Lalla La’roussa
4 tracks, 35 minutes
Awesome Tapes from Africa
More Moorish music! Yesterday we looked at the modern sounds of the Bidhan people of Mauritania, today we’re going a little bit further north to Morocco, and the music of the Amazigh – or Berber – people.
In particular, this tape is a set of wedding music. Most modern Amazigh weddings now usually feature music that is heavily influenced by chaabi and rai music and made using heaps of synthesisers and drum machines, M’hamed Dammou instead brings a modernisation to the traditional Amazigh sounds. All instruments on this album are real – lotar (lute), electric guitar, ribab (one-string fiddle) and another higher-pitched steel-stringed lute that I can’t identify creating the accompaniment for Dammou’s song, and tbilat (bongo-like drums) and iron scraper holding down a delicious swinging rhythm.
I’m particularly interested in the instrument that Dammou is playing on the cover of this tape. Namely, what is it? From his online presence, his usual instrument appears to be the lotar (although I’ve also found pictures of him playing the banjo and guitar), so I assume it is some adaptation of that instrument, but in a way that I can’t seem to find anywhere else. It’s a sort of inverted trapezoid – or even triangle – with a handle extending from the instrument’s neck to its body. Looks cool, whatever it is, and maybe it’s even that mystery lute I’m hearing too – makes sense – in which case it sounds cool too.
This is definitely music that would get me up onto the dance floor of a wedding much quicker than any Abba tune would – in fact, so would all of the other wedding music I’ve already covered on this blog so far, from Kurdistan to Bulgaria to China to India – and it’s always inspiring to hear traditional music forms kept alive in their original contexts by bringing them into modern parameters. Synths have their place, but that place should be alongside – not instead of – the wonderful music that already exists.
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