Nass El Ghiwane

Emerging toward the end of the 1960s, the Moroccan ensemble Nass El Ghiwane drew its material from original Melhoun verse placed over longstanding sacred templates such as Sufi chants and Zaouias litanies. Vocals were accompanied by an array of stringed and percussive instruments—guembri, lute, bendir, derbouka, daadou’, ta’rija and tbila—while the texts, unusually for the post-colonial period, confronted current political corruption and social inequity.

The quartet’s originators—Laarbi Batma (b. 1948, Oulad Bouziri, Chaouia, Morocco, d. 1998), Boujemaa Hagour, Omar Essayed and Allal Yaala—each brought prior involvement in music or theater. Early in the following decade Moulay Abdelaziz Tahiri joined the lineup; when Tahiri departed to establish Jil Jilala he was succeeded by Mahmoud Essaadi, who himself soon entered that same ensemble. Abderrahmane ‘Paco’ Kirouj arrived next, supplying a robust though stylistically distinct voice. Following Hagour’s death in 1974 the remaining members—Batma, Essayed, Yaala and Kirouj—entered their longest-lasting configuration. A documentary portrait, Al Hal, appeared in 1981. Kirouj exited in 1993 and Redouane Arif took his place. After Laarbi succumbed to lung cancer in 1998 his younger brother Rachid Batma stepped in; later still another sibling, Hamid Batma, assumed Arif’s role. Although Kirouj became paralysed in the mid-2000s and could no longer perform, the group continued to play.