Aroun Haouzi El Baidi – Ana nadi bel ghram [Sides 1-2], Polyphon, 1932

Posted on by Christopher Silver

“I am the one who is in love,” Aroun Haouzi El Baidi sang majestically into a microphone in a Constantine recording studio in 1932, “O my desired one.” On this ninety year old recording of “Ana al-ladhi bil-gharam ya saʿfaya” (أَنَا الذِي بَالغْرَامْ يَا سَعْفَايَا), the Aïn Beïda-born Algerian Jewish musician expertly executes an integral song-text of the mahjuz repertoire, itself part of the extended family of Constantine’s classical maluf tradition (and sometimes considered to be an antecedent to it). Literally meaning “restrained,” mahjuz is anything but. As the ethnomusicologist Maya Saïdani has noted, mahjuz is marked by its suggestive sexual themes––so much so that throughout the twentieth century, conservative Constantinois families of means disallowed its performance in their presence.[1] Despite its association with the urban and the city, as well as Constantine’s Jewish vocalists and instrumentalists, mahjuz’s origins point to Algeria’s south. In this way, it is usually marked by the presence of the zurna, the distinctively nasal woodwind instrument that ornaments much of the more rural sound throughout the region. On this recording, however, the zurna has been replaced by a flute. Perhaps, it was an attempt to make it more “palatable” to a crowd of a certain class, much as the violin was sometimes swapped for the mizwid on some Tunisian records of the era. In either case, El Baida’s interpretation of “Ana al-ladhi bil-gharam ya saʿfaya” is a revelation. Much as the artist Aroun Haouzi El Baidi sings of sleepless nights and a fire blazing in his liver (the organ represents a classic motif in Arab poetry and song), the hope is that listeners here are awakened to a similar sensation when it comes to a musician who deserves much more by way of recognition.

Notes

Label: Polyphon
Title: “Ana al-ladhi bil-gharam ya saʿfaya” (أَنَا الذِي بَالغْرَامْ يَا سَعْفَايَا) [Sides 1-2]
Artist: Aroun Haouzi el Baidi
Issue Number: V 45.572 A; V 45.572 B
Matrix Number: 5253 BK; 5254 BK
Date of Pressing: 1932

[1] Maya Saïdani, La musique du constantinois : contexte, nature, transmission et definition (Casbah éditions, 2006), 122.

Aroun Haouzi El Baidi – Ya Moulat El Khana [Sides 1-2], Polyphon, 1932

Posted on by Christopher Silver

Readers of Gharamophone first encountered the powerful voice of the Constantinois Jewish artist Aroun Haouzi El Baidi in a January 2021 post. In that entry, I attempted to sketch out his biography, albeit in broad and sometimes tentative strokes. Since then––and thanks to the intervention of his descendants, a number of other details have surfaced. We now know, for example, that Haouzi was born in Aïn Beïda in 1889 but lived most of his life in Constantine. In addition to his recording activities for Polyphon and Pathé, he owned a record store on rue Caraman (today: Didouche Mourad), the principle street of Constantine’s city center. That the Haouzi home was a musical one is borne out not just be the activities of Aroun but by the fact that he taught the Andalusian and hawzi repertoires to his daughter Edith Khalifa (née Haouzi), of which she was known to sing late into her life. Aroun Haouzi “El Baidi” and his family departed Algeria in March 1962. He died in Paris four years later.

This recording of “Ya Moulat El Khana” comes from a rather prodigious 1932 Polyphon session. Part of the hawzi repertoire, it is a powerful lament, especially when performed by a powerful vocalist. “Today, my dearest ones left,” Haouzi intones at the 2:04 mark, “Only I remained.”

Notes
Label: Polyphon
Title: Ya Moulat El Khana (يا مولاة الخانة) [Sides 1-2]
Artist: Aroun Haouzi el Baidi
Issue Number: V 45.570 A; V 45.570 B
Matrix Number: 5249 BK; 5250 BK
Date of Pressing: 1932

Blond Blond – Chekchouka – Pathé, 1952

Posted on by Christopher Silver

At first listen, this record by Algerian Jewish ambianceur Blond Blond catches you off guard. To be sure, it begins as all North African 78 rpm records did in the first half of the twentieth century: with a spoken introduction. But while the label announced here is the correct one––Istwanat Pathé––the performer’s name invoked in what follows is that of his compatriot and coreligionist Salim Halali! Hence the confusion.

As far as I know, this 1952 release is unique in the history of early recorded North African music. Blond Blond, aided by the legendary banjoist Kaddour Cherchali (né Abdelkader Bouheraoua, 1911-1968) and his orchestra, provides us with four rather faithful impressions of four of the most important Algerian musicians of his era: the aforementioned Halali, Mahieddine Bachetarzi (the father of modern Algerian theater and inheritor of Edmond Nathan Yafil’s mantel), his master and close friend Lili Labassi (né Elie Moyal), and finally, Cheikh Zouzou (né Joseph Guenoun). In doing so, he testifies to the ubiquity of certain records and the particular formula employed therein across the Algerian soundscape at least until mid-twentieth century.

He labels all of this, “Chekchouka,” a dish of cooked and stewed tomatoes, peppers, and onions, to conjure the mixing or getting mixed up that is his series of impressions. Like shakshuka itself, the result is delicious.

Notes
Label: Pathé
Title: Chekchouka
Artist: Blond Blond
Issue Number: PA 2895
Matrix Number: CPT 9040-21
Date of Pressing: 1952

Lili Boniche – Marché Noir [Sides 1-2], Pacific, c. 1947

Posted on by Christopher Silver

The following was originally published under the title, “A Forgotten Song Surfaces About World War II in North Africa,” Reboot, November 30, 2022.

As far as historians go, I look at the past in a very particular way: I listen for its sounds. And as a collector of music, I have long believed that every song tells a story. Such is certainly the case with this phonograph record by the Algerian Jewish recording artist Lili Boniche – drawn from my personal collection – which reminds that the history of World War II encompassed a far wider geography than is often remembered.

Eighty years ago this November, in the midst of World War II, over one hundred thousand American and British troops splashed down on the beaches of Morocco and Algeria to launch Operation Torch. It was a stunning success. Within a few short days, the largest amphibian landing in human history led to the surrender of the authoritarian, accommodationist, and antisemitic Vichy regime in North Africa. It also laid the groundwork for the Allied invasion of Europe. But there were dire consequences, too. Eighty years ago this month, Nazi Germany began its six-month occupation of Tunisia.

The roughly half a million Jews of North Africa who found themselves under fascist rule during the Second World War were subject to a number of mechanisms intended to silence and subjugate. Perhaps that is why their story has taken so long to surface. As with their coreligionists in Europe, Moroccan, Algerian, and Tunisian Jews were confronted with antisemitic legislation, quotas, Aryanization, ghettoization, and the specter of a sprawling camp system. To reconstruct this forgotten wartime history, historians have been laboring with great clarity of purpose for more than a decade to produce accounts both new and definitive. But for me the question still remains: what does music remember that history might not? In other words, whose voices could be raised during the war? And how might we attend for the silences? For the many Jewish musicians of North Africa, who since the rise of the recording industry at the turn of the twentieth century had played an outsized role in crafting the region’s popular sounds, that silencing took on a quite literal form. Pushed off of radio and off the stage, some of the most important cultural figures of their time could no longer be heard at a particularly dire moment in history. Such was the case with the Algerian Jewish recording artist Lili Boniche, whose rising star was forced into retreat as the World War II reached his side of the Mediterranean with the fall of France in summer 1940.

Born in 1922 to a family of humble origins in the Casbah of Algiers, the young Boniche learned music from his father and from his milieu. As a teenager, he apprenticed to some of the other legendary Arabophone Jewish musicians of the years between the two World Wars. By the end of the 1930s, he was welcomed into the pantheon of virtuosos that was El Moutribia, Algeria’s premier orchestra, where he was quickly promoted as their “new star”––including at the troupe’s annual Ramadan spectacles. Just before the outbreak of war, he became a staple of Radio Alger’s “Arab broadcast,” sharing its sound stage alongside Muslim performers emerging and established. But with the installation of the French State’s Marshal Philippe Pétain and the promulgation of anti-Jewish legislation in metropolitan France and in North Africa, Boniche was prohibited from public performance. He was also removed from the French citizenship that he and the vast majority of Algerian Jews had held since the Crémieux Decree of 1870.

But with Operation Torch, Boniche made sure his voice was heard once again. He intimates that he may have even participated directly in the resistance that allowed for the Allied landing in the first place. As soon as was possible, he resumed touring. He also headed to the recording studio. Among his initial postwar releases was “Marché Noir” (Black Market), a song that spoke directly to the experiences of Jews and Muslims in wartime North Africa. Released in 1947, it is now being made available here for the first time in more than seventy years.

