Sonic Pluriverse Festival: Justin Adams & Mauro Durante mit Alessia Tondo | Majid Bekkas & Bassekou Kouyaté

Sonic Pluriverse Festival: Global Echoes of Gnawa
Justin Adams & Mauro Durante with Alessia Tondo | Majid Bekkas & Bassekou Kouyaté
Concerts, DJ set

Justin Adams & Mauro Durante with Alessia Tondo

What was planned as a brief encounter developed into a very successful and long-term touring collaboration. Guitarist Justin Adams and violinist and percussionist Mauro Durante from Apulia, the home of the tarantella, have spoken a common musical language since 2020 and have since expanded this duo to include Alessia Tondo from the Canzionere Grecanico Salentino and sometimes Yousra Mansour from the Gnawa band Bab L' Bluz. The four of them are on tour as the trans-Mediterranean project Almare, and the three of them will play at HKW, while Yousra Mansour will perform a few days later with her own band Bab L' Bluz. Adams and Durante have released two award-winning records together so far: 2021's Still Moving and 2025's Sweet Release. The basis of both is Durante's tarantella backgound: the southern Italian pizzica and tammuriata rhythms. Mauro Durante is the leader of the well-known and award-winning formation Canzionere Grecanico Salentino in his homeland, the Salento peninsula in Apulia, which was founded by his family in 1975 and has since performed at numerous major music festivals around the world. He is regarded as the innovator and guardian of the pizzica and tarantella traditions and has made them internationally famous. Guitarist and producer Justin Adams is best known for his work with Robert Plant, Sinead O'Connor, Tinariwen and Rachid Taha. He spent his childhood in the Middle East and has been fascinated by the music of North Africa ever since. This concert is therefore about the close relationship between gnawa and tarantella, both musics provide relief and healing through dance with their minimalist, trance-inducing rhythms. The tarantella was originally created to cure spider bites. When working in the fields, the inhabitants of southern Italy often came into contact with tarantulas, the poison of which they hoped to sweat out again through prolonged ecstatic dancing. In solidarity, the entire village community danced along and actively participated in the healing process.

Majid Bekkas & Bassekou Kouyaté

The fact that Majid Bekkas and Bassekou Kouyaté are on stage together at this festival is almost a matter of course - and yet an event. Bekkas, known in Morocco and far beyond simply as "Mister Magic", is that rare multi-instrumentalist who always finds the shortest and most beautiful path in his encounters with outstanding musicians from all continents. Decades ago, when Gnawa was still predominantly perceived as purely ritual music, he was one of the first maalems to consciously bring their music back into dialog with its sub-Saharan roots - the world from which the Gnawa itself once came to Morocco via the trans-Saharan caravan routes. Bekkas' own family comes from Zagora, the southern Moroccan desert gateway that connected Marrakech with Timbuktu in the 16th century under Ahmed Al-Mansour: the same ground on which Bassekou Kouyaté stands today. Kouyaté, born on the banks of the Niger in the old empire of Ségou, is the undisputed innovator of the ngoni - the archaic spit lute from which the American banjo was once to emerge via the routes of trade with enslaved people in the Atlantic world and which is also a close relative of the guembri. So when Bekkas and Kouyaté play together, their music is not looking for bridges between foreign worlds - it reaches down into the common ground from which both traditions once grew. Both have had impressive musical careers: Bekkas with Archie Shepp, Randy Weston, Pharoah Sanders, Joachim Kühn and Klaus Doldinger, with groundbreaking albums such as African Gnaoua Blues(2002) and Magic Spirit Quartet (2020); Kouyaté with Toumani Diabaté in his Symmetric Orchestra, on Ali Farka Touré's last album Savane (2006), with Taj Mahal, Béla Fleck, Damon Albarn and Bono's projects, plus his own milestones such as Segu Blue (2007), I Speak Fula (2009) and Ba Power (2015). Two masters, two spit lutes, a single great line across the Sahara: what will be heard here is less a fusion than a homecoming.

19:00-20:00 Justin Adams & Mauro Durante with Alessia Tondo
20:30-22:00 Majid Bekkas & Bassekou Kouyaté
22:00-00:00 DJ set (Magnus Hirschfeld Bar)

Venue:

Paulette Nardal Terrace
Magnus Hirschfeld Bar