OUM
Fri, 4 Mar 2022 20:00 - 22:00 Greenwich Mean Time (UTC±0)
Tickets (£15.68) here.
Oum, Moroccan singer of Saharan origins who blends Moroccan styles such as Hassania, Sufi and Gnawa with jazz, gospel and African music
About this event
We are thrilled to announce that the concert will our special special guest, the soulful and refined Moroccan singer Oum with the new album “Daba” is going ahead in London after a long wait!
Daba means ‘Now’ in Moroccan. Giving this title to her third album is, for Oum, all about linking yesterday’s experience to the one determined by the present moment. In this ‘now’, the singer, having achieved a certain artistic maturity, is able to mix traditional Arab and Sahraoui elements with discreet borrowings from more contemporary aesthetics – soul, jazz and electronic trance.
Thus, her music thrives, as does her thought process as a woman anchored in secular spirituality and open to today’s world.
Originally from Casablanca, Oum El Ghaït Ben Essahraoui seemed destined to become an architect but then decided to embrace a career in music. She quickly drew the attention of the media, who identified her with the Nayda, a movement of young Moroccans attracted by more urban sounds.
The albums Lik’Oum (2009) and Sweerty (2012), which were only released in Morocco, made her a star in her own country. Then she had a crucial brainwave. She began to write in darija, the everyday dialect of Moroccan Arabic. This offered her the possibility of exploiting a new musicality in her lyrics, as well as new combinations of meaning – an entire poetry of assonances. In 2013, she surrounded herself with musical luminaries to release her first international album, Soul of Morocco. European audiences discovered an artist full of generosity who offered a new kind of fusion combined with great authenticity. Concerts followed each other in quick succession, allowing her well-honed group to achieve even greater cohesion.
Two years later, Zarabi, recorded at the gates of the Sahara, deepened the aesthetic direction that Oum has chosen to pursue, whilst offering a discourse on the need to preserve nature and traditional micro-societies.
With Daba, her third album, Oum reaches a new milestone. Entrusting the artistic direction to the Palestinian poetess, singer and oud player Kamilya Jubran, she went to Berlin with her musicians to make a record that was both atmospheric and danceable.
For Oum, this dual aim reflects a sort of state of emergency, one that she describes as positive: to be together, share good times, dance and hold each and every one in a warm embrace, all of which seem to her to be necessities all the more urgent now that the means of communication and transport tend to radically reshape one’s experience of the world and of the other. Expressed in a poetry that is economical with its words and devoid of all artifice, the themes on the album are in accord with the general preoccupations of its creator, her humanism, her feminism, her spirituality and the importance she gives to reconnecting with nature’s mysteries.
‘Chajra’ (Tree) is an ode to nature and ‘Ha’ (Here Is), a monologue of giving addressed by the Earth to those who live on it. ‘Yabhar’ (Ocean) is a supplication to the consoling seas, whose incommensurability offers the promise of forgetfulness and soothing.
The orchestration remains generally acoustic, but, for the first time, certain electronic sounds adorn the songs, as if to echo more contemporary dilemmas. In ‘Laji’ (Migrant) and ‘Temma’ (Over There), Oum evokes the fate of the exiled, their hopes and their suffering, always with luminous words. And in ‘Kemmy’ (You), the singer offers gentleness and compassion to the women who continue to suffer destinies imposed by the patriarchy. With such themes, Oum positions herself as a Moroccan, an African and a woman of the world who is convinced that cultural barriers are less weighty than that which brings us together. And with that she touches on the spiritual. After all, isn’t Abad, the ‘eternal’ the opposite of Daba, the ‘moment’? On Daba, Oum pursues her quest for music that is universal, a reflection of a troubled world and, at the same time, a balm intended to soothe that world and impart to it an infallible hope.
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AWAN is an annual festival and celebration of contemporary female artists from the Middle East and North Africa. AWAN brings together a wonderfully imaginative, always-inquisitive Arab arts community and showcases new work created, envisioned and produced by contemporary emerging female artists.
This event is produced by Arts Canteen in partnership with Grand Junction and Arab Women Artists Now – AWAN Festival.
