Not Glasto: Hamadcha of Fes. Photo: theartsdesk.com
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* “Forget Glastonbury, Morocco’s Festival of World Sacred Music in Fes goes from strength to strength… The festival, which featured Christian and Jewish groups as well as Islamic and other musicians is, for my dirhams, not just Skali’s ‘beacon of tolerance’ but the best world music festival there is.” *
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theartsdesk.com, by Peter Culshaw (Fes, Morocco, June 29, 2014) ― You are or maybe wish you were at Glastonbury this weekend. Not me. I last went six years ago and it’s just too big for me. And you need about four different passes to get backstage should you have a good or a bad reason to get there. Too bureaucratic. However, I was, as ever, more than glad to be at the Fes Festival of World Sacred Music, which is more human in scale, sociable and, at times, transcendent. This year was the 20th edition. I have gone as many times as I possibly could. A couple of decades back, one autumnal morning in my flat in North London my fax machine juddered into life. I had been invited that very afternoon to a press conference in Casablanca and I had a ticket leaving in a few hours to get there should I want to. I decided to drop everything and go. Being in French, I didn’t understand too much of it, but afterwards, founder Fauozi Skali and artistic director Gerard Kurdijan suggested we drive across Morocco the next day to Fes, via the Roman ruins of Volubilis.
On the way, both of them explained the idea behind the Festival. It was a response to the first Gulf war, an attempt to be a beacon of light and tolerance in one of the holiest and ancient cities of the Islamic world. The city itself, with its ancient medina, is a wonderful place to get lost in. It’s a city where many saints are buried, and even if you don’t believe in them, the fact that many have prayed and meditated and chanted at their shrines changes the energy of the place. It was a destination where many Muslims and Jews who were kicked out of Spain in the 15th and 16th centuries came, and the Festival represents a kind of nostalgia for the great days of Andalucia, where Christians, Jews, and Muslims lived, more or less, in harmony and were at the forefront of medicine, mathematics and knowledge. It has the biggest medina in the world and miles of car-free winding alleys ― the only other comparatively similar one was in Aleppo, but now that tragic city has been virtually razed.
“The city itself is probably the real star of the Festival. It was where a university was founded two centuries before Oxford and Cambridge (by two women), and after a few days I found myself reading a line by Idries Shah about Fes that ‘it is a centre of learning, a place where transmission takes place. It’s where the baton is passed on’ and it made perfect sense.”
Ideally, the musicians would have a couple of days to acclimatize themselves to the energy of this place. As Skali pointed out, in other city festivals the energy is dispersed ― people go off to cinemas or clubs and re-assemble the next day. In Fes the energy is somehow more focused, so that after a few days you’ve slowed down sufficiently and have had your ears opened, so that you can really begin to appreciate the ancient Indian vocal music of Dhrupad or a trio of bardic divas from Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. In a globalized world, it’s hard these days to think of anything as alien or exotic, but this trio really seemed from another era, another planet, these strong women’s voices from Central Asia singing songs from centuries ago, and all wearing the most fabulous headgear. Iraq’s top pop star Kadim Al Sahir and Senegal’s finest Youssou N’Dour both returned as they love the Sufi traditions in Fes ― Youssou having a particular connection with the Tidjiani Brotherhood who have millions of followers in West Africa and whose shrine is in the city. Al Sahir says that Fes is like Baghdad used to be “a city of philosophers, musicians and mystics.”
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