RFI Musique - - Album - Hasna El Becharia

Album review

Hasna El Becharia

Smaa Smaa

Paris

28/01/2010 -

Recorded among the dunes of the Sahara, Smaa Smaa is the second album from Algerian singer and musician Hasna El Becharia, who continues to meld her native Gnawa music with more current sounds.

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Hasna El Becharia holds her “guembri” (traditional string instrument) to her almost as though it were a part of her own body. Her new album, too, seems to resemble her, both in form and content, with the warm yet sober look of the accompanying booklet setting the tone.

For three weeks, the singer and a small team spent time in Taghit, a “dreamlike” location in the middle of the desert, some hundred kilometres from her home town of Béchar. The album took shape there in the middle of the sands, with the support of local musicians hired for the occasion, and was then finished in Italy.

Among the eleven titles, several are traditional Gnawa (a hypnotic style of music of the Saharan ethnic group): Bania, Hamou, Sidi Moussa and Moulay Ibrahim. Hasna has appropriated these songs and rearranged them to suit her own style. Although Hasna El Becharia started out singing standards at weddings and banquets, she has also built up her own repertoire of self-composed material.

In this style of music, trance plays an integral role, and you can feel a hypnotic quality of the music taking over when the rhythm builds near the end of tracks like Smaa Smaa or Sadrak. Over a base sound of guitar and guembri cords and derbrouka percussion, Hasna or a choir sing, occasionally accompanied by the violin.

Her voice is deep and almost masculine, adding a particular emotion to these songs that come “straight from the heart”. If Djazaïr Johara, released in 2001, was above all an album for Algeria, Hasna’s family and her friends, the follow-up is much more personal, and despite the sometimes joyful surface of these songs, they reveal a certain inner sadness.