Maleem Mahmoud Ghania with Pharoah Sanders – Trance Of Seven Colors

Zehra

Maleem Mahmoud Ghania with Pharoah Sanders - Trance Of Seven ColorsCross-genre collaborations, eh? They’re sometimes banging, sometimes embarrassing. Gnawa trance from west Africa meets luminary of free jazz doesn’t fill one’s heart with hope, but rest ye assured, this is much closer to a banger.

I could explain the gnawa trance tradition, but I’d basically be re-phrasing whatever I’d scrape from Wikipedia or whatever. Loosely, and in short, it’s repetitive music featuring plenty of bass-ended things, percussion and reedy melodies. It’s a kind of repetition that builds in intensity and isn’t encumbered by tempi, but if it’s improvised then it’s very much locked into patterns, rather than freely improvised in the Pharoah Sanders sense.

The question for these things, I’d argue, is what is the “new” voice adding — that is, is Sanders’s contribution worth it? Well, in short, yeah. It’s really fascinating to hear this person with enormous horn resources taking a lightly-lightly approach. There’s a degree of out-skronk (“Hamdouchi”, where Sanders plays off some sort of double-reeded motif), but more often Sanders is taking a restrained, respectful approach — rarely blowing over the top, rarely extemporising the melodies too far. Which leaves Maleem Mahmoud Ghania‘s (apparently none-finer calibre) band to do its trancey thing.

I guess possibly the most odd, interesting thing about this collection (first released by Axiom in 1994) is that there’s no clear idea of typical roles — the gnawa is meant as a healing ceremony, so perhaps rather than being a player in the gnawa, maybe Sanders is actually its subject, speaking his healing through his horn. It’s definitely one of those kind of records, deep as fuck, Sanders playing with soul but not much swing, the gnawa swirling above him in ecstasy.

Though I say that, there’s some evidence of something approximating more conventional (Euro-American) collaboration — “Peace in Essauira (For Sonny Sharrock)” feels more like gnawa percussive witchcraft over a plaintive, restrained melodic solo from Sanders. Elsewhere, there’s what feels like bass solos from Mahmoud – “Bala Moussaka” dotes around a perambulating melodic bass figure before unleashing the trance. Where there might be most improvisation is in the psalmodic call and response action, Sanders in turn not invading those melodic figures, but carefully fitting around them (“Boulandi Samawi”).

It’s a lovely record and made all the better for being tantalising — I get the impression that some of the more intense pieces (“Casa Casa Atougra”) are part of a longer whole. That piece is a largely percussion-led stomp, call-and-response and a constant battery of built intensity. It’s unclear from the liner notes how this all came about, but the distinct impression for me is that Sanders’s effort was as much to lend his name to something worth listening to, with occasional careful, sober interactions that don’t detract from or make a spectacle of the gnawa ceremonies. I could be wrong, I have no real idea. But it’s definitely a banging set of tracks to, uh, gnawa up your life.

-Kev Nickells-

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