Gnawaa

Morocco's gnawa (or gnaoua) tradition is the music of crossroads: a place where Arab northern Africa and black sub-Saharan Africa meet. With its distinct and evocative mix of African and Arabic elements, gnawa ritual combines both music and acrobatic dancing to create an atmosphere that is said to induce both trances and healing.

The Gnawa religious brotherhood are the descendants of West African slaves who were brought northward, but they claim their spiritual descent from Bilal al-Habashi, the Ethiopian who served as the Prophet Muhammad's first muezzin, a person who calls the Muslim faithful to prayer.

Gnawa music is played on the sintir (also known as a guimbri), a long-necked, three-stringed lute, accompanied by tbal (double-headed drums) and the castanetlike percussion called querqbat. One vocal phrase or a few lines can be repeated over and over hypnotically; in ritual, one song may even last several hours.

Although gnawa perform as entertainers (as they are seen in Marrakech's famed Jmaa el-Fna square), their music is at its heart spiritual. The most important gnawa ritual is the lila (also called a derdeba), an all-night, seven-part healing trance ceremony led by a maalem, or master musician.

In the past several decades, gnawa music has been more and more visible outside Morocco. Famed musicians like the now U.S.-based Hassan Hakmoun have done much to bring the music to a wider public, as have foreign musicians like jazz pianist Randy Weston, saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, trumpeter Don Cherry and Led Zeppelin's Robert Plant and Jimmy Page. Other gnawa masters include Mahmoud Guinia, with whom Jimi Hendrix studied, H'mida Boussou and Brahim Belkane.

For years, one of the annual highlights of Morocco's festival schedule is the Festival Gnaoua hosted in June in the southern Atlantic coast city of Essaouira, which attracts thousands of fans from all over the globe. Anastasia Tsioulcas