On An Overgrown Path

No, those photos were not taken in Algeria in the 1950s. They were snatched by me earlier this year during nightime location shooting for the feature film La Baie d’Alger ( The Bay of Algiers ), with the beach at Le Racou in French Catalonia standing in for North Africa. La Baie d’Alger is based on the eponymous Prix Méditerranée winning novel by Algerian born Louis Gardel which is set in 1955 during the early part of the Algerian war of independence. This bloody conflict between the French military and the the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) ended on July 5th 1962 when the country was granted independence. The cinematic release of La Baie d’Alger is just one of many events taking place next year to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Algerian independence. This anniversary will attract global interest because the independence struggle resonates with the Arab Spring which has profoundly changed neighbouring Tunisia while leaving Algeria in the grip of a political ble...

We live in a society that is fixated on success and for too long maverick musician Philippa Schuyler and cultural nomad Isabelle Eberhardt have shared the fate of being dismissed as eccentric and marginal figures who failed to live up to their early promise. Philippa Schuyler’s reputation as a composer and pianist has been conveniently buried in the wreckage of a military helicopter in Da Nang Bay while Isabelle Eberhardt’s literary ambitions have been scattered in a wadi in southern Algeria. But attitudes are changing, and, quite appropriately, that change has been sparked not by the mainstream media, but by voices that are themselves often considered eccentric and marginal. In a remarkable example of cultural miscegenation a chance coupling between this blog and the BBC has spawned a Radio 3 profile of Philippa Schuyler which is being broadcast this evening. A few months later a multi-media chamber opera based on the life of Isabelle Eberhardt composed by Missy Mazzoli , whose cre...

Communities are supposed to be places of intimacy, warmth, and relationships that sustain... In the Middle Ages, monasteries that grew to more than 500 monks would send some off to create new foundations. More than five hundred brothers could no longer be a true community. The globe is too big a place to provide for warmth and intimacy. The more we connect with those far away, the more we seem to disconnect from those close to us. Will the Internet do on a global scale what the telephone did to the French in Algeria? When telephones were introduced in Algeria, the French army's Arab Bureau got lazy. The Arab Bureau was responsible for maintaining good relations with the indigène [local people] and for knowing what was going on in the villages. Traditionally, this had been done by officers riding their horses into the bled [backcountry] for several weeks, traveling the circuit, sipping tea with the local leaders for long hours, and building personal relationships. But the teleph...

Online record stores can only aspire to the atmosphere and serendipity of their bricks and mortar counterparts . As is shown by my photos of La Corde Sensible in Prades, France. Prades was, of course, the adopted home of Pablo Casals . But La Corde Sensible is a working record store rather than a museum and its stock of used discs ranges from rock on vinyl to Philip Glass operas on CD. My serendipitous discoveries on the shelves of La Corde Sensible included a deleted 1999 2 CD set of the singer, composer and guitarist Enrico Macias in concert with l'ensemble Foundok . Enrico Macias was born in 1938 to a Jewish family in French Algeria. During the Algerian War of Independence in 1961 Enrico Macias' father-in-law the musician Cheikh Raymond Leyris was assassinated by the National Liberation Front (FLN) and Macias went into exile in France. He has not been permitted to perform in the country where he was born since then and this is a reminder of how little we know of Algeri...

'A strong breath of life rose from Marseille and its ports, an insistent call towards distant horizons, like a subtle and irresistible magic spell. For the first time Orschanow realised that the universe did not end here on this quayside, that out there, beyond the soothing sea, were lands of sun and silence: Africa.' Those are the words of Dmitri Orschanow, the central character in Isabelle Eberhardt's little known autobiographival novel Vagabond and my header photo shows the quayside and soothing sea at Marseille. Isabelle Eberhardt was a cultural explorer, Sufi adept and libertine. It is no coincidence that the narrator in her autobiographical novel is male because, as my October 2011 post recounted , from an early age Isabelle experimented with cross-dressing. For most of her extensive travels she wore male Arab clothing and assumed the identity of a man, a disguise that almost certainly went beyond the need for security in Muslim countries. Like Isabelle, Orschanow s...

