Woke up to the news this morning that Algeria's famous Kabyle folk singer Idir had passed away. Allah yirhamu. Below is a post I wrote while still under the spell of his concert in Lyon in July 2008. And for those who don't know the music of Idir, here's his trademark song A Vava Inouva, sung in tandem with Scottish vocalist Karen Matheson, whose haunting voice is the centerpiece of the Celtic folk group Capercaillie. This beautifully illustrated video by Ismail Abdelfattah has the added advantage of providing the transcription of the original Kabyle Berber along with a French translation.
July 2008: I’m still catching up after weeks in the mountains and on the road, so I’m only now writing about a concert we attended in Lyon on July 6, on our way back from Italy. Our son treated us to tickets to “Nuit de l’Algérie,” a double bill concert at the city’s open air Roman theater. And what a treat it was: legendary (it’s overused, but a term that suits) Kabyle (Berber) musician Idir (check out his website - he looks like an Avuncular Algerian), followed by the 40-member chaabi orchestra El Gusto.
The world has just finished paying brief attention to the Mediterranean and its peoples thanks to President Sarkozy’s weekend summit meeting in Paris, but the multicultural crowd in Lyon a week earlier personified a Mediterranean unified with a passion that politicians can only dream of. On stage and in the audience, Muslim, Jew, Christian, whether Algerian, French, or a stray American – the atmosphere was joyous (El Gusto = “joy,” reflecting the Spanish/Sephardic element in Algeria’s melting pot).
Idir set the stage, and his following is intensely loyal. Several showed up wrapped in Kabyle and Algerian flags, and it didn’t take long until they were dancing (mostly solo, in the demure folk style of North Africa that has vulgar belly dancing beat by a mile) in the Roman stone aisles. Idir, who has been a Kabyle Algerian institution for more than thirty years, is a voice for moderation, for inter-religious fraternity, and respect for women. Indeed, it appeared to us that of the largely Maghrebi-origin audience, women accounted for a hefty majority of Idir’s fans - though very few head scarves were in evidence.
Following the rousing folk-rock-fusion Idir group intro, it was a little odd to shift to the suited and decidedly graying “El Gusto,” which some European writers have nicknamed “the Algerian Buena Vista Social Club.” Last year Robin Denselow of The Guardian attended an El Gusto concert in Marseille:
Behind the rabbi and the imam was a 42-piece orchestra, composed of Algerian Muslim and Jewish musicians. Some of them had lived together in the country before 1962 - the year of Algerian independence - when some 130,000 Algerian Jews, the vast majority of the community, fled for France, fearing for their future in what was now a Muslim state. It was the end of an era in which Muslim, Jewish, and European musicians had lived and played together in the narrow streets of the Casbah in Algiers, developing a rousing, wildly varied hybrid style - chaabi [literally, "popular"] - that the El Gusto project set out to rediscover.
No rabbi or imam on stage in Lyon, but otherwise an excellent resume of the band’s origins. Just how "popular" is chaabi? The concert flyer and website has a picture of three of the musicians practicing in what looks like an Algiers barber shop.
As in “Buena Vista” the Ry Cooder of El Gusto, responsible for bringing these respectable gents together, is a young Irish-Algerian film-maker, Safinez Bousbia. According to Denselow, Bousbia
was determined to track down surviving musicians from the heyday of chaabi, the 1940s and 50s. Chaabi is a mix of Arabic and north African berber styles, blended with modern French chanson, American boogie and Latin American styles, brought by the American troops stationed in Algeria during the second world war. It's a lively, versatile music suitable for weddings, bars and concert halls alike, and played exclusively by men.
American boogie... that explains the banjos. I can testify to the influence of American GIs, who landed in Vichy-held Algeria in November 1942: our plumber in Oran, an impressionable boy at the time, years later still remembered chewing bubble gum and repeating '40s pickup lines like “What’s cookin’ chicken?” for the soldiers’ amusement. For francophone readers, it’s worth watching the video excerpt of Bousbia explaining her first contacts with the elderly musicians, whom she feared tiring out with the first hour and a half long session. Not to worry: the music went on for close to four hours! For anglophones, Quidam Productions has a wonderful series of clips from Bousbia's documentary film "El Gusto: The Good Mood."
Actually, we pooped out before the end of the Lyon concert, since the next day was a working day for our son and his girlfriend. As we climbed down and left the amphitheater, the music followed us as we walked towards the car. That night in Lyon was a gift, for us of course, but mainly for the young “beur” (French slang for the sons and daughters of Algerian, and also Moroccan and Tunisian, immigrants) fans celebrating these ambassadors of normality from the oft troubled country of their parents or grandparents. I suspect that the audience, like some of the chaabi old timers, included a certain number of pieds noirs and their descendants, from the community of Europeans who left Algeria in 1962. Algeria has a way of going to your head, and staying there, as Alistair Horne noted in his everlasting work on the Algerian war of independence, A Savage War of Peace - "l’Algérie, ça monte à la tête."
“Deux Rives, Un Rêve” (Two Shores, One Dream) is the title of Idir’s album that we picked up before the concert. That’s exactly what was happening last week in Lyon.