Recording History: Jews, Muslims, and Music across Twentieth-Century North Africa by Christopher Silver

Author:Christopher Silver
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2022-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 17. Advertisement for Salim Halali’s Casablanca cabaret Le Coq d’Or. Source: The English Language Guide to Morocco, ed. Art Rosett, 1961.

Revolutionary Music

By the early 1950s, Moroccans had begun to imagine independence.65 For many, it may have sounded like Elmaghribi. In tandem with a national struggle waged by the Istiqlal in global forums like the United Nations, Elmaghribi was sating Moroccans back home with what he called his “sensational revolution in Oriental music.”66 And it could be heard nearly everywhere: from the concert hall to the radio and from the royal palace to the marketplace. His revolutionary music celebrated urban and rural, north and south, locations in the French protectorate and the Spanish one, while making no distinction between Arab or Berber nor Muslim or Jew. All were Moroccan. But if his nationalism was more capacious than that of the political parties it was no less nationalist. On the country’s largest stages and on its most symbolic ones, Elmaghribi donned the national colors, toured alongside Muslims, and sang of and for the nation. In each setting where his music was performed, Elmaghribi’s audiences learned to perform his inclusive brand of Moroccan nationalism as well.

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