Bab L'Bluz honors African blues by opening up traditional Gnawa music to new sounds. Created in 2018 as a tribute to Gnawa culture, Bab L'Bluz is a powerful Franco-Moroccan band that cultivates the blues from North Africa. Ancient and contemporary, funky and bouncy, this blues is accompanied by Arabic verses sublimated by soaring voices, supported by deep, heavy grooves that seem to spring from the heart of the Maghreb. Sensual, visceral, and immediate, their first album Nayda! presents a mix of funk, trance, and blues, all topped with psychedelic grooves saturated with color and inspired by counterculture heroes such as Santana, Jefferson Airplane, and Nass El Ghiwane, the Moroccan Rolling Stones. "More than anything, we are a rock band," says Yousra Mansour, the band's leader who, like a Berber warrior goddess, sings, howls, and pulls riffs from her small awicha guembri. Nayda! features four musicians dedicated to an ideal of unity, to an attitudinal revolution that shakes up the status quo. These values are in tune with the Moroccan youth movement Nayda (a term that means both to rise up and to party in the Darija street dialect). "Bab L'Bluz plays with original material that mixes different styles that form a whole. The fact that we are led by a Moroccan female musician is a symbol of our respect for equality in a field that has too long been a male-only tradition."
Amazon
eBay
Rare Vinyl