As you will hear, piano and violin set the mood as Boniche arrives at his prolonged lament.


“Oh, the good old days, I wonder if they will return

Their lightness became darkness

Time lost its meaning.”

The twenty-five year old, quieted under Vichy, was invoking the prewar moment at full volume. For much of the rest of the six minute dirge, split on two sides of a 78 rpm record, he narrates the deprivations of the Vichy years, of survival despite all odds, of food rations, and of the emergence of a notorious and devastating black market.

With Operation Torch, the tide had turned. With this record, Boniche made clear that this history need by passed on to subsequent generations.

“Now that goods are available,                       

The situation is settled, thank God.               

We can tell our sons and daughters             

this story of the Black Market.”

Despite the real-time testimony of Boniche and others, the silence surrounding World War II and North Africa has endured for decades. To begin to remedy that, we need to listen for and amplify a range of voices, including those etched between the aging grooves of records. Music indeed remembers what history so often forgets.

Notes
Label: Pacific
Title: Marché Noir
Artist: Lili Boniche
Issue Number: CO 7010
Matrix Number: ST-1480
Date of Pressing: c. 1947

Mouzino – Neklab ssika (Elked eladi ssabani) – Odeon, c. 1906

Posted on by Christopher Silver

Over a recording career that spanned three decades––from the tail end of the nineteenth century until his death in 1928––the Algerian Jewish musical pioneer Saül “Mouzino” Durand released hundreds of records and quite a few cylinders as well. As far as we know, the entirety of his recorded output drew upon the multi-modal suite music (nuba) of the Andalusian tradition and its associated repertoires. But some of it, like this c. 1906 recording of “Elked eladi ssabani” (al-Qad al-ladhi sabani, القد الذي سباني), a lighter inqilab in the mode of sika, was of far more recent vintage than al-Andalus or even the centuries afterward, at least compositionally. This is but part of the reason why the surfacing of this particular recording has so excited aficionados of Algerian music. The other is that this Odeon release is one of the few records yet to be recovered of what was the prodigious career of one of Algeria’s most consequential artists of the last two hundred years.

Born on December 29, 1865, the young Mouzino­––whose nickname of “little Moïse” must have derived from a likeness or similar disposition to his father Moïse––began appearing in private concerts in his teens in his native Constantine and then more public venues as a twenty-something when he and his family moved to the capital Algiers.[1] Early in his career, Mouzino achieved the status of virtuoso and despite his new surroundings, soon appeared alongside Shaykh Mohamed Ben Ali Sfindja, the doyen of Algerian musicians at the turn of the twentieth century, on stages large and intimate. “He mastered virtually all of the instruments,” music historian Ouaïl Labassi has written of Mouzino, “he excelled as much as with the violin as with the kouitra, but his preferred instrument for the execution of the nuba was the rebab [a bowed string instrument].”[2]

No later than 1900, a certain “Mouzino of Hammam Bou Hadjar,” recorded thirty cylinders of the Andalusian repertoire for the Pathé label.[3] That this artist was associated with Hammam Bou Hadjar, a hamlet close to Ain Temouchent in the Oran region, rather than Algiers or even Constantine, raises questions about his true identity. Whatever the case, we can conclude that the Mouzino brand already had cachet. And that Algeria was a flurry with various efforts to record––whether through transcription or through the phonograph itself––meant the thirty-something was in the right place, at the right time.

The figure that stood at the center of all recording endeavors in Algeria (and across North Africa) was Mouzino’s coreligionist Edmond Nathan Yafil, himself a disciple and close collaborator of the above-mentioned Sfindja. Among Yafil’s multiple monumental releases in 1904 was a sheet music collection for piano entitled the Répertoire de Musique Arabe et Maure, transcribed in the presence of private performances by Sfindja, Laho Seror, and Mouzino. Number 16 in a published series that stretched to more than two dozen was “El Ked El Ladi Sabani” (al-Qad al-ladhi sabani, The figure that seduced me), the very record presented here and recorded by Mouzino two short years later. Yafil and his collaborator on the sheet music project Jules Rouanet noted that it was Sfindja who had provided the composition for the much older song text. As Labassi has pointed out to me, it is therefore through the voice of Mouzino that we can hear what was perhaps Sfindja’s last musical innovation before his death in 1908.

With Sfindja’s passing in 1908, the torch was passed to Mouzino. In due time, the press hailed the Jewish artist as the “undisputed leader” of “professional Arab musicians” in Algiers. This feat was accomplished through his virtuosity but also through his extensive recording activities, as well as his teaching. In addition to the Odeon sessions, Mouzino recorded prolifically for companies including Gramophone, Zonophone, and Pathé. Mouzino also sold records, including his own, from a storefront on rue de la Lyre, a stone’s throw away from Yafil’s home-office.[4] Alongside the commercial side of the music business, he provided free training to generations of young Muslim and Jewish musicians in the capital through Yafil’s association El Moutribia. By the 1920s, his celebrity continued to rise. Audiences considered him, as well as a young Mahieddine Bachetarzi and the veteran Yamina, to be one of the three greats of Algerian music. Ever in demand, he animated concerts for every occasion––from thousand plus person Ramadan gatherings to benefits for Jewish charities held in hotel ballrooms.

Mouzino died at the age of 62 on February 2, 1928. It was a difficult year for Algerian music. Within months, both Edmond Nathan Yafil and “Muhammed Boukandoura, the Hanafi mufti of Algiers who oversaw Quranic recitation in the capital’s mosques,” would pass from the scene as well. One is tempted to speak of silences but a turn to records and radio reveals that such was not exactly the case.

In the decade after Mouzino’s death, his records continued to sell well and circulate widely. And until the outbreak of World War II, his recordings could be heard constantly on Radio Alger. In fact, through the late 1940s and 1950s, his records were played regularly on Radio Alger on segments appropriately titled, the “voice of the past.” On March 26, 1949, for example, more than two decades after his passing, Algerian radio dedicated fifteen uninterrupted minutes to Mouzino’s music. What this means, of course, is that Mouzino’s records did not disappear suddenly in 1928 but were still heard and found in Algeria at mid-twentieth century and later. The question that remains is what happened in the far more recent, intervening years. That is something I am trying to figure out. In the meantime, I am adding one more Mouzino record to the archive and will continue to surface others.

Notes

Label: Odeon

Title: Neklab ssika (Elked eladi ssabani) [al-Qad al-ladhi sabani, القد الذي سباني]

Artist: Mouzino

Issue Number: 36924

Matrix number xp1391

Date of Pressing: c. 1906

[1] On one particular and prominent concert featuring Mouzino, see Jonathan Glasser, “Breaking the Colonial Spell: A Musical Perspective From Algiers via Paris,” The Spain-North Africa Project, May 2, 2020, http://www.spainnorthafricaproject.org/bulletin/1889-world-exposition.

[2] For the first and most thorough biography of Mouzino, see Ouaïl Labassi, “Chaouel (Saül) DURAND (1865-1928)

dit MOUZINO,” Le Groupe YAFIL Association, February 21, 2018, http://yafil.free.fr/album_mouzino.htm.

[3] Christopher Silver, Recording History: Jews, Muslims, and Music across Twentieth-Century North Africa (Stanford University Press, 2022), 37.

[4] Silver, Recording History, 43.

Laho Seror – “Kam wa-kam ya ʿayni” – Pathé, c. 1907-1912

Posted on by Christopher Silver

Eliaou “Laho” Seror was among the first cohort of Algerians to record for the phonograph at the turn of the twentieth century. That his recording career lasted decades, from his first appearance on a set of cylinders made in Algiers in 1905 through sessions which brought him to Berlin in the 1930s, makes it all the more surprising that to date, so few of his records have surfaced. What this means is that while his name has long been invoked among aficionados of Algerian music, his voice itself has been harder to come by since his passing in 1940.

Laho Seror was born in the lower Casbah of Algiers on September 8, 1860 to Moïse Seror and Bellara Seror (née Bensimon). Like all Algerian Jews at the time, Laho, the youngest of the Seror’s three children, was a subject of France rather than a citizen (that would change with the promulgation of the Crémieux Decree a decade later). The young Seror grew up in both an arabophone and Ladino- (or as it was known in Algeria, Tetouani-) speaking family. At some point in the 1880s, or possibly earlier, he apprenticed himself to Shaykh Mohammed Ben Ali Sfindja, the doyen of Andalusian masters in the Algerian capital. Although Sfindja was sixteen years Seror’s senior, the two had much in common. Both were cobblers by trade. Both spent much time in and around a greasy spoon by the name of Maklouf Loubia. And both formed an important relationship with Maklouf’s son Edmond Nathan Yafil, the pioneering figure behind the North African recording industry.[1]

In the earliest years of the twentieth century, Yafil (who we will learn more about in a follow up post) began collaborating with Sfindja, Seror, and an emerging European musicologist by the name of Jules Rouanet in order to render the Andalusian repertoire onto the printed page in the form of sheet music. By 1905, Yafil turned to the technology of the phonograph cylinder to make a series of commercial recordings as part of what he called “Collection Yafil.” Among those featured on the “Collection Yafil” cylinders was Seror.

