Azzddine

Massaft (Barraka El Farnatshi/Barbarity 023, 2004)

Azzddine's debut CD demonstrates the surge of creativity that is coming out from the Mediterranean region. Massaft  combines Berber blues, shaabi, melhoune, chill out and trance sounds created by Azzddine Ouhnine, a blind ud player and composer from Morocco; along with the powerful bass grooves of American musician and producer Bill Laswell; the balieu-French (spoken in the multicultural suburbs around the big cities of France) rapping of Algerian singer Boualem; and the crew at Barraka's studio in Switzerland.

The story behind the final recording is very interesting. Producer Pat Jabbar explains: "At that time, hard-disk recording studios were not easy to find yet in Morocco, so 24 track tapes were brought to Rabat, with the intention of recording Azzddine's whole orchestra of 15 musicians in 2002. In the meantime, the motivated orchestra, managed to record some tracks themselves at the studio of Les Freres Megri, a very famous Moroccan singer & songwriter. Unfortunately, these recordings were made too fast and without synchronization. Only two tracks with the whole orchestra were able to make it on the actual album (tracks 6 and 12)."

Finally, a few months later, the rest of the tracks were recorded on a Pro-Tools system in Casablanca, with only five musicians. Back at the secret laboratory, the programming and the production was growing fast until the point was reached of choosing the bass lines and their sounds. Nothing happened anymore, it was complete stagnation! Synthetic bass sounds would not have given what the music needed. And bass players in Morocco are as difficult to find as kanun players in Europe. So Bill Laswell was asked if he could play a bass line to one or two tracks from a selection of ten songs. “One week later, we got a CD back from New York City with eight incredible and groovy bass lines to eight tracks from the master himself!"