Morocco Rocks

Nice article in today's NY Times about the 10th-annual Gnawa and World Music Festival in Essaouira, Morocco.  Likened to Burning Man, this music festival draws 400,000 fans from across North Africa, Europe and, even, the United States.

...The music built slowly to an exhilarating crescendo of intricate rhythms and cross rhythms created by propulsive beating on hand-held drums and large, tambourinelike bendirs, staccato hand claps and the incessant, syncopated clack and clatter of the steel castanets. As the spirit moved them, musicians put down their instruments and stepped to the front of the stage to dance, displaying footwork and moves that resembled those of their African-American cousins, from the Temptations’ stylized line steps and James Brown’s knee drops to hip-hop’s exaggerated lopping turns, as well as whirls, leaps, back flips and hussar-like two-legged kicks that defied choreographic categorization, not to mention gravity.

Like all Gnawa brotherhoods, Mr. Gadari’s group performed music that for centuries was played only in secret spirit-possession and healing ceremonies called lilas that have evolved from ancient African animistic and Islamic Sufi rituals. The brotherhoods continue to perform in such religious rites — though only in strictly private gatherings — in which conjured healing spirits are said “to mount” the possessed, who whirl and writhe in ecstatic trance, during which they often cut or flail themselves with ceremonial daggers or iron batons.