Essaouira’s festival Gnawa is a sea of sound you won’t forget
Essaouira: The jewel of north Africa is home to a festival that showcases Gnawa, an ancient music form finding a place in modern Morocco.
The power of Gnawa: Essaouira
I’m standing in the middle of a crowd of tens of thousands of young Moroccans in Essaouira, on Africa’s Atlantic coast, watching them go ape to a music called Gnaoua (Gnawa in English), a relentless, hypnotic, heavily rhythmic sound that has the power to send its listeners into a trance.
It features just three instruments: heavy iron castanets called krakeks, the human voice, and the bass rumble of the three-stringed ghimbri.
The line of singers on stage are dressed in extravagantly coloured costumes, move like Olympic athletes and are led by band leaders who have star status in Morocco.
One of the most famous is Guinia, an Essaouira native, whose onstage arrival is greeted as fervently as the arrival of the national football team.
This music may be ancient and folkloric but it sounds as contemporary as a car horn.
The festival setting is hard to beat. The main open-air stage sits between the raging Atlantic and 16th-century ramparts, while a long, luxurious beach lies to the east.
This is where you’ll find the club stage, pumping beats through the night.
Around me, in Place Moulay Hassan, the square is circled by cafés, hotels, restaurants and the rooftop terrace of boutique hotel Villa Maroc, where guests gaze down on to the action with a chilled Moroccan wine in hand.
Essaouira has long been the haunt of travellers, film-makers and musicians – Orson Welles and Jimi Hendrix are among those to have enjoyed its languid airs. Its architect was an 18th-century Frenchman indentured to the local sultan, its builders West African slaves.
Two hundred years on, their descendants are the Gnawa, once despised itinerant musicians and healers who carried their ancient ritual music with them, passing it down from generation to generation. Since 1998, their music has been celebrated in Essaouira with an annual festival that draws up to half a million visitors over its four days of free, open-air concerts.
Lots of Westerners come, too, and in between the music, there are hundreds of restaurants, cafés, shops and stalls to ease into your day.
The labyrinthine medina, a Unesco World Heritage Site, is dotted with smaller venues – riyads and the open-air Bastion stage on the ramparts.
Visiting musicians tend to stay at the Riad Al Madina, an old hippie favourite where Hendrix once had tea and a smoke in the beautiful central courtyard of what was then the Hotel du Pacha, a visit out of which a thousand tall tales have been spun.
From the roof terrace of the Riad Al Madina, you can spend quality time tuning in to the clatter and pulse of the Gnawa stages dotted around town and the shriek of seagulls on the wind.
A cts ranging from Asian Dub Foundation to Wayne Shorter have played the festival. Somali-Canadian rapper K’naan headlined in 2011, while this year’s guests include Soweto Kinch (below), fusing jazz and hip hop.
One of the joys of the festival is meandering between stages, from the Place Moulay Hassan near the fishing port and open-air fish stands – you point at it, they grill it – down the Avenue de L’Istiqlal on to Rue Mohamed el Qory, your passage through the narrow pedestrian alleys lit up with all manner of street foods, street sounds and aromas.
Fabrics and metals, precious and other-wise, hang from the doors of dark, deep and ancient-looking shops.
There are jewellers and instrument makers, woodworkers and painters, leather workers and carpet sellers, all bartering late into the night. Like any Moroccan souk, it has zones – the silver smiths, the butchers, the wet market, the medicines and herbs – and Essaouira now enjoys licensed restaurants and rooftop bars such as Taros, overlooking the main festival stage.
An evening here, on Place Moulay Hassan, as the African sun slips into the Atlantic and the festival music rises into the hazy, salty twilit air, is one you won’t forget.
Royal Air Maroc flies from Heathrow to Marrakech (a two-hour drive from Essaouira). Returns from £280pp. Tel: 020 7307 5800. Le Festival Gnaoua, June 21-24; a four-day pass costs
£36.
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