dj Cheb i Sabbah

On La Kahena, Algerian-born, Cheb i Sabbah returns to his North African roots, collaborating with some of the most distinctive female singers from the Maghreb. Recording in studios in Marrakesh, San Francisco, New York and New Delhi, Sabbah has added his own "dj Science" or modern aural magic to these performances making La Kahena a truly original and groundbreaking project.

Cheb i Sabbah left his native Algeria in the 1960s, and has made a career out of blending music from all over the world into kaleidoscopic, dance-floor mixes ever since. His first three masterful albums for Six Degrees Records, Shri Durga (1999), MahaMaya - Shri Durga ReMixed (2000), and Krishna Lila (2002), are cult classics in which India's time-honored traditions merge with the universe of possibilities afforded by contemporary recording technology. This trilogy established him as a unique artist who creates bridges between cultures with a deeply moving sound drawn from DJ wizardry and world music aesthetics. His fourth release was a continuous DJ mix entitled AS FAR AS, on which the traditions of Asia, Arabia and Africa, Sabbah's main sources of inspiration, are all represented as if the listener were attending one of his renowned live sets. From here he turned his attention to North Africa.

I've been wanting to make a record with the music from where I come from, says Sabbah, and I wanted to make a record with mostly women singing. So I went to Morocco. Actually, on La Kahena there's music from Morocco; there's music from Algeria and there's one song that's in Hebrew with Yemenite dialect.

When Cheb i Sabbah discusses the music on La Kahena, he often digresses into history. The album itself is named for a 7th century North African leader. She was Berber and Jewish, says Sabbah, and she rallied all the Berber tribes against the Arab invasion of Kabylia, Algeria. The Arabs tried many times to invade, but the Berber were fierce.

The music on La Kahena is a provocative mix of Arab, Jewish, and Berber (Amazigh) elements. Filtered through Cheb i Sabbah's transformational technology, cultural diversity plays out in contrasting musical textures. For him, a broad range of sounds and moods is everything. He says, It's like Don Cherry used to say: there's some music to dance to, but we can't dance all day long. There’s some music to contemplate with, just to chill with, for meditation.

[Quelle: Six Degrees Records-Presseinfo, 2005]