Bab L'Bluz honors African blues by opening traditional gnawa music to new sounds. Created in 2018 in tribute to gnawa culture, Bab L'Bluz is a powerful Franco-Moroccan group that cultivates the blues from North Africa. Ancient and current, funky and bouncy, this blues is accompanied by verses in Arabic sublimated by soaring voices, supported by deep and 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, blues, all topped with psychedelic grooves saturated with colors 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," declares Yousra Mansour, the gang leader who, like a Berber warrior goddess, sings, howls, and pulls riffs from her small guembri awicha. Nayda! features four musicians dedicated to an ideal of unity, to a revolution of attitude that challenges the status quo. Values that align with the Moroccan youth movement Nayda (a term that means both to rise and to party in the street dialect darija). "Bab L'Bluz plays with original material that mixes different styles to 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 solely male tradition."
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