Berklee's New Program in Morocco Explores an African Musical Tradition

A quarter-century ago, Essaouira was mostly a quiet old port on the coastal edge of Morocco, out of the way for anyone not looking for it. Those who made pilgrimages there were mostly artists and musicians, including the likes of Jimi Hendrix and Carlos Santana, who came to explore a style of music that’s said to be a musical wellspring from which the blues and other African-diaspora genres later arose.

“Essaouira was a very interesting city but was really marginalized. It was like a hippie city,” says Neila Tazi, owner of A3 Communications, a marketing and public relations agency that also organizes cultural events. In 1998, she and a group of friends decided the city would be a perfect spot to start a small festival for aficionados who had an interest in the region’s distinctive Gnawa (also written as “Gnaoua”) music.

“It wasn’t music we would see on stages or on TV,” Tazi says. In 1999, A3 changed that by launching a free, open-air festival with one stage, and enjoyed a small success. Then word started to spread. 

Within two years, nearly half a million people came to Essaouira to attend what some now call the “Moroccan Woodstock,” a multistage event featuring dozens of concerts. Over time, the Gnaoua and World Music Festival has turned the city into a year-round musical mecca. In December, 60 Minutes aired a 22-minute spot on the festival and the culture it celebrates.

“If you say Montreux, you think jazz. If you say Cannes, you think cinema. And if you say Essaouira, you think Gnawa. It’s totally linked now,” Tazi, who is now also a senator in Morocco, says. And thanks to her efforts and those of her team, in 2019 Gnawa culture entered UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

“Originally practised by groups and individuals from slavery and the slave trade dating back to at least the 16th century, Gnawa culture…[combines] ancestral African practices, Arab-Muslim influences and native Berber cultural performances,” the UNESCO inscription reads. 

It’s this cultural and musical richness that also attracted Berklee, which partnered with the festival in June to launch a concurrent six-day educational program designed for professional musicians from around the world. 

Berklee had been looking for ways to further engage in Africa, and the festival had been on its radar for several years but the pandemic had put a potential partnership on ice. In 2022, the festival returned after a two-year hiatus, and last year, when Tazi reached out to Berklee, everyone agreed the timing was now right for a partnership.

“The Gnaoua and World Music Festival…was very much aligned with the values and the history that Berklee also represents, even more so with the fact that Berklee acknowledges in its mission [that it is] founded on the culture and music of the African diaspora,” says María Martínez Iturriaga, senior vice president of Berklee Global.

The initiative ties into the work Berklee Global is doing in engaging with critically important musical traditions, says Jason Camelio, assistant vice president of global initiatives. “It’s arguable that the roots of the blues come from the Gnawa music tradition. If you really dig into the [Gnawa stringed] instrument—the guembri—and the spiritual tradition of the music, you’re going to find that there are strong, strong connections,” he says.

Origin Stories

Like distant cousins who share traits inherited from a common ancestor, many African-diaspora genres that later developed across the Americas can trace their lineage back to sounds that still reverberate through Gnawa music.

“We stay with what is made here in this part of the Atlantic, and it’s jazz or rap or you name it in Latin America. But there’s not much consciousness among people in the Americas of what’s going on in Africa and [that] we got a lot of our music from them,” says Professor Leo Blanco, one of the five Berklee instructors who came from Boston and Valencia, Spain, to teach in the program. “So I think that bridge needs to be re-established again in a different way.” 

The original connection Blanco is referring to was established by the slave trade as enslaved people were brought from sub-Saharan Africa to places such as Morocco, and beyond. With them came their music. Some say that the krakeb, an iron castanet that’s prominent in the rhythmically rich and complex music of the Gnawa, came from the metal used to shackle slaves. Krakebs, along with a three-string bass lute called a guembri (a potential precursor to the banjo), constitute the genre’s primary instruments, along with the voice.

In Morocco, sub-Saharan rhythms blended with Arabic and Sufi styles to produce a genre steeped in spirituality and used in ceremonies that induce trances, but in North America they took different paths and made their way into blues and jazz. 

“I try to get the Gnawi in John Coltrane, or the Gnawi in Dizzy Gillespie or in Thelonious Monk,” says program participant Abdel Kander, a Moroccan bebop guitarist and Gnawa music enthusiast who works in cybersecurity in Paris. “Some of the tunes really [lend] themselves quite easily to that sort of a rhythm and groove.” 

Anas Chlih, a Moroccan who’s been playing the festival for 14 years and who attended the Berklee program, agrees: “You discover when you start to research Moroccan music that jazz is in here already.” 

Putting Down Roots

Kander and Chlih were among the 45 professional musicians who took part in the program. Nearly half came from Morocco, six came from Sierra Leone, and others came from Europe, North America, and the Middle East. 

Tracy Jac-During, one of the participants from Sierra Leone, said the program presented a chance to connect with other musicians from around the world “just to learn new sounds from other people and share our own sound and see how we could learn and improve our music.” 

This fusion of traditions was a defining feature of the program. Blanco, the program’s academic director, says it was important for him to create a cultural bridge. “And I think it was beautiful because in the classes we kind of shine [a light on] what each of the cultures represent and how they manifest in different ways,” he says. 

The mixture resulted in a sort of musical alchemy. “That level of diversity in terms of the musical breadth was something that we thought could happen, but until you’re there and see the magic that takes place it’s hard to conceive,” Martínez Iturriaga says.  

The program’s days included a technical class, a lab, ensembles, and special lectures. Students would go from a class in which they explored different ways of feeling the downbeat to a seminar on navigating the music business. 

“It’s a very long week in terms of what we gained from this experience,” Chlih says. “Intense in a very short time.” At the end of the week, the students performed on a festival stage the pieces they had developed during the program. And Chlih won a prize to take a Berklee Online course. 

The Berklee Global team is already planning for the second edition of the program. “I’m really looking forward to seeing everything tick up significantly—the population, the diversity of students, the diversity of styles—and really pushing the envelope on what the outcomes could be. I think it could be incredibly impactful,” Camelio says. 

Kander feels that the partnership is the start of something big: “I wouldn’t be surprised if—let’s say, five or 10 years from now—some big-time artists are coming out of, or getting their big start or their initial spark in, the program.”

Applications for the 2025 program will be accessible online the first week of December.