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Review: Mohamed Errebbaa and Justin Adams, Crofter’s Rights – ‘Heady, heavy intoxicating cycles’
Modesty is an over-moralised and under-rated aesthetic value. In partially concealing something, its beauty is celebrated rather than denuded or reduced to factuality.
If understood by more musicians, there might be less cant and showmanship, better dress-sense, and a return to honesty and skill.
Modesty is just the practical wisdom of humility: knowing how to entertain an audience and bear your heart without being an industry cynic or an individualist tosser.
is needed now More than ever
For an example of modesty as a musical value, anyone could look to last night’s performers at the fundraiser for Bristol Refugee Festival and Dovetail Orchestra.
The show – skill, stage flair, real story – defied exoticism precisely because it was simply itself. The show was itself? Yeah, the players on stage made it happen. So, enter two masters who are completely unassuming.
Now a Bristolian, Mohamed Errebbaa is an acknowledged master of his native Gnawa music. Steeped in Sufi ritual and Muslim hymns, his driving and artful riffs on the guembri – the traditional three-stringed bass lute – unlocked rhythmic possibilities as his graceful singing soared above.
Alongside Errebbaa, guitarist Justin Adams proved his solid musical credentials in the live arena with an easy stage presence and deliberative picking.
Errebbaa’s guembri benefitted from amping up – not just to give it something of the thump that young ears love in increasing increments of permanent aural damage, but also to bed into the twang of Adams’ sensitive, languid, fluid-but-raggedy rawk electric guitar.
As the trance took hold, time passed without thought. Interlocking melodies and polyrhythms gave rise to Gnawa lyrics praising God; African-American songs looking for liberation; guitar quotes from English folk; blues and desert; a clatter of drums, beguiling and precise…
As each chorus arrived, inevitable but new each time, vocalist and percussionist Chloë Rose Laing breathed freshness over the heady, heavy intoxicating cycles. She hyped the crowd with clap patterns while adding to the stage another performing body landing carefully but effortlessly on the edge between emotive plangency and healthy detachment.
Man of the match was drummer Omar El Barkaoui who consistently locked into multiple separate counter-rhythms while running alongside the nuanced variations of Adams’ exploratory soundscapes and Errebbaa’s syncopated marches.
His emphatic delivery enhanced their breezy caprice while drilling listeners and dancers deeper into mountain rock.
Support came from local stalwarts Moussa Kouyate on kora and Guinness, and trumpeter David Mowat. Mowat did the heavy lifting in an exposed position, incisively drawing out timbres and tones from the intricate wash, pealing from Kouyate’s rippling fingers on the west African harp.
But if the players on stage made the show happen, what did the audience contribute?
Money – for two important causes. Some non-stop roly-poly skank from younguns up front. A wall of solidarity in the beards and beer bellies of slightly older musos. An appropriate outpouring of private emotion from colourfully-dressed bohemian culture enthusiasts.
Props to Crofter’s Rights for hosting something outside their usual wheelhouse and to Music at the World Junction for promoting this grassroots fundraiser. And bravo-bravo to everyone who packed out a venue on a Monday night.
Really the only virtue appropriate to the audience of a non-egotistical band is unassuming attentiveness. Opened ears can open the feet and hips and even the heart. But the point here was to raise money for people with nothing who’ve had to leave everything.
Going to a gig is a great excuse to open the wallet. And if it also swerves egos and avoids exoticising the issue, it can be a gateway for doing more as a city – more sincerely, more painfully perhaps, however modestly.
All photos: Hannah Ford
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