The Brotz & The Gnawa

Peter Brötzmann's explorations of North African trance music

What does religious music mean to the unbeliever? I’ve spent a significant portion of my life considering this question, and speaking only for myself, the answer varies. I was raised Roman Catholic, but no longer consider myself any variety of Christian, and have in fact been so thoroughly turned off to Christianity by the behavior and rhetoric of its adherents that even gospel music brings me no pleasure at all. I find Norse paganism more interesting — the stories are better, and the message stands up better in the modern world — but I don’t go to Amon Amarth, Unleashed, Enslaved, or even Wardruna (the people who did the soundtrack to Vikings) seeking enlightenment; that would be absurd. And I really don’t know anything about traditional Jewish music at all (I don’t think John Zorn’s Masada albums count).

Then again, I’ve always had time for so-called “spiritual jazz,” though players like John and Alice Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Nduduzo Makhathini and even early ’70s Santana (yes, Welcome, Love Devotion Surrender, Lotus, and especially Illuminations, his collaboration with Alice Coltrane, are spiritual jazz albums) seem to mix and match from the spiritual traditions of several continents. And one of my favorite albums by Cuban singer La Lupe, La Lupe es La Reina, ends with “Guaguancó Bembé,” a song rooted in Santería, and she wears the white dress and head covering of that faith on the cover. So I’m of at least two minds on the issue.

One type of religious music that has long had a grip on me is Gnawa music. It’s a North African tradition of ancient Islamic spiritual/religious songs and rhythms, performed at lilas (pronounced “leela”), all-night communal celebrations that include prayer, calls to the spirits, and healing music and dance. It has some rhythmic similarities to the keening, mountain-based trance music of the Master Musicians of Jajouka, but it’s heavier than that, because it’s centered around a massive four-stringed lute called the guimbri, and Gnawa ensembles typically include a whole corps of backup singers who also play rattling, metal hand percussion that clatters like a junkyard hit by a tornado. It’s astonishingly powerful stuff on a purely sonic/artistic level; you don’t have to have the slightest idea what they’re singing about (and I don’t) to be blown away by it.

The Gania family of Essouaria, Morocco, are Gnawa music royalty. The patriarch, Maâlem Boubker Gania, was regarded as the greatest master of the music (“maâlem” means “master”), and his sons Maâlem Mahmoud Gania, Maâlem Abdelah Gania, Maâlem Mokhtar Gania, and Maâlem Bilal Gania all performed the music. In 1994, Mahmoud (who died in 2015) made one of the greatest records I’ve ever heard in my life, The Trance of Seven Colors, a collaboration with Pharoah Sanders produced by Bill Laswell.

I had the chance to interview Laswell in 2011, and I asked him about that project. He said, “Well, I remember we took a lot of equipment to North Africa and in those days it wasn’t small or easy to carry. It was pretty heavy, pretty overweight, pretty bulky, and it was a big operation. We took all this gear not to a village, it was a city, but on the water, Essaouaria, and we thought we had it all covered, and then there was a power surge or shortage, so while we were recording, we could see the meters but we couldn’t actually monitor the sound. So we didn’t even know what was on these digital tapes until we got home. It was pretty scary. But it was with a full 16-track digital setup, with expensive microphones and very heavy gear to carry. Very expensive to do, but the end result, you know, everything did translate and it was well recorded. As opposed to people that go with a cassette machine and then they wonder why nobody’s listening to the record 10 years later.”

I’ve also heard two other, more traditional albums of Mahmoud’s: Aicha (a late ’90s cassette reissued on CD and vinyl in 2020) and Colours of the Night (his final recordings, from 2017). They’re both great, and remind me at times of the Mississippi hill country blues of Junior Kimbrough.

Two years after his encounter with Laswell and Sanders, in November 1996, Mahmoud recorded an equally incredible collaboration with another powerhouse saxophonist, Peter Brötzmann, and drummer Hamid Drake, The Wels Concert, which was released on the Chicago underground jazz label Okka Disk. The set consists of three tracks, the first two running about 25 minutes each and the last 19. Gania plays guimbri and sings, Drake switches back and forth between a drum kit and an African frame drum which he slaps with his hands, and Brötzmann comes in and out, soloing sometimes over the relentless North African-inspired rhythm but other times engaging in call-and-response with Gania or even just accompanying him with surprising subtlety. There’s a thrilling moment in the second piece when Gania is singing and Brötzmann begins making a sound on one or another of his reed instruments that sounds uncannily like the ululations one would hear from a female backup singer in a traditional Gnawa ensemble.

I emailed Brötzmann to ask for his thoughts on these recordings, and this music. As those who follow his work know, he’s had some health troubles of late, including a period of hospitalization not long ago, and indeed his response began, “the health is very shaky and it won’t get better that’s why I make it short.” So keep him in your thoughts.

