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Blazing sound of Bab L’Bluz opens portal to diverse African cultures
Headlining at this year’s Vancouver Folk Music Festival, the electrifying Marrakesh-born outfit plugs in traditional instruments and rocks out
Bab L’Bluz.
The Vancouver Folk Music Festival presents Bab L’Bluz on the Evening Main Stage on July 19 at 10:05 pm, and on the West Stage on July 20 at 12:30 pm
THE BAB-EL-MANDEB has been much in the news of late, and little of the news has been good. The 26-kilometre-wide strait that connects the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea, and hence to the Suez Canal, is the choke point through which much of the world’s shipping passes, and the site of several smouldering conflicts that have gained intensity in the past few weeks.
Bab, in Arabic, means “gate”, while mandeb means “tears” or “lamentation”. While most lexicographers credit the ocean pathway’s name to its treacherous currents and fickle winds, it could just as easily relate to the region’s long history of strife, piracy, slavery, and poverty.
Other famous babs in the Arab world include the Bāb al-maghrib, which we in the anglophone world know as the Strait of Gibraltar; the Bab Mansur al-’Alj, a picturesque and much-photographed gateway in the Moroccan royal city of Meknes; and, at the other end of the Arab world, Babylon, the ancient capital of one of the world’s first agrarian empires. Although that city has been in ruins for more than two millennia, at some point it must have fully lived up to its name as “gate of the gods”.
The band Bab L’Bluz, which headlines the Vancouver Folk Music Festival mainstage on July 19, is still too new to have produced any impressive ruins. Formed in 2018, it has so far only left behind a pair of fascinating recordings and a reputation for wildly invigorating stage shows. But in a way, it offers as important a link between cultures as any shipping channel, though it’s not quite the connection that its name implies. This “gate to the blues” is actually more of a portal to the diverse musical cultures of North Africa, the Sahel, and the Middle East. A good argument can be made that African-American musics such as the blues originated in West Africa. Bab L’Bluz founders Yousra Mansour and Brice Bottin take as their starting point the bass-heavy, deeply funky, and trance-inducing grooves of Morocco’s Gnawa tradition, itself created by Hausa, Fulani, and Bambara migrants from south of the Sahara.
And then they rock it up in much the same way that Led Zeppelin did with tunes by American blues performers such as Memphis Minnie, Willie Dixon. and Sonny Boy Williamson.
Neither Mansour nor Bottin are of Gnawa heritage: she’s an urban Moroccan from the Atlantic port of El Jadida, while he’s a French citizen from the alpine department of Savoie. But they met in Marrakesh, home to a large Gnawa community, and fell in love with the traditional gimbri and awisha while playing a different form of intercultural music with the Marrakech Jazz Beat musicians’ collective.
“He’d been part of the project before I came, and then I joined the project as a singer,” explains Mansour, in a Zoom conversation from an instrument-cluttered studio in France. “I used to play guitar, but we hadn’t played these traditional instruments before. And then we started to learn the instruments. We thought it was cool to learn these instruments as a challenge, even if we didn’t belong to this tradition of Gnawa and its big family of musicians. The challenge worked well, so we started to compose our own songs and put on some concerts, and once we had a set list of 10 songs, then we were joined by some other members.”
The reception within the tight-knit Gnawa world has been good, Mansour continues, in part because Bab L’Bluz does not repurpose tunes that often have a specific religious or ceremonial function. “People are encouraging,” she says. “I think some of them might not like it, but most of the people, most of the Gnawa musicians, they are very responsive, actually. We are mostly composing and writing our own lyrics, so it’s kind of different—and we’re inspired by a big interest in Moroccan musical heritage, which is not only Gnawa. So our music draws not only on Gnawa—but it’s mostly Gnawa because the instruments are very connected to it.”
Mansour’s awisha is a smaller, higher-pitched relative of Bottin’s gimbri, and they both have a loose connection, through the Moroccan influence on Spain, to the guitar (and also, through sub-Saharan tradition, to the banjo). But there are differences: the Moroccan instruments have only three strings, which imposes a certain simplicity on the music, but they are also fretless, which allows for the use of mind-bendingly emotive quarter-tones and vocally expressive slides. Mansour and Bottin have also commissioned electric versions from a friendly luthier: these get loud, and allow for some very creative electronic manipulations. Pure folk musicians they are not.
And then there’s Mansour’s incandescent stage presence. To say that she’s upending the traditional Western perception of women in Arabic music would be an understatement: she wrings the kind of sounds from her instrument that we’d normally associate with rock-guitar gods, and sings with penetrating assurance. She also favours songs with deep meaning. On Bab L’Bluz’s recent Swaken album, for instance, we can find a rare venture into genuine folk music with their cover of a traditional melody from Yemen, on the shores of the Bab-el-Mandeb—but it’s a Jewish folk tune that points out the interlinked heritage of all the Semitic peoples.
“We thought ‘Hezalli’ was beautiful because of the connections between North Africa, West Africa, and the Middle East,” says Mansour, who identifies as Muslim. “And while we are very supportive of the Palestinian people, we are very supportive of peace also. So that’s why we chose this one: maybe it’s an example of Muslim and Jewish people delivering beautiful art together.”
Swaken’s “Li Maana”, in turn, draws on Tunisian poetry to examine a similar theme, while “AmmA” expresses Mansour’s feminism in a very personal way. “‘Li Maana’ is just about diversity, and how diversity should be something that we celebrate, and not a source of conflict,” she says. “How it is beautiful to be from different backgrounds, and to share this moment and share each others’ background. And ‘AmmA’, which means ‘Mother’, is a song about ladies, the ladies fighting for their rights. We can see that the whole world over, there are still ladies fighting for going to school, for basic rights. Equality in salaries, inheritances, and this kind of thing. So this is for me a very important song, having been raised by my beautiful mom.”
Mansour admits that seeing a strong woman rocking out onstage with an instrument that has generally been reserved for men can be challenging for some of her fellow Moroccans. “But being a strong woman is not only difficult in our culture; it’s difficult all over the world,” she observes. “We think that in Europe it’s kind of equal, but not at all. It’s easier for ladies to get to this job—the society doesn’t criticize you—but it’s still a male-dominated area, even in European and Western culture.”
That’s true, but it’s not going to stop Mansour and Bab L’Bluz from providing a gateway into their very 21st-century take on Moroccan culture, and from having a very fine time. 
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