In addition to his independent recording activities, Yafil represented Pathé, Gramophone, Odeon, and other labels then operating in Algeria. Again, Seror featured prominently. This recording made by Laho Seror for Pathé under the supervision of Yafil is difficult to date but suffice it to say that it has been little heard for a century or so. It appears, for instance, in a 1912 record catalog but its matrix numbers align well with a print publication released by Yafil in 1907. As music historian Ouail Labassi has observed, “Kam wa-kam ʿayni” (How much, my eyes), the side featured here, is a khlas or mkhiles, an integral component of the Andalusian repertoire in that it serves to close a particular suite (in this case, nubat maya).

As with many of the early Pathé releases at the time, there is quite a bit of surface noise on this record. As Jonathan Ward has noted, this owes, in large part, to the labels iconoclasm. Pathé records, for example, were vertically cut, meaning that the music was to be found at the bottom of shallow grooves rather than on the sides of deeper channels (as was more common practice). The label also continued to record initially on cylinders, rather than on master discs, well past the point of their competitors. Still, you might find that if you close your eyes and come to focus on the voice and instrumentation, the surface noise will start to melt away. With a careful ear, you will hear Seror on the kwitra (a type of ʿud), accompanied by Alfred “Sassi” Lebrati on the mandolin. You may also detect Seror repeating the vocables, “ya la la” and “ya la lan,” at once, understood as making reference to al-Andalus itself and at the same time, as a form of copyright. In other words, by omitting some of the words of “Kam wa-kam ʿayni” and replacing them with “ya la la,” the artist could protect a difficult to learn repertoire from imitation by competitors.

From just before the First World War until the eve of the Second World War, Seror also played a foundational role in the ever-expanding world of Algerian musical associations, including Yafil’s El Moutribia (est. 1912) and El Andalousia (est. 1929).[2] In 1914, he also served as artistic director of an early incarnation of the aforementioned El Andalousia, which was then a part of the Young Algerian association El Toufikya.

Seror made his final records in the early 1930s for the Baidaphon label in Berlin. Throughout the end of the interwar period, he remained a regular on stage in Algeria’s principal cities and on Radio Alger. Shaykh Eliaou “Laho” Seror died in 1940 and is buried in Cimetière de St. Eugène in Algiers.

Notes

Label: Pathé

Title: Kam wa-kam ya ʿayni (كم وكم يا عيني)

Artist: Laho Seror

Issue Number: 10.409

Transfer number?: 428

Date of Pressing: c. 1907-1912

[1] Much of the detail for this post is adapted from Chapter 1 of Recording History: Jews, Muslims, and Music across Twentieth-Century North Africa (Stanford University Press, 2022): Available here and here for North America and here for Europe, MENA, and beyond.

[2] On Algerian musical associations in the early twentieth century, see Silver (2022), Jonathan Glasser (2016), Malcolm Théoleyre (2016), Hadj Miliani (2011), Omar Carlier (2009), and Nadya Bouzar-Kasbadji (1988).

Ensemble Paul Godwin – Touchiat Dil – Suite Arabe – Polydor, 1929 

Posted on by Christopher Silver

Paul Godwin (né Pinchas Goldfein) and Saoud l’Oranais (né Médioni) are not names you might expect to find together on a record. But once again a disc made almost a century ago has managed to surprise and delight. Let us start with a bit of biography. The Polish Jewish violinist and composer Pinchas Goldfein was born in 1902 in Sosnowiec in Congress Poland.[1] His talent for music was recognized while he was still a boy and brought him to study in Vienna, Budapest, and eventually in Berlin, where he settled in the 1920s. In Berlin, he established a dance band and made a name for himself as an artist fluent in the various popular styles of the day. While his first dance records were made under his family name––“Tanz-Orchester Goldfein” (the Goldfein Dance Orchestra)––he soon settled on the stage name of Paul Godwin. By 1928, his more than 1500 recordings of foxtrot, tango, and jazz made Godwin perhaps the best selling artist of his time. For a sense of scale, Lloica Czackis has suggested that the Grammophon label had sold some 9 million of Godwin’s records by 1933.[2]

            How Godwin connected to “Touchiat Dil,” (tushiyyat dil), a metered, instrumental overture in the mode of “dil” and a component of the Algerian Andalusian repertoire, is not entirely clear but the credited names at the center of this record begin to offer some clues. At the end of the 19th century and continuing through the 20th century, European composers in Algeria embarked on a number of projects to transcribe and “modernize” Andalusian music in an attempt to render it, “classical.”[3] While Jules Rouanet was perhaps the most famous of these figures, owing to his partnership with the Algerian Jewish recording pioneer Edmond Nathan Yafil, the Oran-born José Huertas was well known in his time as well. Like Rouanet, Huertas’ compositions were indebted to a celebrated Algerian Jewish musician, in his case, Saoud l’Oranais (né Messaoud Médioni).[4] Owing to Médioni’s labor, Huertas went on to publish and register the copyright for a number of Andalusian pieces or those associated with the tradition, including the famed qasida, “Bensoussan,” which tells the true and tragic story of a Jewish-Catholic romance in late 19th century Algeria. Given that Huertas’ compositions were distributed by the French music publisher Senart and that he was a member of the French rights society SACEM (Société des auteurs, compositeurs et éditeurs de musique), the potential for Godwin to be paired with “Touchiat Dil” starts to reveal itself. And while Godwin’s 1929 Polydor recording is a departure from his standard fare at the time and certainty from whatever Saoud l’Oranais must have initially played for Huertas, the Polish Jewish violinist nonetheless gives an evocative performance which manages to capture at least an echo of the original.

Notes
Label: Polydor
Title: Touchiat Dil – Suite Arabe (José Huertas – Saoud Médioni)
Artist: Ensemble Paul Godwin
Issue Number: 22515
Matrix Number: 704 BN
Date of Pressing: 1929

[1] Much of the biographical sketch of Godwin (né Goldfein) is gleaned from Rudolf A. Bruil, “Paul Godwin – Violin / Viola,” Sound Fountain, http://www.soundfountain.com/amb/godwin.html, first published July 2001.

[2] Lloica Czackis, “Tangele: The history of Yiddish tango,” The Jewish Quarterly, Spring 2003, 48-49.

[3] On European transcription projects in Algeria, see, for example, Jonathan Glasser (2016), Malcolm Théoleyre (2016), and Hadj Miliani (2000).

[4] Hadj Miliani, “Fabrication patrimoniale et imaginaires identitaires. Autour des chants et musiques en Algérie,” Insaniyat, 2000, 53-63.

Sariza – Épreuve – “Mihna” – Polydor, 1938

Posted on by Christopher Silver

In May 2020, I posted Sariza Cohen’s stunning recording of “أَشْكُوا الْغَـرَامَ”(Ashku al-gharam), released on Polydor in 1938. This is the other side of that record. It is no less remarkable. Here the pianist and vocalist from Oran performs a composition by Algerian Jewish impresario Edmond Nathan Yafil. The title of the piece is given simply as “Mihna” and “Épreuve,” both of which mean “hardship” (in Arabic and French, respectively). Her voice and piano-playing are exquisite. So is the ʿud which adorns the three minute recording.

For many years, the memory of Sariza was kept alive by someone who shared her city and her passion for Algerian music and culture: the late scholar Hadj Miliani (1951-2021). Indeed, it is largely thanks to the intrepid and inimitable Miliani that we know what we know of Sariza in the first place––from her frequent appearances on radio to her close relationship with the revolutionary Francophone Algerian poet Jean Sénac. Deservedly, there have been many tributes to Miliani since his unexpected passing in July 2021. You can read one such homage by Omar Carlier here and here. This post, dedicated to Miliani, is but a small contribution to that effort. He was and remains an inspiration.