Anyway, he wrote:

“I met Mahmoud at some festival in the French Alps in the ’90s, we both were invited by a French sound sculptor artist, forgot his name but I am still grateful. The artist was not of any importance for the rest of the evening but Mahmoud and I got along very very well, no speak, just play.

“I had no idea about Gnawa music but he had the drive and punch you need. Some friends organised a duo concert for the next day in an abundant house, Mahmoud’s wife, a great Sufi dancer, joined us and we had our special performance.

“We both had the feeling — we have to do it again — and of course Hamid came in my mind because he not only did know about everything about Gnawa, he did know everything about the complicated rhythms and he not only could play them, he lived them. So we organised the first tour in Europe.

“We toured in Morocco too but for health reasons we had to ask Majid Bekkas and later I met Mokhtar, fulfilling very much the family tradition.

“This Moroccan music is so strong and beautiful, I have learned a lot.”

Indeed, that first tour seems to have really sparked something in Brötzmann, because he’s worked with Gnawa musicians on three other occasions. In November 2011, the Unlimited Festival in Wels, Austria dedicated four days to showcasing his work in a variety of contexts, and asked him to invite other artists in his orbit to perform as well. The 5CD box Long Story Short, available from the Trost label, features music from 10 different Brötzmann ensembles as well as groups or solo sets by Keiji Haino, Mats Gustafsson, Joe McPhee, Masahiko Satoh, Caspar Brötzmann Massaker, and others. It’s an incredible document and well worth hearing.

One of the sets, running nearly an hour, features a one-off group of Brötzmann, Laswell, Maâlem Mokhtar Gania, and Drake. It’s intriguing because Gania doesn’t come in for quite a while — the first 12 minutes or so are Brötzmann, Laswell, and Drake, and the bassist is playing through his trademark envelope filter pedal, creating a deep liquid dub sound. Then, when Gania joins, slapping out high-intensity lines on the guimbri, Laswell opts for a thick distorted sound as the saxophonist and drummer up the energy level, too. Drake’s snare rings out powerfully as he drives the other three on like he’s whipping horses.

Almost eight years later, in May 2019, Brötzmann reunited with Mokhtar and Drake at the AngelicA Festival in Bologna, Italy. Prior to the concert, he said, “3 names, 3 cultures, 3 continents, 3 different concepts of time and timing — this is the essence of this trio. This is what we have to bring together. I am rather optimistic.” The performance was released in 2020 as The Catch of a Ghost on the i dischi di angelica label. The sound is very different, once again; Mokhtar’s guimbri sounds like an electric bass, and Drake’s kit has some of the dry, high-tuned plastic quality of Tony Oxley’s drums with Cecil Taylor. They play four pieces, the longest of which is the first, at 33 minutes; the others run 11, 13 and 14 minutes respectively. Brötzmann is in a hoarse, crying free jazz mode throughout, and Drake is creating a relentless but hypnotic trance groove. On “Almost With the Sun,” he starts laying down a hip-hop groove at about the 3:30 mark, and neither of the other two men even blinks.

In November 2022, Brötzmann and Drake recorded one more live album, Catching Ghosts, this time with Majid Bekkas. Unlike the Ganias, Bekkas was not raised in the Gnawa tradition — he grew up playing banjo in Moroccan groups, and later studied classical guitar. He studied Gnawa music with Maâlem Ba Houmane, and in 1990 formed the Gnaoua Blues Band, which did what its name suggests. He’s performed and recorded extensively with German jazz pianist Joachim Kühn, and has also played with Archie Shepp, Randy Weston, and others.

Catching Ghosts was released at the end of April on the ACT Music label. It’s by far the most concise of the releases under discussion, with four tracks in just 43 minutes, two of which are five and seven minutes long, respectively. Brötzmann’s playing is cleaner than at almost any other point in his career, and Bekkas is indeed more of a Gnawa blues singer than a purist, and his guimbri has a deep, low rumble but relatively little rattle. This combination of sounds allows Drake to play with a somewhat lighter touch, too, and frankly the whole album has a gentle, dancing flow.

People often think of Peter Brötzmann as just a hurricane-force blower, but he’s always had a softer side; you just need to know where to look to find it. I recommend his solo album of blues and standards, I Surrender Dear, and the live album he made with Oxbow, but I think his collaborations with Gnawa musicians also show him at his most open and collaborative. As Marino Pliakas, bassist in his group Full Blast, told me in a 2018 interview, “Peter’s always got big ears and is very much hearing and interacting…In my opinion, he’s a very good listener.” I have no idea what his own spiritual beliefs are, but it’s clear that this music inspires something in him, and it definitely resonates with something in me.

That’s it for now. See you next week!