Gnawa

Gnawa music is anchored by the guembri (also called sintir), a three-string bass lute with a wooden body and a camel- or goatskin head. Its plucked low notes are dry and percussive, with a thud rather than a sustained ring. Iron castanets (qraqeb), held two per hand, supply a clattering metallic upper layer that fills any acoustic space. Vocals are call-and-response: a maâlem (master) calls and the group answers. A ceremony — a lila — typically begins at a relaxed pace and accelerates through the night.

The Gnawa community in Morocco descends from sub-Saharan West Africans brought north across the Sahara as slaves over centuries. The name 'Gnawa' is widely understood to be a corruption of 'Guinea'. The music's ritual frame (the lila) fuses West African spirit-possession ceremony with Moroccan Sufi Islam — each mluk (spirit) is associated with a color, a set of songs and specific guembri tunings, and a successful ceremony calls each spirit in sequence. In the 1960s and 1970s American jazz musicians, particularly the pianist Randy Weston, began collaborating with Gnawa masters in Tangier and Marrakech, opening the form to international listeners.

Track how the guembri's repeating low riff anchors a piece while the qraqeb intensifies above. The acceleration across a long performance is part of the design — what feels like the 'song' may shift speed and intensity several times over twenty minutes.

Hassan Hakmoun's 'Trance, Vol. 1: Hadra' or his 'Trance of Seven Colors' (1994) with Adam Rudolph offer well-recorded entries; for closer-to-tradition material, the recordings of Maâlem Mahmoud Guinia.

Each mluk (spirit) is associated with a specific color, and the songs of a lila move through the colors in a set sequence — the maâlem must know which spirit each color invokes and which guembri tuning each requires. The Essaouira Gnawa and World Music Festival, founded in 1998, made the once-private ritual music visible to a large international audience.