Chikaha Rahma
6 tracks, 38 minutes
Awesome Tapes from Africa
Perhaps the biggest sound from Algeria on the world stage (as well as at home) is the pop style of raï. Raï has created so many superstars, with Khaled, Rachid Taha, Faudel, Cheb Mami and Cheb Hasni representing just a small number of singers that have thrilled international audiences. You may notice that all of those names are men. This is no coincidence – raï is a predominantly male genre, and female musicians have been met with a lot of opposition for their art. It wasn’t always that way, though. Two of the most direct ancestors of raï are medh and meddaha music – women’s genres that came to prominence in the 1920s and provided the music for women-only marriage and circumcision celebrations. The music on this Awesome Tape is the real roots of raï: it’s the style that came after meddaha, using its aesthetic while singing on profane themes to both male and female audiences in cafés and other such venues of low repute.
As ever, low repute gives us the spiciest music. This is really raw music. There’s not much to it – just two gaspa end-blown reed flutes and a large riqq (tambourine) accompanying Chikaha Rahma’s voice, but each one of those sounds complement each other and still fill the full range of timbre and pitch to leave the ear satisfied on every level: the gaspa are reedy, a sound filled with overtones so that even though they play in quite a low register, their resonances stretch all the way up; the riqq has a similarly broad range from the jangly cymbals to the booming skin. Together, the three instruments push forward insistently and without respite, so by the time Rahma adds her throaty and occasionally raspy Arabic song to the mix, it’s hypnotic to the point where it’s a losing battle to try to keep still. It’s music to move to and it will do its job whether you want it to or not.
There’s also an unnamed man who comes in at the beginning and the middle of each track to introduce the musicians, the record label, the studios and other such important information. It’s a technique that goes right back to the dawn of recorded music as a very basic anti-piracy measure: although it doesn’t stop the album from being stolen, it does make false attribution impossible. It also adds an interesting element to the music too, an ‘in the moment’ vibe of realness, clarifying that these are real musicians making music together in a studio, as is their job. It’s one of those things that you don’t get with most music – especially not pop music – in which the performer often inhabits some sort of character when they sing, and it’s interesting to have that expectation flipped on its head in that way.
There’s always an old behind a new. Behind the masculinity of raï lays the femininity of meddaha – in the middle is the music of the Cheikhas and Chikaha Rahma is one of the best. You can almost hear the folk becoming pop. This all-acoustic album is just a synthesiser and a drum machine away from filling the discothèque, but when you can make all of this noise from just two flutes, a tambourine and an amazing voice, who needs them?
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