Samuel Kaplan
Tangier-America Day! (and my 1st academic conference, ever)
As it happened, the US Cultural Attaché in Morocco caught Nacim and Zakaria’s performance at the Fulbright Symposium (see previous post for videos). A week later, the American Embassy in Rabat contacted me to help organize a fusion performance for Tangier-America Day in – you guessed it – Tangier. I happily obliged. The idea was to showcase American and Moroccan collaboration, so we brought together Nacim Haddad, Zakaria Aktoui, Aicha (a Watson Fellow from the States/phenomenal singer), and myself. Aicha brought a soul-stirring addition of jazz vocals and spoken word to a Gnawa 3-piece band: Nacim on the haj houj, Zakaria on the qraqeb, and yours truly on the tabla (hand drums). The result was quite a spectacle (YES, that was a double entendre in French!), and we even had the honor of playing for the US Ambassador, Samuel Kaplan, and his wife Sylvia. Believe it or not, Zakaria did his first ever Gnawa toe touch less than a foot away from them. Check it out. Oh yeah, we called ourselves Gnawa Voyageur…and Zakaria and I just might be the greatest dance duo in Tangier-America Day history (see video 3).
Here’s the opener, a variation on “Bu Lila. Aicha comes in with the 2nd chorus on English:
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Gnawa Show at the Fulbright Symposium
Every year the Moroccan American Commission for Educational and Cultural Exchange (aka MACECE) hosts a 3-day conference to bring together all the Fulbrighteres in the country to present their findings. After opening remarks by US Ambassador Samuel Kaplan and his wife Sylvia, we heard from professors, students, and visiting scholars, on a variety of subjects ranging from Maghrebi conceptions of citizenship, to religious rhetoric during the Spanish Civil War, to the Equity and Reconciliation Commission established to address injustices from the Years of Lead, to the new generation of hip hop artists in Casablanca. As for my own presentation: New Perceptions of Gnawa: Reassessing Tagnawit (Authenticity), I faced a dilemma of sorts. How do I go about talking up saints and rituals without angering the spirits? So, I decided to model my 15 minutes of Fulbright fame after a Lila, complete with music and dance by none other than Nacim Haddad and Zakaria Aktoui. As tradition dictates, we began with songs from Awlad Al-Bambara, and ended with Aisha Qandisha. Check it out. I’ve included a 2-minute recap of my slides (with music) and I’ve paired the performances with transliterated/translated lyrics below:
The Presentation in a nutshell:
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