Rock the Casbah: ‘Abdel Hadi Halo and the El Gusto Orchestra of Algiers’ revives North Africa’s chaabi

Pub date May 13, 2008
SectionNoise

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ABDEL HADI HALO AND THE EL GUSTO ORCHESTRA OF ALGIERS
Abdel Hadi Halo and the El Gusto Orchestra of Algiers
(Honest Jon’s)

By Erik Morse

The style and history of chaabi may be recognizable to few if any Westerners. But the examples performed on Abdel Hadi Halo and the El Gusto Orchestra of Algiers represent a unique and fascinating exchange between French, Spanish, and Algerian musical identity as well as the miscegenation of Jewish, Berber, and Arabic street culture in the heart of North Africa.

Translated from Arabic as “popular,” chaabi – originating in the Casbah as part of a Moorish/Andalusian tradition that stretched back to the 15th century – reached its height during the 1950s. Primarily performed in bars and clubs where many French expats, American GIs, Sephardic Jews, and Algerian Muslims congregated and swapped native instruments and scales, the cosmopolitan interplay of chaabi marked a complex colonial parity comparable to American Delta blues. With Algeria’s independence from France in 1962, over 100,000 pied-noirs (mostly Jews and European colonials) fled north from their homes fearing reprisal from the Muslim sanctioned government. And with them went much of the cross-cultural popularity of chaabi.

Although it lost much of its mystique among younger musicians, the forefathers of chaabi played on. Some, like El Hajj Muhammad El Anka, referred to as the “father of chaabi,” continued to teach and spread the genre’s musical heritage throughout Algeria until his death in 1978.