Notes
Label: Polydor
Title: Épreuve – Mihna (Yafil)
Artist: Sariza
Catalogue Number: 524 448
Matrix Number: 4022 HPP
Date of Pressing: 1938

Aroun Haouzi El Baidi – Koumtarra Barahim, Polyphon, 1932

Posted on by Christopher Silver

This entry will no doubt change as more information comes to light. In the meantime, here are the few details we can begin to piece together on the life and career of the Algerian artist Aroun Haouzi, more commonly known as Aroun Haouzi El Baidi. Haouzi was born in eastern Algeria around the beginning of the twentieth century. As his recording name suggests, El Baidi could trace his origins to Aïn Beïda although it seems that he may have spent his earliest years in the larger entrepôt of Constantine as so many from the region did. It is also possible that Haouzi was the child of a certain Chaloum Haouzi and Rina bent Fredj Zerbib, married in Aïn Beïda in 1886, although at present that is impossible to determine.

The relatively small town of Aïn Beïda, south of Constantine and west of Tunisia, supplied a number of prominent practitioners of maluf, the Andalusian tradition straddling the Algerian-Tunisian border. In addition to our El Baidi, there was also Eliaou Assoun “El Baidi”, who recorded extensively for Pathé and Gramophone. Both El Baidis recorded at the same time in the 1920s and 1930s.

Aroun Haouzi El Baidi made a number of discs with the Pathé and Polyphon labels in the early 1930s. Among them, El Baidi recorded the classic “Qum Tara” (Arise, see the almond blossoms) for Polyphon in 1932.

El Baidi’s strong vocals, which begin with the repetition of “ya layl,” are punctuated by the early introduction of the zurna, a woodwind instrument found not only in Algeria but in the Middle East, Balkans, and Central Asia as well. As you will hear, there is also a shoutout to the violinist Youssef on side 1. Could this have been Youssef Benzarti, who also recorded for Polyphon at the time? If so, does this mean that his relative (brother?) Haroun Benzarti, a famed zurna player (zurnaji), was also captured here? Hopefully those with more knowledge will weigh in soon.

Notes
Label: Polyphon
Title: Koumtarra Barahim (قوم ترا براهيم) [Sides 1-2]
Artist: Aroun Haouzi el Baidi
Issue Number: V 45.564 A; V 45.564 B
Matrix Number: 5237 BK; 5238 BK
Date of Pressing: 1932

Saoud l’Oranais – El Idd El Kebir [Sides 1-2], Pathé, c. 1930-31

Posted on by Christopher Silver

On the approach to Eid al-Kabir (also known as Eid al-Adha, the Festival of Sacrifice), it felt appropriate to update this entry on Saoud l’Oranais, first posted on this site’s predecessor in 2015. Here, then, are both sides of his c. 1930 recording of the hawzi piece, “El Idd El Kebir” (العيد الكبير), composed by Tlemceni poet Ahmad Ben Triki sometime in the seventeenth century during his exile in Morocco. As its name implies, the song-text performed here by the renowned Jewish musician invokes the Muslim holiday which commemorates the willingness of Abraham (Ibrahim) to fulfill God’s command to sacrifice his son Ismail (as in “the Binding of Isaac” in the Jewish tradition, God intervenes to replace the child with a ram). Ben Triki’s qasida itself deals with issues of longing for home and family.

Gharamophone · Saoud l’Oranais – El Idd El Kebir [Sides 1-2] (Pathé, c. 1930)

Notes
Label: Pathé
Title: El Idd El Kebir (العيد الكبير)
Artist: Saoud l’Oranais
Issue Number: X 55225
Matrix Number: 99583
Date of Pressing: c. 1930-31

Salim Halali – Adhrob Kassi and Atini – Pathé, c. 1947

Posted on by Christopher Silver

This year marks the one hundredth anniversary of Salim Halali’s birth. It is only fitting, then, that we add some of his lesser known recordings to the Gharamophone archive. “Adhrob Kassi” (Toast with me)[1] belongs to that series of records Halali made for Pathé just after the conclusion of World War II. Indeed, after surviving the war while under German occupation in Paris, he wasted little time in returning to the recording studio postwar. Whereas on his earliest records he collaborated with his compatriots Mohamed Iguerbouchène and Mohamed El Kamal, the mid- and late-1940s sessions now drew heavily on a number of Tunisian Jewish artists including the late Gaston Bsiri[2], Simon Amiel, and Messaoud Habib (who likely provides the piano here).

SHalali-Atini 2

Like Halali, “Adhrob Kassi” is salacious. It begins with an invitation to an unnamed lover for a drink, which leads to a kiss, and then proceeds with the Algerian Jewish vocalist invoking all manner of sexual innuendo.

Gharamophone · Salim Halali – Adhrob Kassi and Atini [Sides 1 – 2] (Pathé, c. 1947)

Notes
Label: Pathé
Title: Adhrob Kassi (اضرب كاسي) and Atini (اعطيني)
Artist: Salim Halali
Composer: Salim Halali
Issue Number: PV 53
Matrix Number: CPT 6429 and CPT 6439 (M3-111282 and M3-111283)
Date of Pressing: c. 1947

[1] Literally, “hit my cup.”

[2] Bsiri was murdered in Sobibor in 1942.

Sariza – Plainte (Chekoua) – Polydor, c. 1936-1938

Posted on by Christopher Silver

The early twentieth century Algerian Jewish pianist Sariza Cohen is still venerated among Algerian musicians and music-lovers but is unfortunately little known beyond those circles. While the biography that follows will necessarily be a partial one given the scant source material available at the time of writing, it will nonetheless hopefully serve to increase her profile.

Unfortunately, much of our limited knowledge of Sariza comes from a single source: a report written at the height of Vichy rule by an employee of the Centre de Hautes Études d’Administration Musulmane (CHEAM) named M. Delahaye. In order to begin to sketch out her career, then, one must start by reading against the grain of a very problematic document.

The woman who would record and broadcast under the name of Mme. Sariza or simply Sariza was born as Zahra Saïac to Isaac Saïac and Hana Aobadia in Oran in 1889. Her mother’s family was originally from Tlemcen. In 1913, she married Abraham Cohen and thus became Zahra (Sariza) Cohen

Sariza was trained as a classical pianist, most likely at the Conservatory of Oran. At some point in the early 1930s, she became transfixed by the Andalusian repertoire, with particular interest in marrying the musical traditions of western Algerian with Western art music. As Hadj Miliani recently unearthed, Sariza’s brothers were also musically-inclined. Her brother Edmond Sayag (Saiac) served as the manager of a number of music-halls and cabarets in Paris, including the famed Les Ambassadeurs. Her brother Max Sayag (Saiac), also based in Paris, was the founder of Maxsa, one of the first French labels to deal exclusively in jazz.

Around 1936, Sariza made her first records for the Polydor label in Paris. On some of those recordings, she was apparently accompanied by the orchestra of the Great Mosque in the 5th arrondisement.[1] In 1937, J. Bouyer of L’Echo d’Alger praised one of her Polydor releases, which featured “Ana louleïa” on the A side and “Y a smer eloun” on the B side, as a “truly original record.” The French journalist was as taken by her voice as with her piano playing. He did make one suggestion, though. Given his “total incompetence in Oriental music,” he proposed that Sariza’s records moving forward, “include spoken preamble, in French, specifying the origin of the Arab melody and its literary meaning.”[2]

This Polydor side, “Plainte” (“Chekoua”), which might be best translated as “lamentation,” ornamented simply but stunningly with Sariza’s voice, her own accompaniment on piano, and strings, may have hailed from those 1936 sessions although the record itself indicates it was pressed in 1938. Nonetheless, the result is breathtaking. And now thanks to Kawther Bentjdipas (a friend of this site and much more), this piece has been further identified as the istikhbar,
“أَشْكُوا الْغَـرَامَ”(Ashku al-gharam), performed here in the mode of araq.

By 1939, Sariza and her records were featured on the “Muslim broadcasts” of Radio Alger. She often came on the air right after Quranic recitation. She also gave a number of high-profile concerts in Paris at this time.

In late 1940, she was forced off of Radio Alger by Vichy’s anti-Jewish statutes. In his report written a year later, M. Delahaye of CHEAM noted that the “Oranaise Jewess” was being compared to two figures just before the outbreak of the war: Mohamed Iguerbouchène, who among other activities, had acted as the composer on Salim Halali’s earliest records, and the Radio Alger violinist Jacqueline Maire, who was experimenting with Andalusian music herself.

After the war, Sariza appeared once again on Radio Alger and on a number of stations in Paris. By 1962, Cohen, like the vast majority of Algerian Jews, had left Algeria. But like a minority of others, she returned to independent Algeria by the end of the year. In Oran, she resumed her position at the conservatory. Alongside Abderrahmane Sekkal, she also served as the co-president of the music association Ennahda (La Renaissance). She finally departed Algeria for France in 1977.

