Association hamadcha de fez

Geoff Wood explores the ritual music of these mystics of Islam, including the night-long trance-inducing ceremony known as a lila. Abderrahim Amrani Marrakchi (né en 1962 à Fès), surnommé Hamadcha de Fès, est un musicien, et maâlem hamdouchi. Il chante Dieu et la vie et se fait connâitre comme un brillant soufi et l’un des derniers chefs de groupe, « moqaddem », de la confrérie des Hamadcha. Son groupe est sollicité régulièrement par des festivals de musiques traditionnelles tant au Maroc qu’à l’étranger ou encore le 26 novembre 2008, à l'Unesco. Abderrahim Marrakchi Amrani, is musician, teacher and master of the Hamadha sufi brotherhood. His life is a melody and he tells to us in music. Difficult to make him speaking about his own existence. Each sentences is the happy pretext to quote a verse, to hum a poem or to tell a historical anecdote. Amrani is a well of stories and History. Not only about the Hamadcha sufi brotherhood which he's the local leader in the city of Fez in Morocco. He is one of those holders of a memory which dies. With his fingers, he beats the rhythm on the table, pulls on his cigarette and regrets the whole culture that "the only oral tradition is not enough to make survive." Abderrahim Amrani Marrakchi was born in Fez (Morocco), in Derb Mechmacha, the district of the artists, in the heart of the Old City before being taken by his uncle and his aunt in Constantine (Algeria), where he grew up. "Two major places of culture of the Arab world" he says. "I lived in the disctrict of Souk El Assar, homa fennia, in front of a great master of the Arabic-Andalusian music, Haj Mohamed Taher Fergani, and this is how I spent my first 15 years, rocked by this music which I saw today ». The uncle is a Malhoun fan. It was on his knees that Abderrahim learns his first songs and poetry, at the age of 4 years, "a song written by the great M'barek Soussi. At primary school, he attends music lessons, "compulsory in Algeria and that I regretted the absence in Morocco." In 1978, the death of president Boumediene, the power of the Algerian military junta is increasingly threatening. Is it the fear of being accepted as a foreigner in Algeria or the conscience not to be the place that is his own? Whatever, Abderrahim returned to his native city of Fez in Morocco. He was 16 and the school don't worried him anymore. "It was Algerian history that I had studied me!" At the same age he attends alongside his father at its first "Lilla", a trance ritual. Musician you are and musician you will be, to the dismay of the patriarch who wanted his only son for a job "that could make a living and not just dreaming." Faced with such a refusal, Abderrahim must be done alone. He visits the elders, urges him to learn the art of Sufi music, playing the guembri and accompanies various sufi bands (taïfas). He learns about the other mystical doctrines (tarîqat) and styles of spiritual North African music like "Jilala, Aïssawa, Gnawa...", "Malhoun too, before they can approach that of my ancestors, Hamadcha music being the most difficult rhythmically " Ten long years of initiation and mystical musical before mounting its own sufi band in 1986. And finally, the recognition of the father and master. "It was the Essaouira Gnawa Festival. People have helped to bring him on stage where he congratulated me. " Abderrahim Amrani is still living in Fez where he's the unavoidable interlocutor for everybody who wants to learn traditional music, arts & crafts, or foreign musicians eager to learn those old rhythms. The chief of the Taifa Hamdouchiyya works in the artistic direction of a local musical label, writes and sings the night. Between the two, every Sunday, he receives childrens who learns from him the spiritual songs. And Abderrahim concludes: "The music is present in all of us. This is the place where we live which makes a voice. " - Newspaper translated by Mehdi Nabti for Abderrahim Amrani