Sonic Pluriverse Festival: Aficionado Flamenco Moro | Aly Keïta | Hassan Boussou

Sonic Pluriverse Festival: Global Echoes of Gnawa
Aficionado Flamenco Moro | Aly Keïta | Hassan Boussou
Concerts, DJ-Set

Aficionado - Flamenco Moro by Alaa Zouiten Sextet

Fourteen kilometers separate Tarifa and Tangier. The shortest sea route in the world between two continents - and one of the most permeable for centuries. From the eighth century onwards, the Moors brought their modes, their lutes, their poetry to al-Andalus; seven centuries later they were driven out, but the sound they left behind has never disappeared. It lives on in flamenco - a music that is Spanish and at the same time has never been entirely Spanish. Aficionado - Flamenco Moro picks up this interrupted thread once again and weaves it anew. The sextet is led by Alaa Zouiten, who was born in Casablanca and has lived in Berlin for many years. The oud player and composer has released three albums and has been working on transcultural projects between Morocco, Europe and the Arab world for over a decade. What Zouiten discovered through years of exploring flamenco was not least his own Moroccan tradition, heard through the ear of her distant sister. The name of the project is a homage: in Andalusia, aficionado is the name given to those who do not live from tradition, but for it - those who sing along to the peñas, who with patience and humility penetrate a music that is not their own and yet may become so at some point. This is how Aficionado sees itself: as a declaration of love to flamenco from a Moroccan perspective and at the same time as a rediscovery of that place where the two traditions had not lost sight of each other. And then there is that other, deeper place where Morocco and Andalusia meet: the duende. What Federico García Lorca described as the dark, possessed depth in which the true flamenco voice is born, the Gnawa and the entire Moroccan trance practice knows by its own name - the same shiver that wanders back and forth across the strait. The debut album, released in April 2025, quickly brought the project international recognition: four stars in the British trade magazine Songlines, 17th place in the Global World Music Charts, tours of China and Morocco, invitations across Europe. For the festival, Aficionado closes a gap: between the Gnawa's travels to Mali, Brazil, Cuba, Haiti and Italy, this one path does not lead across the Atlantic, but across the strait - back to that southern Spain, which itself has long been an echo of Morocco. This evening's performance is therefore not a crossover, but a homecoming in two directions at once.

Aly Keïta Trio

Aly Keïta, singer, balafon player, composer, long-standing and successful protagonist of Berlin's vibrant jazz scene, has just released his latest album Balafon Evolution, recorded with his Berlin trio, which includes Marcel van Cleef on drums and Roberto Badoglio on bass. Cleef and Keïta have been playing together since 2008, with Badoglio joining in 2014. They have toured the world together and have now invited singer Mariam Koné as a guest for the album, who will also accompany them at their concert at HKW. The repertoire includes African rhythms, jazz and improvisation. Aly Keïta was born in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire. He learned to play the balafon from his father, a respected Mandingo griot, and then moved with his brother to their grandmother in Mali, where, following the family tradition, they built and played balafons. By the age of 18, Aly Keïta had already established a good reputation as a balafon virtuoso, was booked by successful musicians, began traveling the world with them and thus came into contact with jazz, which he never let go of. He was the first to use the balafon, which until then had been used purely as a percussive accompaniment, as a solo instrument, chromatically tunable, for melody at the center of the stage and the show - thus setting new standards and opening up new possibilities for subsequent generations of balafon players.

Hassan Boussou

No festival day goes by without Gnawa - but on this evening, the entire program led up to it. He began on the northern side of the Mediterranean with Aficionado - Flamenco Moro, in which the gnawa resonates as an unspoken subtext. He continued with the Aly Keïta Trio: mandingo-balafon from Côte d'Ivoire and Mali, embedded in jazz and improvisation. And now the evening culminates in an authentic Gnawa concert with Maalem Hassan Boussou from Casablanca. A dramaturgy that is no coincidence: what follows one another in three sets is basically a single great line across the Andalusia-Maghreb-Sahel continuum, at the southern pole of which is the Gnawa itself. Hassan Boussou is the son and musical heir of the legendary Maalem Hmida Boussou, one of the great figures of the Gnawa brotherhood of the 20th century. According to tradition, the Boussou family comes from the Lake Chad region - a biographical trace that leads directly back to the sub-Saharan roots from which the Gnawa was formed in the first place as the sound of an entire history of migration. Hassan has never frozen this tradition in a museum: he founded the band Gnawa Fusion in Belgium in 1996 and worked with jazz figures such as Bojan Z and Julien Lourau without ever leaving the ground of his heritage.

At the end of his concert, he welcomes a special guest on stage - Aly Keïta returns with his balafon. Guembri and balafon, both grown from the same soil, come together in a final joint piece: a final chord that once again makes the fundamental idea of this festival audible - that the Gnawa is not an island, but a knot in a much wider musical web.

18:00-19:00 Aficionado Flamenco Moro
19:15-20:00 Aly Keïta
20:30-22:00 Hassan Boussou
22:00-00:00 DJ set (Magnus Hirschfeld Bar)

Venue:
Paulette Nardal Terrace
Magnus Hirschfeld Bar