Notes
Label: Polydor
Title: Chekoua (Plainte)
Artist: Sariza
Catalogue Number: 524 448
Matrix Number: 4021 HPP
Date of Pressing: c. 1938

[1] Hadj Miliani, “Crosscurrents: Trajectories of Algerian Jewish Artists and Men of Culture since the End of the Nineteenth Century,” in Jewish Society and Culture in North Africa, Indiana University Press, 184.

[2] J. Bouyer, “Un beau disque nord-africain,” L’Écho d’Alger, April 11, 1937.

Lili Boniche – Carmelita – Pacific, c. 1950

Posted on by Christopher Silver

You can read more about Lili Boniche and listen to his mid-twentieth century song “Pourquoi Tu Ne M’aimes Pas”/“علاش ما تحبنيش” here. Meanwhile, here is another side from his postwar sessions with the Pacific label on its “Musique orientale” series. Written and composed by Boniche, “Carmelita,” a paso-doble about a Spanish woman who drives him wild, was a major hit across North Africa when it was released c. 1950 (and possibly as early as 1947). It was later covered by Blond Blond and a young Moroccan Jewish musician by the name of Haim Botbol, both of whom found much success with the song. Listening to the original, it is not difficult to understand why.

Notes
Label: Pacific
Title: Carmelita
Artist: Lili Boniche
Issue Number: CO 7013
Matrix Number: ST-1485-1
Date of Pressing: c. 1950

Marie Soussan – Alach ya Lsan tadoui [Sides 1-2], Polyphon, 1934

Posted on by Christopher Silver

Until 2019, we knew little about Algeria’s first female stage actor Marie Soussan (1895-1977). Then Ouail Labassi, a historian of early twentieth century Algerian music and a friend of Gharamophone, published his groundbreaking research on the comedienne and recording artist here. Much of what follows, then, is mere summary of his work (with permission). Readers should also note that I build on the pioneering scholarship of Hadj Miliani. Where possible, I have added some additional details culled from my own findings.

Soussan was born on January 17, 1895 in the lower Casbah of Algiers. As Labassi has shown, her mother Louna Aboucaya was the maternal aunt of impresario Edmond Nathan Yafil. Like so many artists of her era, she honed her musical skills at family gatherings, where she devoted herself to singing and the darbuka. At some point after World War I, she joined El Moutribia, the orchestra and theater troupe of her famous cousin Yafil. According to Labassi, her stage debut may have occurred in 1925 at the Casino d’Alger. Over the next fifteen years, she maintained a busy career with El Moutribia, acting and touring alongside her comic partner Rachid Ksentini. Together, the Jewish-Muslim duo took center stage. Many of those acts were then recorded to disc. Soussan, of course, was also a talented solo artist, recording an array of genres––classical and popular––first with Gramophone and then with Polyphon. All of this earned her early membership in the Société des auteurs, compositeurs et éditeurs de musique (SACEM).

This record, “Alach ya Lsan tadoui,” an original composition by a yet identified musician, was made for Polyphon in 1934, a rather productive year for the label in North Africa. As can be heard, there is a strength and a sultriness to her voice. Perhaps that is why, in part, the French press of the time referred to Marie Soussan as “the Sophie Tucker of North Africa.”

Notes
Label: Polyphon
Title: Alach ya Lsan tadoui [علاش يا لسان تدوي]
Artist: Marie Soussan
Issue Number: 45.803
Matrix Number: 237 HRP; 238 HRP
Date of Pressing: 1934

Blond Blond – Ghnaït Robert Cohen [Sides 1-2] – Pathé, 1954

Posted on by Christopher Silver

In Algerian historiography, the year 1954 looms especially large. Most notably, the date marks the formal start of the Algerian war of independence. That year, it should be mentioned, Algerians had other causes to celebrate and occasions to mark, even if now forgotten. Indeed, two months before fighting broke out in November 1954, a boxer from Annaba in eastern Algeria fought halfway across the globe to become the bantamweight champion of the world and a national hero back home. His name was Robert Cohen.

On September 19, 1954, Cohen, twenty-four years old and standing at 5 feet, 2.5 inches (1.59 m), faced off against a slightly older and slightly taller Thai boxer by the name of Chamroen Songkitrat in Bangkok. The fierce title fight was held before a crowd of some 60,000 and lasted the maximum fifteen rounds. Despite Songkitrat’s homecourt advantage, Cohen would win on decision.[1] In emerging victorious, the young Jew electrified the boxing world, Algeria, and seemingly all of North Africa.

Less than three months after Cohen’s victory, the celebrated Algerian Jewish artist Albert Rouimi, better known by his stage name of Blond Blond, composed and then recorded the celebratory “Ghnaït Robert Cohen” (the Song of Robert Cohen) for Pathé. On what was likely the first boxing record of its kind in the Maghrib, he was accompanied by multi-talented Tunisian Jewish musician Youcef Hedjaj, a vocalist, instrumentalist, and composer who was also a favorite of Louisa Tounsia, Line Monty, and many others.

The rousing song about the Algerian Jewish boxer Cohen––curiously listed as a “chant Marocain” (a Moroccan song) on the label––is reminiscent of Saoud l’Oranais’ 1934 football chant “Gheniet U.S.M.O” in structure, melody, and lyrics. The phrase “khalouni nghani” (let me sing), for example, is repeated in both throughout, as is the French word “champion.” At the same time, there are notable differences. Blond Blond, for instance, sang of Cohen’s victory not just as the pride of a certain city, as Saoud l’Oranais did, but as “honoring” all of Algeria and North Africa as well. Of course, the context was also much changed. 1954, the start of the Algerian revolution, was a far cry from 1934 or any other moment in the interwar period. Nonetheless, this record captures certain continuities that existed in parallel to the rapid changes on Algeria’s path to decolonization. In 1954, Algerian Jews––legal French citizens since the end of the nineteenth century––still sang in Arabic and could still be considered part of the national community and even national heroes. In fact, it is noteworthy that Blond Blond recorded “the Song of Robert Cohen” in Arabic. This was a choice. He could have easily done so in French. But in making that choice, Blond Blond made clear his audience: Arabophone Algerian Muslims and the not insignificant number of Algerian Jews who still spoke Arabic. It was for them, it seems, that Cohen’s triumph was especially meaningful.

Notes
Label: Pathé
Title: Ghnaït Robert Cohen (اغنية روبر كوهين)
Artist: Blond Blond
Issue Number: PA 3120
Matrix Number: CPT 11.296; CPT 11.297 / M3-160363; M3-160364
Date of Pressing: end of 1954

[1] Cohen held the title until 1956. He lost to Italian Mario D’Agata on June 29, 1956 in a fight that was recognized as a title match by some institutional bodies but not others. In 1957, Alphonse Halimi, another Algerian Jew, took the title from D’Agata to become bantamweight world champion. It is of interest to note that Cohen and Halimi shared many similarities, in addition to both being Jews. Both were from eastern Algerian (Halimi was from Constantine). Both got their start in swimming. And class was a significant factor for both. Cohen and Halimi, for example, were each one of fourteen children.

Elie Touboul dit Pinhas El Saidi – Istikhbar Zidane + Ya saki ou s’ki habibi – Columbia – c. 1928

Posted on by Christopher Silver

The early-to-mid twentieth century Algerian recording artist Elie Touboul (1894-1947) and his music illuminate in more ways than one. To begin with, Touboul, who was also known as Pinhas El Saidi[1] and most commonly as Cheikh Pinhas, hailed not from one of the major urban centers that scholars of music and aficionados tend to focus on––but from Mostaganem, a medium-sized city some 100 kilometers east of Oran. In this way, Cheikh Pinhas’s voice serves to remind of the vast and sometimes little-known universe of Algerian music-making that existed outside of Algiers and other principal locales.

What little is known of Cheikh Pinhas has mostly been surfaced by Hadj Miliani in his chapter on Algerian Jewish musicians and stage actors in the volume Jewish Culture and Society in North Africa (ed. Emily Gottreich and Daniel J. Schroeter, 2011). Miliani, drawing on Rashid Muhammad Ibn Tunis’ critical study of history and culture in Mostaganem (1998), demonstrates that far from elusive, Cheikh Pinhas was among his city’s most celebrated musicians during the interwar years (along with his co-religionists Meyer Reboah and Isaac Benghozi).[2] As devoted as the people of Mostaganem were to Cheikh Pinhas, he was to them. After the city suffered a devastating flood in 1927, the musician composed and then recorded a song on the Columbia label to commemorate the tragedy and honor the victims.[3] The recording of “Ya saki ou s’ki habibi” featured in this post appears to hail from those 1928 sessions. Here, again, Cheikh Pinhas and this particular record of his prove revelatory.

