Djmawi Africa new wave

Portraying Algeria’s youth

Paris 

28/03/2011 - 

Since the end of the great raï era, the Gnawa Diffusion craze and the beginnings of rap, there had been little for young Algerian music enthusiasts to get excited about. Since late 2008, however, they’ve been dancing to Djmawi Africa’s fusion sound sensation.

In the space of three years, Djmawi Africa have sold 15,000 copies of their first album, Mama. A remarkable score in the lacklustre Algerian music sector, taking the reggae-gnawa-chaâbi-raï fusion group to second place on the list produced by Belda Diffusion, Algier’s contemporary music label, and just behind the pioneers of the defunct Gnawa Diffusion. Their music is blowing fresh energy into a frequently disenchanted youth lacking in perspectives, culture and an image of themselves.

Pan-Africanism

Watching Djmawi rehearsing in a room in Algiers’ Riad El Feth shopping centre, you can see just what makes them so popular. The eight musicians are explorers. Hailing from a range of backgrounds (classic, rock, gnawi, jazz, etc.), together they make music that blends the popular base of Algerian music with other influences, from urban to traditional.

There are a few instruments hanging around brought back from their tours. A djembé, a kora and a ngoni from Burkina Faso, an Indian percussion instrument and an Andalusian cajón have come to join their usual panoply of instruments: the guitar, oud, drums, guimbri, the bass gnawa, etc. Mama, their first album, centred on the hypnotic music of the Sufi brotherhood present in Morocco and Algeria, inherited from black slaves from the Sahel, who brought their instruments and beliefs with them.

The second disk aims to introduce young Algerians to other aspects of their musical heritage, like the highly original sound of Oran’s raï trab, which is based on the gasbah flute and the guellal, a long percussion instrument made of clay. They also explore the region of Timimoune to the south of the country, and its little-known Ahellil music, which is organised around a lead voice and backing vocals with stones providing the percussion.

“This album will be really different. But what we’re interested in is staying true to our African roots. Algeria is a huge country and its people are divided into 35 million little parcels. The only thing that we really have in common is our Africanness,” explains Abdou, Djmawi Africa’s guitarist. Radical words in a society that, despite the recent set-up of Algiers’ Pan-African Festival, still has trouble accepting its sub-Saharan heritage. 

So, aiming to go beyond geographical borders and cultural preconceptions, Djmawi Africa set off to play in a bus in the Great Algerian South’s small towns, so often left out of cultural policies. The boys from Algiers also performed in Burkina Faso, Mali, Sudan, and in front of the Egyptian pyramids in an attempt to beat out their Pan-African sound all over the Sahara.

Mutation

The concerts can all be found on their DVD Mama Tour, which came out in Algeria this March. In three years, Djmawi Africa has given over 200 performances, from New Delhi to Montreal via Paris. On the road, the musicians matured. “Mama took us on a big tour, but over the course of performances, our sound changed. We reworked the album’s arrangements, it was all very open and progressive. For the sake of our fans and even ourselves, we decided to finish the Mama adventure before embarking on a new project,” explains Abdou.

Designed like a family album, the CD box is decorated with images depicting some of the marking moments from their three years of tours, like playing two duets with the French members of Yapa in Burkina, and in Paris on the project, Aux portes de l’Europe, where the young Algerians worked in residence with artists from Slovenia, Serbia and France.

Djmawi Africa have a core of united, responsive fans that faithfully follow the group’s comings and goings, their choices and concert dates. In 2008, the group launched a web competition for the best lyrics written in the Djmawi spirit, and the most unusual photo featuring a bottle of Hamoud Boualem, the national lemonade. The winners got a chance to cross the country in the famous Mama Bus Tour and go to the Saoura Festival in the middle of the desert, with three days of partying in full Djmawi spirit.

Their Facebook page currently counts 12,000 fans, and an audience of 2,500 attended the closing show of their Mama tour last September. The result is that Djmawi carefully listens to what their fans expect of them – many have asked them to make the lyrics more hard-hitting and take their words further. The musicians of Djmawi Africa don’t just represent themselves, but all of the Algerian young people who listen to them. So all eight band members are working together, and plan to produce something for their fans to listen to in the autumn of 2011.

Djmawi Africa DVD Mama Tour, available on the website: http://www.djmawi-africa.com/ (2011)

Eglantine  Chabasseur