Rehearsing for Led Zeppelin

Famous people like to come to Marrakech and why not?  Winston Churchill did it. Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti did and so did Brian Jones and the rest of the Rolling Stones. There were so many and then there was me.

Marrakech is the city from which we get the name of Morocco. It is a flat town whose old city is surrounded by red walls, punctuated by Moorish gates. The town is not industrial and despite the hundreds of thousands of tourists who visit it each year to get a taste of a medieval city it could be sufficient unto itself as it is in the center of the Haouz plain and is the emporium for agricultural products that come in, get processed. It then supplies the farmers for miles around with their basic needs. Life there has not changed that much since the 19^th century. Marrakech is still a Moorish delight.

And the delight of that delight is an open square called the Jmalfna, a near 24-hour food market where traditional entertainers, acrobats, singers, story tellers, dancers, and hustlers of all kinds entertain other Moroccans as well as so many thousands of tourists.

They stay in local hotels, are taken around by local guides and get the feel of local society without becoming part of it. I vowed not to do that. And so back in 1977 I put on my drip-dry brown suit, bought a bicycle, and rented a room in an old Moorish house in the Old City. Admittedly it was run by an American avant garde composer, but all our neighbors were Muslim Moroccans. Among the most colorful was Brahim el Belkani.

Brahim was a little older than I was and came from a talented musical family that played Gnawi music, a very Sudanese style of music brought by former West African slaves who were brought to the north by the cruel and colorful Sultan Moulay Ismail whose pirates and privateers raided the coasts of Europe including England an imported thousands of white European Christian to build the Sultan’s palaces.

A British author has written a complete biography of one such British unfortunate and his life of a slave in Morocco in the book called, White Gold. Click here for the book link on Amazon.

The Gnawi brought West African and in particular Sudanese instruments and sound to the multi ethnic soundscape of this medieval kingdom and as this kind of music has the same origins as the blues, it is not surprising that white British rock stars who are consciously and unconsciously steeped in the blues are attracted to the music.

I was no different except that I played the oud and had brought my oud with me. The oud is a local and regional multi-stringed lute with no frets and that is used in a variety of Moroccan styles. As a foreigner I could play in some of them and so I was welcome.

Brahim lived next door, and he would often come over, and we would “jam.” Of all the visitors and musicians around I was the only one who did not have a long Moroccan pipe or sebsi and for health reasons do not smoke kif, the local form of marijuana. But so many of the musicians I played with did. This often made them lose their sense of time and freed them up for extensive improvisation.

Here is a session when Brahim and I played together. He started out with a long improvisation on ginbri and then I followed up with my interpretation of the Nubian Sudanese singer and oud player Hamza ad Din’s song The Messenger and then I ended the session with a Sudanese improv of my own making. Throughout Brahim accompanied me on drum.

We had many sessions like this, but I recorded only one. That was three years before Brahim cut an album with Jimmy Page and Robert Plant.

I would like to think that Brahim and my session was a rehearsal for Led Zeppelin. There may be some truth in this.

Read more about this and view additional videos here:

When Led Zeppelin created Moroccan'roll in Marrakech