Elie Touboul-1.jpg

“Ya saki ou s’ki habibi,” as Algerian musician and mélomane Ouail Laabassi explained to me in brilliant detail, represents a song-text from the core of the Andalusian nuba and is specifically associated with the modes of raml maya and maya. What makes this recording of “Ya saki ou s’ki habibi” so striking––in addition to the vocals and the exquisite piano––is that it is performed not in raml maya or maya but in the mode of zidane. And while the technique of employing a single song-text across multiple melodies was known in Cheikh Pinhas’ time, it largely fell out of favor after the Second World War. In other words, for those familiar with “Ya saki ou s’ki habibi,” this 1928 recording by a Mostaganemi musician likely represents the first time they have heard it sound like this. Indeed, Laabassi quickly matched the melody employed by Cheikh Pinhas in his performance of “Ya saki ou s’ki habibi” to that which is usually paired with another Andalusian song-text: “Ya nas djarat li gharayeb.”

In order to begin to fill out his biography, it need be noted that Cheikh Pinhas continued to record in the postwar period. In addition to his own sides made for Odéon, he also recorded in duet on the label with the famed Tlemcani musician Elie Bensaid (1880-1972).

Notes
Label: Columbia
Titles: Istikhbar Zidane [استخبار زيدان] and Ya saki ou s’ki habibi [يا ساقي واسقي حبيبي]
Artist: Elie Touboul dit Pinhas El Saidi
Issue numbers: 17083 [both sides]
Matrix numbers: W-N 38287 and W-N 38288; 39297 and 39298
Date of Pressing: c. 1928

[1] The name Saidi points to his family’s origins in Saida, Algeria.
[2] Miliani, “Crosscurrents: Trajectories of Algerian Jewish Artists and Men of Culture since the End of the Nineteenth Century,” in Jewish Society and Culture in North Africa, Indiana University Press, 183.
[3] Ibid.

Alice Fitoussi – Ya msalmin kalbi – Polyphon – 1933

Posted on by Christopher Silver

Alice Fitoussi (1916-1978?) was one of a handful of Algerian Jewish musicians to remain in Algeria after independence in 1962. In many ways, the continued presence of a highly visible and audible Algerian Jew in independent Algeria reminds that music can complicate periodization schemes. At the same time, Fitoussi serves as yet another potent symbol of the ways in which Algerian Jews remained deeply attached to their Arabic-language musical heritage––one shared with their Muslim compatriots––after more than a century of French colonization.

Of course, Fitoussi was much more than an emblem. She was a gifted vocalist and masterful ʿud player. She served as a prominent member of the Radio Alger orchestra and was among the first musicians to appear on Algerian television. And like her father Maʿallim Rahmim Fitoussi, she was also a respected recording artist.

Alice Fitoussi first started recording as a teenager: initially for Gramophone and then for Polyphon. Even at that early juncture, she was already crowned a maʿallima (master musician) by her peers. She earned that honorific, in part, thanks to her skillful interpretation of the hawzi repertoire. On this Polyphon recording from 1933, for example, a 17-year-old Fitoussi deftly performs “Ya msalmin qalbi,” an eighteenth-century poem written by the famed Tlemcani shaykh Bensahla.

Notes
Label: Polyphon
Title: Ya msalmin kalbi[1]
Artist: El Malma Alice Fitouci [Alice Fitoussi]
Issue Number: B 45.972 V
Matrix Number: 281 WPA
Date of Pressing: 1933

[1] Correct transliteration into English should render “kalbi” as “qalbi” (of my heart) but I am following the French orthography printed on the label here. In future posts, I will add titles in Arabic to avoid confusion.

Unknown – Bar Yohaï – Pacific, c. mid-1950s

Posted on by Christopher Silver

Until well into the twentieth century, Tlemcen, Algeria was known as “the Jerusalem of the West.”[1] That appellation derived from the robustness of the city’s Jewish community––both in terms of its size and piety––and so too from the fact that Tlemcen was home to the sainted tomb of Rabbi Ephraim Enkaoua (al-Naqawa), also known as the Rabb.

Enkaoua, born in Toledo in 1359 and who fled Spanish persecution there in 1391, is considered a foundational figure in Algerian Jewish history. He is not only credited with re-establishing the Jewish presence in Tlemcen in the 1400s following his settlement there but so too, with performing all manner of miracle in the process (including riding into town seated on a lion and soon thereafter healing the ailing daughter of Sultan Abu Tashfin). All of that miracle-making earned him moniker of the Rabb, which translates to something akin to “master.”

Since at least the nineteenth century and through the twentieth, reverence for the Rabb culminated in the annual pilgrimage (known as both a ziyara and hillula) to his burial site in Tlemcen. For centuries, thousands of Jewish pilgrims ascended to the Rabb’s tomb on the holiday of Lag BaOmer, a date which corresponds to the thirty-third day after Passover and which marks the death of the second century Rabbi Shimon Bar Yohai. In this way, the ziyara or hillula to the grave of the Rabb has long been imbued with an intense mystical quality. That mysticism is palpable in the kabbalistic, Hebrew-language piyyut (hymn) of “Bar Yohai,” written by the sixteenth century Rabbi Shimon Lavi and which was performed to great fanfare at the tomb of the Rabb at least through Algerian independence in 1962 and in more sober fashion in the decades that followed.[2]

In the first half of the twentieth century, a number of North African Jewish artists recorded the piyyut to 78 rpm disc. This version of “Bar Yohaï”[3]––of an uncredited singer on the Pacific label––comes from about the mid-1950s and was certainly the last ever recorded in Algeria.

Notes
Label: Pacific
Title: Bar Yohaï
Artist: Unknown and uncredited
Issue Number: CO 9009
Matrix Number: BY 2
Date of Pressing: c. mid-1950s

[1] Susan Slyomovics, “Geographies of Jewish Tlemcen,” Journal of North African Studies, 5:4, 2000, 81.
[2] North African Jews also sing “Bar Yohai” on Sabbath evenings before the start of the meal.
[3] “Bar Yohaï” is misspelled in the Arabic on the label as “Dar Yohaï,” which unintentionally means “the House of Yohaï.”

Saoud l’Oranais – Gheniet U.S.M.O. – Polyphon, 1934

Posted on by Christopher Silver

Sports, like music, matters. In many ways, historians, like other scholars, are still playing catch-up to “the people,” who have long understood this. And as with music, sports has a deep history. Still, it sometimes takes the present to remind us of that past. For those following the 2019 protests in Algeria, music and sports have come together in a manner that is difficult to ignore. Indeed, the ubiquity of the soccer chant in marches across the country and the mobilization efforts led by ultra fans demand attention. So too do their antecedents across the Maghrib.

As journalist Aida Alami noted in a May 2018 article for the New York Review of Books on Algeria’s neighbor to the west: “soccer protest is not a new phenomenon in Morocco.”[1] Drawing upon the work of Moroccan sociologist Abderrahim Bourkia, she writes “as far back as the 1920s, when the country was under the rule of the French Protectorate from 1912 to 1956, soccer stadiums offered a place to display resistance to the colonial power—and this tradition has persisted since independence.” As historian Omar Carlier has demonstrated, the same was true in Algeria.[2] In the aftermath of the reform-minded Jonnart Law of 1919, indigenous associations in Algeria, including soccer clubs, proliferated. As Carlier notes, most of these sports associations invoked Islamic symbols or holidays in their names, flags, and bylaws as forms of both national identification and anti-colonial resistance. Much like in Morocco, Algerian soccer matches provided a rare interwar outlet for large numbers of young men to gather, spectate, cheer, and chant.

Presented here is what is almost certainly the first soccer chant ever captured on 78 rpm record in North Africa. It dates to 1934. That it was written, performed, and recorded by Saoud l’Oranais, with accompaniment by the violinist Doudane, intrigues. In part, this is because Saoud l’Oranais, the Algerian Jewish musician born Messaoud Medioni in 1886, was among the most important twentieth century practitioners of the high art repertoire of Andalusian music and someone not immediately identified as having sung of topics beyond the poetic song-texts of al-Andalus and its related traditions.[3] But here it is: Saoud l’Oranais with a rollicking ode to his hometown team l’Union Sportive Musulmane d’Oran (or U.S.M.O. for short).

On Gheniet U.S.M.O (the Song of U.S.M.O.), Saoud l’Oranais invites the listener to celebrate the soccer club’s triumph in the Oran Cup of 1933. As the “Champion d’Oranie”––the phrase l’Oranais invokes again and again on the 1934 recording––the U.S.M.O was catapulted into the North African championship, where it would face and ultimately lose to the rather fierce l’Union Sportive Marocaine de Casablanca. Nonetheless, traces in the archives and in popular memory make clear that Saoud l’Oranais Arabic-language panegyric to U.S.M.O hardly disappeared­­––being sung or hummed for years to come. The six minute song also serves as sonic reminder that in the years between the First and Second World War and more than half a century after the 1870 Crémieux Decree, which bequeathed French citizenship to most Algerian Jews and often cleaved them from their indigenous milieu, prominent members of the Jewish community––like Saoud l’Oranais––expressed their deepest joys in Arabic and continued to root for the local Muslim team.

