Moroccan jazz? Yes, Virginia, there is such a thing and according to Professor Hisham Aidi, a noted music critic and historian, it goes back to the 1920s; something he discussed at length at the Metropolitan Museum of Art last week. After tracing the history of the merger between America’s great improvisational music and traditional Gnawa music of Morocco, he turned the stage over to TK Blue and his ensemble, who is perhaps best known for his years with the late Randy Weston.
Before the group’s surging music filled the space, embellished by an Arabic motif of books and artifacts, the sizable audience had a chance to survey the surroundings, partake of wine and hors d’oeuvres, and anticipate the music, prefigured by a screen showcasing a poster of the Oscar Dennard quartet, featuring Idrees Sulieman, Buster Smith, and Jamil Nasser.
They were given further insight into the soaring sound that would fill the space when Aidi laid out a litany of jazz musicians and African American performers who had traveled to Morocco, including Weston, Yusef Lateef, Quincy Jones, Josephine Baker, Adam Rudolph, and Ornette Coleman, to entertain and participate in the Gnawa culture.
Blue’s powerful saxophone and sizzling flute were a brilliant soundtrack for Aidi’s introduction. In one tune after another, Blue and crew captured the essence of Gnawa music — the trance-like repetition of notes with his saxophone playing against Yayoi Ikawa’s cascading passages on piano and Román Lajara’s rhythmic guitar. All of this received added intensity from vocalist Malika Zarra’s lyrical sonority and Samir Langus’s bass emphasis on one of the music’s main instruments, the guembri.
At one point toward the end of the concert, I thought I heard elements of Ornette Coleman’s beautiful “The Blessing,” and if that was the case, it must have certainly delighted his son, Denardo, who was there among a coterie of musicians.
It was an entertaining evening at the Met for the “Marrakech Blues — A Century of Moroccan Jazz,” and it deserves an annual event.