Despite widespread coverage of the Libyan and Tunisian uprisings, events in North Africa are otherwise neglected by the North American and European media. So, prompted by my recent post about the Berber psychedelic folk band Imanaren, Stephen 'who are the real Master Musicians?' Davis sends an email drawing attention to the uprising by armed Tuaregs in northern Mali . The Tuaregs are nomadic Berbers who are the majority inhabitants of the Saharan interior of North Africa. Colonel Gaddafi's political machinations included fomenting unrest in North African nations to the south of Libya using conscripted Tuaregs. Following the overthrow of the Gaddafi regime, rebel Tuaregs armed with sophisticated Libyan weaponry have attacked towns in Mali's northern desert, with a rebel spokesman explaining “Our goal is to liberate our lands from Malian occupation”. And in breaking news, within the last few hours reports have come that an Army coup reacting against the Tuareg rebelli...

Mali , Algeria and other North African countries have featured On An Overgrown Path many times over the years. The CD above from Tuareg-Berber band Tinariwen featured in a March 2012 post about the music of the region and the new unrest in Mali , and at the time I wrote “Despite widespread coverage of the Libyan and Tunisian uprisings, events in North Africa are otherwise neglected by the North American and European media”. More recently in a post about Algeria I wrote "But outside France there has been little interest in the anniversary [of the Algerian civil war], despite the link between the failed colonial ambitions of Western European countries in North Africa and the topical Arab Spring". Now the BBC’s political editor Nick Robinson has written “Until a few days ago, the vast majority of British voters had never heard of Mali (let alone the Sahel) nor could they - or indeed I - have placed it on a map. Now, I suspect we are all going to have to learn a great de...

A biography of Abd al-Qadir al-Jaza'iri is subtitled 'A story of true jihad'. So it is surprising to find that a town in America's Midwest, the region that led America's swing to the right in the 2016 presidential election, is named after a Muslim freedom fighter. But Abd el-Kader , to use the popular transliteration of his name, was a freedom fighter who won global approval. His interpretation of jihad was based on the Quaran - 'Let not your hatred of other men turn you away from justice. Be just…that is closer to piety' (5:7) - rather than the perverted interpretation adopted by those who have sullied the Muslim faith. Abd el-Kader was born in Guittena, Algeria in 1808. His father was a was a shaykh in the Qadiri Sufi order and while in Damascus Abd el-Kader was initiated into the Naqshbandiyah Sufi order. As part of its colonial ambitions France occupied Algiers in 1830 and established a strong military presence. The alienated Algerian populace ele...

L'Orchestre National de Barbès takes its name from the Boulevard Barbès in the 18th arrondissement de Paris, an area known as "little Algeria". It is here that much of the sediment stirred up by France's colonial misadventures in North Africa has settled, and in musical terms that sediment is remarkably fertile. The ten piece band had its early roots in Belcourt, a working class section of Algiers, and several founder members including a Sufi percussionist left Algeria for France as exiles . The residents of Barbès jokingly consider the area to be an independent state and the title track from the self-styled national orchestra's latest CD Rendez-vous Barbès is a hymn of praise to a little bit of Africa stranded in the heart of Paris, a concept that does not meet with universal approval . Traditional North African instruments such as the guembri and karkabou blend with synthesizers and electric guitars to produce L'Orchestre National de Barbès ' unique m...

Bach in the 80s, when I was Music Librarian at Indiana University, Natalie Hinderas sent me a tape of a talk Philippa gave, I think at Duke University. It was recorded back in the days of the Communist hysteria and Philippa reflected this in her talk, given rather nervously as she recounted experiences she had in Africa. The tape also included her performing a work or two of her own, somewhat like a Black Bartók (which I hope she will never be called!). I remember Natalie made some reference to Philippa's interest/belief in spiritualism, which was share by the people who actually made the tape. Ms Tallalay [ Philippa Schuyler's biographer - ed] followed my escape from Bloomington, working in the library. I find it easy to assume she must have encountered Natalie's gift and took off from there. That email from musicologist Dominique-René de Lerma , which was prompted by yesterday's post Young, gifted, black and now on the BBC , takes us down several engrossing pat...