Algeria Night
El Gusto
Idir
The reunion of Berber music and Chaâbi for an Algerian Night, where Idir and El Gusto, in their style, will celebrate the identities of their common country through a recovered fraternity.
This Algerian Night should be one of the most touching evenings of the festival. All the invited artists have a poignant background that also tells the bustling history of Algeria, a country that is now ready to heal its wounds. Idir, the son of a Kabyle shepherd, has popularized Berber music by giving it a new style, with no orchestra, on a guitar-voice basis. He was soon discovered on Radio Alger and had a great success with his first song, A vava Inouva, and then tried his luck in Paris in 1976. He has long been a major figure of the Kabyle community, as a singer but also as a man lauding the reconciliation in Algeria and fighting against fundamentalisms. The Kabyle identity, denied in the name of national unity and then Islam, is for him a peaceful fight, the affirmation of the Algerian people’s diversity. By the end of the 90’s, when he decided to release a new album aptly called Identités and start his first French tour, he received triumphant praise from all generations. He latterly recorded La France des couleurs, with some famous French rap artists, to demonstrate the need for diversity isn’t only an Algerian matter...
El Gusto’s story is quite different... In the 40’s and 50’s, Jews and Arabs from Algeria created a musical genre called the Chaâbi : a music born in the streets of Algers, among the people ; a music of sharing, friendship and joy at the "crossroad of the marabouts’ religious music and Andalusian music", as it was defined by a member of the band. The Chaâbi of the Algiers pioneers had almost disappeared when the war for independence tore the communities apart. It took 50 years for the musicians who had created this "school" to meet again. It was nearly by chance that the Irish-Algerian Safinez Bousbia discovered the existence of the Chaâbi and the improbable story of its musicians, some of which are still alive but scattered in several countries, without knowing about one another. So she decided to bring them together again by dedicating a documentary to them that took her many years to produce. Damon Albarn’s enthusiasm that led to the production of the album El Gusto for his label Honest Jons has been a great aid as well. Thus we have discovered with wonder this Algerian "Buena vista social club", its desire to restore to life a free and euphoric music, that can go from a mere piano melody to an epic form where 40 musicians combine guitars, mandoles, violins and percussions in a fraternal and generous spirit beyond boundaries and genres.
