On Gnawa and Jazz: Melodious rythms sing back to power
Jamal Akabli
Publication: Volume 1 Issue 4
Abstract
While Jazz has established itself as an international genre of music, Gnawa has a long way to tread to earn a name for it. Both genres are anchored in the same history, genealogy, and different rythms that carry their tunes. This article will retrace some of the similarities and difference that bind and distinguish these musical styles, and why their fusion works to perfection, creating a condition, a third space, inhabitable by both. This coming together into a fusion does not sit well with some critics who are bent on compartmentalising the two genres in such a way as to disallow any alloy or admixture. This essay will fall back on these reductionistic folklorising dimunitive voyages into a terra incognita only as a threshold to reinstating the music to its rightful place, not in a museum but rather on the stage where music belongs.
Keywords: jazz, music, gnawa, similarities, differences, condition, third space.
Jamal Akabli (jamal.akabli@hotmail.com) is a faculty member in the Department of English, Ibn Tofail University, Kenitra, Morocco. He got his masters degree in Studies in English Language and Culture and went on to obtain his PhD in cultural studies from Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences at Ibn Tofail University, Kenitra, Morocco. His areas of interest ranges from Postcolonial Studies, Creative Writing, to Performance Arts.