Zohra El Fassia – Aïta Akki Atta and Aïta Moulay Brahim, Pathé, 1951

Posted on by Christopher Silver

In 1951, the Moroccan Jewish artist Zohra El Fassia (1905-1994) recorded two selections of ʿaita for Pathé from the transnational label’s Casablanca recording studio. To be sure, the second side of that recording, “Aïta Moulay Brahim,” has circulated with great frequency in the last decade.  This is due to multiple, overlapping factors, including its re-release on Jonathan Ward’s groundbreaking compilation “Opika Pende: Africa at 78 rpm” (Dust-to-Digital, 2011), its posting to the predecessor to this website and transfer to Gharamophone, and its magnificent reprisal by Neta Elkayam and Amit Hai Cohen. In part, we can attribute its “rediscovery” and subsequent resurgence to its difference. ʿAita, the genre from which El Fassia drew in 1951, is a far cry from either the urban Andalusian tradition and its associated repertoires or the broad, city-centric popular repertoire known as shaʿbi. With origins in the Moroccan plains stretching from the Atlantic to Marrakesh, the discrete corpus––marginalized until relatively recently––is very much an “embodied one,” to paraphrase Alessandra Ciucci, customarily performed with great emotion by shikhat, female vocalists and dancers.[1]

Less known still, is the first side of that 1951 release: “Aïta Akki Atta.” If the provenance of “Aïta Moulay Brahim” is easier to locate as sung poetry in praise of the Sufi saint Moulay Brahim (whose tomb in the eponymous Atlas village is an ongoing site of pilgrimage), the first side has not yet revealed its origins. At this juncture, this author can only gesture at possible connections to Aït Akki, east of Kenitra and north of Meknes, or Taghzout N’Aït Atta, just southeast of Tinghir. Whatever the case, the existence of this additional recording of ʿaita by Zohra El Fassia serves as a testament to the diversity of her output, an element which has only infrequently been referenced in discussion of her career. In addition to her well-known mastery of malhun, ʿaita often adjoined Egyptian taqtuqa and popular song from Tripoli, in addition to original song poetry, whenever and wherever the Jewish artist ascended to the stage. With “Aïta Akki Atta,” especially in her transition to the “ayayaya” in the middle of the recording or the ululation toward the end, once again becomes audible.

Notes
Label: Pathé
Title: “Aïta Akki Atta”
Artist: Zohra El Fassia
Issue Number: CPT 8306, PV 304
Matrix Number: M3-132318
Date of Pressing: 1951

Label: Pathé
Title: “Aïta Moulay Brahim”
Artist: Zohra El Fassia
Issue Number: CPT 8307, PV 304
Matrix Number: M3-132319
Date of Pressing: 1951

[1] On ʿAita, see, for example, Alessandra Ciucci, “The Study of Women and Music in Morocco,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 44, No. 4, Special Issue: Maghribi Histories in the Modern Era (November 2012), pp. 787-789; and Alessandra Ciucci, “Embodying the Countryside in ʿAita Hasbawiya (Morocco),” Yearbook for Traditional Music, Vol. 44 (2012), pp. 109-128.

Zohra El Fassia – Kif Youassi [Sides 1-2] – Polyphon, 1938

Posted on by Christopher Silver

As we begin to fill out the biography for the Moroccan Jewish musician Zohra El Fassia––thanks in no small part to the scholarship of Tamar Sella––it is important that we consider the contours of her recording career as well. El Fassia (née Hamou) was born in 1905 in the city of Sefrou. As Sella has gleaned from her oral history interviews, El Fassia settled in Casablanca (via Fez) sometime in the mid-1920s and there she began performing. If some of her best known recording sessions are associated with her Philips releases of the late 1940s and 1950s and Pathé in the 1950s, her earliest entrance to the studio––that we know of––took place in 1938 with Polyphon. In a cavernous space at the end of the interwar period, Zohra El Fassia made at least six records for the label directed locally by Jules Toledano. “Kif Youassi,” a song-poem from the hawzi tradition in which the narrator seeks consolation for a lost love, was among those half-dozen 78s made by the thirty-three year old artist in the course of a morning or more likely an afternoon.

But one has to wonder if she did not record earlier. Indeed, in his memoirs, Mahieddine Bachetarzi, the Algerian vocalist, impresario, and artistic director for Gramophone, mentions El Fassia as one of the musicians he recorded during a 1929 session in Morocco. While I have never seen mention of the records in question in any catalogue, it does not mean that they do not exist. And of course, should those purported 1929 sessions be found, you will be the first to know (and hear them).

Notes
Label: Polyphon
Title: Kif Youassi
Artist: Zohra El Fassia
Issue Number: 47008
Matrix Number: 5740 HPP
Date of Pressing: 1938

Zohra El Fassia – Ayli Ayli Hbibi Diali [Sides 1-2], Philips, c. end of 1954-1955

Posted on by Christopher Silver

Within moments of Albert Suissa’s end of 1954 release of the politically charged “Ayli Ayli” on the Olympia label, Zohra El Fassia did much the same with “Ayli Ayli Hbibi Diali” on the Philips label. Indeed, El Fassia, a favorite of the Moroccan palace, was almost certainly motivated to record the song at the time for the same reasons as Suissa: she, like so many others Moroccan Jews and Muslims, longed for the exiled Sultan Mohamed Ben Youssef.

One final note on what else can be heard on this recording. At minute 5:41, El Fassia excitedly recognizes her violinist, the famed Moroccan Jewish musician known as Shulamit.

Notes
Label: Philips
Titles: Ayli Ayli Hbibi Diali / ايلي ايلي حبيبي ديالي [Sides 1-2]
Artist: Zohra El Fassia
Issue Number: 78.120 H
Matrix Number: 207-A [Side 1] and 208-B [Side 2]
Date of Pressing: c. 1954-1955

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.

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