Notes
Label: Polyphon
Title: Gheniet U.S.M.O.
Artist: Saoud l’Oranais with Doudane
Issue Number: 45.729
Date of Pressing: 1934

[1] Aida Alami, “The Soccer Politics of Morocco,” the New York Review of Books, December 20, 2018. https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/12/20/the-soccer-politics-of-morocco/.

[2] Omar Carlier, “Medina and Modernity: the Emergence of Muslim Civil Society in Algiers between the Two World Wars,” in Walls of Algiers: Narratives of the City through Text and Image, ed. Zeynep Çelik, Julia Clancy-Smith, and Frances Terpak, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles in association with the University of Washington Press, 2009.

[3] Presciently, Hadj Miliani made reference to Saoud l’Oranais’ Gheniet U.S.M.O. in “Crosscurrents: Trajectories of Algerian Jewish Artists and Men of Culture since the End of the Nineteenth Century,” in Jewish Culture and Society in North Africa, ed. Emily Benichou Gottreich and Daniel J. Schroeter, Indiana University Press, 2011.

Line Monty – Ouine houa? – Pathé, c. 1952

Posted on by Christopher Silver

Algerian Paris in 1952 must have been quite the scene. In and out of the Pathé recording studio that year, for example, was a who’s who of Algerian artists including the rising star Line Monty. In Paris that year, the twenty-six year old Line Monty, born Eliane Serfaty and sometimes dubbed “the Algerian Edith Piaf,” recorded six sides in Arabic. On all of those sides, she was backed by Youcef Hedjaj, the Tunisian Jewish orchestral and bandleader, multi-instrumentalist, and vocalist who was so adept at setting the mood. While four of those sides would be re-released on a single Pathé EP by the end of the decade––including her iconic rendition of l’Orientale––two were never re-released. Now, for the first time in over six decades, Ouine houa? (Where is he?) is available again in all of its mid-century sultry splendor.

Notes
Label: Pathé
Title: Ouine houa?
Artist: Line Monty
Issue Number: PA 2834
Matrix Number: CPT 8691 / M3-135633
Date of Pressing: c. 1952

 

Louisa – Ya Manna – Parlophone, c. 1930

Posted on by Christopher Silver

In 1931, Gramophone described Louisa al-Israïliyya (Louisa the Jewess) as “the most famous ‘méââlma’ in Algeria.”[1] Given her fame, Parlophone could refer to her in their catalogue simply as Louisa. Her mononym provided more than enough recognition to sell their records. That Louisa, sometimes also known as Louisa al-Dziriyya (Louisa the Algeroise), was among the biggest names of her era is clear from what can be pieced together from the historical record. Given her renown, it is all the more curious that Louisa has been almost completely forgotten.

Beginning as early as the mid-1920s, Louisa appeared alongside Mahieddine Bachetarzi, Sassi, the pianist Mimoun, and Yamina bint al-Hajj al-Mahdi (the other great muʿalima) in concert and on radio. Among those giants, she could hold her own. Algerian newspapers reported as much about Louisa, who was, in addition, one of the few artists of the era to be explicitly referred to as Jewish. At the same time, reporters never neglected to mention that despite her French citizenship, “the Jewish star” (la vedette israélite), as she was called, was nonetheless “a native.” That indigeneity was evidenced by the fact that Louisa performed (almost) exclusively in Arabic and so too, that she was a staple of the largest Ramadan celebrations of the interwar period.

Louisa recorded the song Ya Manna (O object of my desires) in 1930 for Lili Labassi’s Parlophone label. In fact, the voice introducing the record is none other than that of Labassi himself. The Parlophone catalogue declared that, “her ‘Ya Manna’ will be a triumph.” Indeed, it was. The Tunisian song, part of the wedding repertoire, would henceforth be covered by Meriam Fekkaï, another major Algerian artist, while near contemporaneous versions by Tunisian musicians Bichi Slama and Fadhila Khetmi were released as well. Decades later, its most famous version would be performed by Naâma, one of the greats to emerge right around Tunisian independence in 1956.

Notes
Label: Parlophone
Title: Ya Manna
Artist: Louisa
Issue Number: 46.764
Matrix Number: 114521 [Side 1] and 114522 [Side 2]
Date of Pressing: c. 1930

[1] Or muʿalima, meaning “master” and in this case, “master musician.”

Zohra El Fassia – Mayli Sadr Hnine – Pathé, c. 1956

Posted on by Christopher Silver

Among the many North African musical forms recorded by Zohra El Fassia, her interpretations of Algerian hawzi (or haouzi) stand out. Her “Mayli Sadr Hnine,” recorded c. 1956 for Pathé and complete with accordion accompaniment, is no exception.

Zohra El Fassia was born Zohra Hamou to a Jewish family in Sefrou in 1905. Soon thereafter, the Hamou’s moved to Fez (or Fas) from whence her stage name of “El Fassia” derives. Her father, a butcher by trade and a paytan[1] by pleasure, provided her with early musical training. First recognized for her talent as a teenager, she started recorded in the 1930s and would continue to do so in Morocco through the late 1950s. By mid-century, she found herself in Casablanca, like so many musicians of the time.

“Mayli Sadr Hnine,” a song text in colloquial Arabic––like the rest of the hawzi repertoire, has long been held in high regard by a range of Algerian recording artists from Tlemcen but so too their Moroccan Jewish analogues like El Fassia. While the Tlemencis Larbi Bensari and Elie Bensaid had already recorded the song in the late 1920s, it appears that Zohra El Fassia may have been the first Moroccan woman to record it, even if decades later.

It should also be mentioned that there is a rather wonderful surprise at the end of this recording. Just as the song finishes on the second side, an eager Pathé employee or perhaps a member of Zohra El Fassia’s entourage can be heard swinging open a door.

Notes
Label: Pathé
Title: Mayli Sadr Hnine
Artist: Zohra El Fassia
Issue Number: PV 549
Matrix Number: CPT 12.183 – M3-179133
Date of Pressing: c. 1956

[1] A paytan is a singer of piyyut or Hebrew liturgical poetry.

Sassi – Tchambar Sika – Parlophone, c. 1930

Posted on by Christopher Silver

Alfred or Fredj “Sassi” Lebrati was many things: an Algerian Jew born to Meyer Lebrati and Rebecca Chemla in 1885, a shoemaker in the early twentieth century, and an entrepreneur who opened a lively café in Algiers during the interwar period.[1] But Lebrati, the musician who became known simply as “Sassi,” was also the greatest North African mandolinist of the twentieth century. Indeed, Sassi, born in Constantine but raised in Algiers, was not only the most accomplished mandolin player of his generation––almost always described as a virtuoso––but among the most prolific recording artists of his era.

Sassi’s rise to musical prominence owed much to the musical incubator that was the lower Casbah of Algiers at the turn of the last century. The streets of Bab El Oued, Socgemah, and de la Lyre––where Sassi lived, worked, and made music––were occupied by the likes of record impresario Edmond Nathan Yafil and the mostly Jewish members of El Moutribia, Algeria’s first Andalusian orchestra and association.

Sassi’s recording career began early––in 1912 at the latest. And over the next three decades, he would record dozens of records for Pathé, Gramophone, Columbia, and Parlophone. To put it lightly, his repertoire was varied. This included almost all of the genres and sub-genres associated with the classical Andalusian repertoires of Algeria’s major cities but so too Hebrew paraliturgical music. He also dabbled in the popular.

Parlophone first started recording in Algeria in 1930. This record dates from those early and wide-ranging sessions, which grabbed the attention of both commentators and the record-buying public at the time. In large part, that attention was the result of the presence of Sassi, “the seal of the mandolinists,” as one commentator later referred to him. Here, he performs a “chambar” (tshanbar), what anthropologist Jonathan Glasser has described as a “prelude or metered overture.”[2] Like the inqilab or the istikhbar, the tshanbar, performed in a specific mode, served to welcome the listener to a particular nuba (the Andalusian musical suite). On this side, Sassi, along with Algerian pianist Amar (who has left us only his last name), masterfully executes the tchanbar in the mode of sika. While this piece may sound rather timeless, it should be recalled that both the mandolin and piano were rather new additions to Andalusian music. As much as Sassi was a musical master of a particular repertoire, he should also be remembered as a master of innovation.

