar in a richly altered tuning. Still others feature fluttering ilala flutes, keening double-reed gaitas, the Berber rebab and rolling, tripping frame-drum rhythms and voices that soar, chant and ululate, forming and informing this mesmerizing collection.
You may also be interested in...
Omani Author Zahran Alqasmi's Story About Life, Land and Honey
In his third novel, about a beekeeper living in Oman’s mountainous interior, local author Zahran Alqasmi grapples with a changing landscape around him.
In the Aftermath of Rome's Collapse, These Communities Shaped the Mediterranean
Three regions of the post-Roman Mediterranean, from 400 CE to 1000 CE—the Latin West, Byzantium and the early Islamic world—are the focus of this work.
Book Deconstructs Myth Surrounding Egypt’s Most-Famous Boy King
Egyptologist Aidan Dodson sifts the evidence—from tomb paintings to statuary to temple inscriptions—in his quest to recover the real King Tutankhamun.