Notes
Label: Parlophone
Title: Tchambar sika
Artist: Sassi (mandoline); Amar (piano)
Catalogue Number: B 46.510 a
Matrix Number: 114020
Date of Pressing: c. 1930

[1] For the most complete biography of Alfred or Fredj “Sassi” Lebrati, see Ouail Labassi’s “Alfred LEBRATI: Maalem Sassi (1885 – 1971),” http://yafil.free.fr/album_Sassi.htm, posted on February 16, 2018.

[2] Jonathan Glasser, The Lost Paradise: Andalusi Music in Urban North Africa, University of Chicago Press, 2016, p. 97.

Reinette l’Oranaise – Ya biadi ya nas – Polyphon, c. 1934

Posted on by Christopher Silver

“Ya biadi ya nas,” first recorded by the Algerian Jewish artist Reinette l’Oranaise in 1934 for the Polyphon label, represents a case study in sonic transmission. So too does this particular recording of a song (associated with the pre-wedding henna ceremony) demonstrate the power of the record to fix a repertoire at a certain moment in time and then for decades to come. For both of these ideas, I draw on the pioneering work of ethnomusicologist Edwin Seroussi, who has long demonstrated the intersection of commercial recording and canonization of folk repertoire.

In fact, to give you a sense of the song’s chain of transmission and enduring popularity, consider that Reinette l’Oranaise’s recording of “Ya biadi ya nas” was first released on Polyphon during the interwar period and then re-released more than a decade later on the Philips label. Clearly, audiences were still clamoring for the record years after it first appeared in North African record stores. In similar fashion, Philips again released “Ya biadi ya nas” as a 45 rpm record at mid-century. Thanks to the intrepid collector Farid Hamidi, a recording of that EP has been available on Youtube since 2011.

Let me provide you with a bit of background on Reinette and“Ya biadi ya nas” before we move on to the latest link in the chain of transmission of a song first recorded more than eighty years ago. Reinette l’Oranaise was born Sultana Daoud in Tiaret, just south and east of Oran, in 1915. Blind since childhood, the young Daoud and her family moved from Tiaret to Oran toward the end of or immediately following the First World War. According to Maurice El Medioni, Algerian Jewish pianist and eventual collaborator of the future Reinette l’Oranaise, Daoud was first apprenticed to his uncle Saoud Médioni –– better known by his stage name of Saoud l’Oranais –– at the age of eight (Maurice El Médioni, A Memoir: From Oran to Marseilles, 1938-1962, p. 166). Indeed, it is entirely possible that Saoud was the first to crown her Reine or Reinette, a French play on her name “Sultana” and from whence she derived her stage name Reinette l’Oranaise.

Saoud l’Oranais was Reinette l’Oranaise’s shaykh (her master teacher). Over more than a decade, he transmitted his musical knowledge, especially that of the colloquial hawzi repertoire, to his taliba, who is referred to at the outset of this recording –– made when she was nineteen –– as his éleve (his apprentice or student). That relationship of shaykh to taliba meant that the two were nearly inseparable in the period between the two wars. Reinette, for example, would first make her debut and then remain a fixture at the café owned by Saoud in the Derb, Oran’s Jewish quarter. As the archives make clear, Algerian troops often listened to the two artists in tandem. And as available newspapers demonstrate, Reinette l’Oranaise and her mentor Saoud l’Oranais frequently appeared together on Radio Alger’s Arab broadcast. Indeed, if you listen carefully to the first thirty-seconds of Reinette’s recording of “Ya biadi ya nas,” Saoud himself is there in the background, lending his vocals to hers as she warms up.

Astutely, Joseph Chetrit, scholar of North African Jewish culture, language, poetry and song, has written that “Ya biadi ya nas,” also rendered as “Abiadi Ana” or “Abyadi Ana,” likely emerged during the birth of the recording era (the turn of the twentieth century) in Western Algeria –– possibly Tlemcen or Oran –– before spreading west to Morocco (See: “ABYADI ANA,” 2015). Given that we now know that Reinette l’Oranaise can be credited with the earliest recorded version of the song (in 1934) and learned it from her Oran-born master Saoud l’Oranais, Chetrit’s assesment seems all the more likely.

As for transmission, Seroussi and co-authors Ofer Ronen and Elia Meron at the Jewish Music Research Centre (See: “ABYADI ANA,” 2015) have shown that perhaps the most famous version of the song, released by Moroccan Jewish artist Zohra El Fassia for the Zakiphon label in the early 1960s, bears some remarkable similarities to the original. “The ending cadences of the sections,” the three point out, “and their divisions are identical.” Was Zohra El Fassia familiar with the Reinette l’Oranaise record in question? It is certainly possible. If so, the Israeli artist Neta Elkayam latest show, “ABIADI,” which pays brilliant homage to the Zohra El Fassia and her version of “Abyadi ana”, not only connects us to the Moroccan star of the mid-twentieth century but so too draws on Reinette l’Oranaise and perhaps on Saoud l’Oranais as well. Thanks to Elkayam and her co-collaborators, then, and her reprisal of “Ya biadi ya nas”, we are connected once again to sounds which first emerged on record some eight decades ago.

Notes
Label: Polyphon
Title: Ya biadi ya nas
Artist: Reinette l’Oranaise
Issue Number: 45.719
Matrix Number: 69 HRP
Date of Pressing: c. 1934

Salim Halali – Je t’appartiens (tango) – Pathe, c. 1945

Posted on by Christopher Silver

“Istwanat Pathé, Salim Halali.” These were the words the Algerian Jewish musician Salim Halali spoke in the summer of 1945 as he recorded at the Pathé studio in Paris. Those 1945 recording sessions occurred about a year after Paris’ liberation from Nazi German control. For many, this recording –– “Je t’appartiens” (“I belong to you”) –– and others from his 1945 sessions signaled that Halali had survived in Paris. It was a question that many Algerians had wondered at war’s end. With this tango, then, Salim Halali not only boldly announced his return to the stage and studio but also made it clear that, once again, he belonged to his public.

Salim Halali is a fitting candidate to launch Gharamophone.com –– the online archive dedicated to preserving North Africa’s Jewish musical past, one record at a time. Halali is a figure who is known in the broadest of brush strokes, and at the same time, a personality for whom almost all of the details still escape. We know, for example, that Halali was born in 1920 in Bône (Annaba), Algeria, that he made his way to Paris as a teenager in the mid-1930s, that he survived the war years in Paris, and that he eventually established the famed Le Coq d’Or cabaret in Casablanca. And yet, all of the rest still needs filling in. Similarly, some of his music catalogue is readily available –– instantly conjured by generations of fans from the Maghrib –– and still, so much of his music has remained unreleased until the present. With the addition of Halalil’s “Je t’appartiens” to the archive, I aim to change some of the above.

Beyond constituting a long forgotten component of Halali’s repertoire, this record also provides a rather remarkable glimpse into his immediate postwar life. Indeed, if before the war, Halali had made a name for himself alongside Algerian orchestral leader Mohammed El Kamal and Algerian composer Mohamed Iguerbouchène (whose names were featured on all of his early recordings), by the outbreak of war, the three had more than parted ways. As Halali went into hiding ­­­­–– possibly at the Grand Mosque of Paris –– El Kamal and Iguerbouchène went to work for Nazi German-controlled radio in Paris. In fact, at the very moment that Halali himself went silent in occupied Paris, El Kamal pressed ahead, continuing to record throughout the war alongside French jazz musicians in the capital.

While Halali survived the war, other North African Jewish musicians stranded in the metropole did not. Gaston Bsiri, for example, giant of Tunisian song –– a recording artist and composer –– was deported from Paris and then murdered in Auschwitz in April 1942.

What is intriguing about this Salim Halali recording – beyond the music itself –– is that the words for “Je t’appartiens,” are credited to none other than the Gaston Bsiri. In fact, this was the case for almost all of Halali’s immediate postwar recordings, which are attributed not to his former Algerian collaborators (turned collaborators of a different sort) but to the Tunisian Jewish Bsiri. Did Halali and Bsiri encounter each other in Paris? It is almost certain they did. And yet, whether the writing credit and its timing constitutes mere coincidence or an act of homage on Halali’s part is unclear. What is clear is that this record begins to give voice to the wartime fate of some North African Jewish musicians and so too to their long silenced output in the days following the war. Given the Bsiri credit and his tragic fate, so too might there be another layer of meaning to the lyric, “I belong to you.”

Notes
Label: Pathé
Title: Je t’appartiens (tango)
Artist: Salim Halali
Composer: Gaston Bsiri
Issue Number: PV 5
Matrix Number: CPT 5975 (M3-107233)
Date of Pressing: c. summer 1945