{"id":31084,"date":"2021-09-24T10:35:55","date_gmt":"2021-09-24T10:35:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jazairhope.org\/?p=31084"},"modified":"2021-09-26T14:20:43","modified_gmt":"2021-09-26T14:20:43","slug":"hadj-el-anka","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jazairhope.org\/en\/hadj-el-anka\/","title":{"rendered":"Hadj El Anka"},"content":{"rendered":"

Translated by Chrysalide<\/strong> from french source<\/span><\/p>\n

Music lovers know that Hadj Mhamed El Anka is to chaabi what Louis Armstrong is to jazz, what John Lee Hooker is to blues and Amalia Rodriguez to fado, among other poems of hypnosis.\u00a0 Three universal musical genres producing ecstasy like the cha\u00e2bi ankaoui.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0Nirvana that the Arabs call the “tarab”.\u00a0 A deep communion of senses on which every musical note and vocal intonation plays as if they were percussion instruments!\u00a0 An aesthetic emotion that the ethnomusicologist Gilbert Rouget calls “profane trance”.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0This is the “tarab” of Hajj Mhamed El Anka which appeals to a broad emotional spectrum: pleasure, delight, pleasure of mind, soul accord, emotional shock, rapture, elation and ecstasy.\u00a0 Music lovers, you go through this whole palette that plunges you into the “wajd”, the religious trance linked to the spiritual inspiration of El Anka, especially when you listen or re-listen “Lahmam”, its emblematic title on the habit of\u00a0 love and the wounds of separation.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0We therefore know a little the great imam of chaabi, interpreter of nearly 360 poems (qassaid) and author of 130 records in half a century of career.\u00a0 We also know that he was a virtuoso of the mandola, that Algerian cousin with plucked strings of the mandolin.\u00a0 We also know that the author of “Lahmam” had his own mandola, “sculpted” for his evil fingers, that is to say to the extent of his specific playing and more in accordance with his magical inspiration.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0Chiseled by Spanish blackfoot maker-luthier Jean Bellido, who redesigned his half-mandolin in 1932.\u00a0 The result will result in the typical Algerian mandola that we know today.\u00a0 We also know that the artistic sphinx was a polychrome instrumentalist, equally at ease with a lute, a guitar, a tar or a violin.\u00a0 As has been noted, he was likewise a lyricist of rich poetic density.\u00a0 And such is, my faith, the case of “Lahmam”, marvelous monosyllabic poem embroidered by El Anka in 1937.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0This mythical poem, which greatly contributed to the artistic glory of Mhamed Idir A\u00eft Ouarab, alias Halo, is the subject of enduring legends.\u00a0 Indeed, the story of the sublime “Lahmam” is part of what Arab grammarians call “established mistakes that become truths.”\u00a0 So he said to himself that he would have written and composed this song for his eldest son Mustapha who would have left him for exile in France.\u00a0 As he repeats on the other hand that he would have created it to deplore the fact that his disciples Hadj Mrizek and Hadj Mnaouer would have abandoned him by showing ingratitude to their master.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0But artistic history, with a capital H, is ultimately not one of those little stories that die hard.\u00a0 It is, however, based on a tangible fact of the ordinary life of the Chaabi Buddha, and which reveals of his beautiful aesthetic soul an unrecognized but very amiable human aspect.\u00a0 And it is his eldest son who recounts it in an interview on Algerian public television.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0Mustapha El Anka, singer and actor, therefore indicates that his father had asked him one day in 1937, when he was eleven years old and was not yet old enough to go into exile, to “go to Ammi Dahmene, get a\u00a0 object in safe deposit at his home \u201d.\u00a0 Mustapha then goes to his father’s friend who gave him two small wood pigeons.\u00a0 El Hadj Mhamed, who quickly brooded over these two particularly affectionate wood pigeons, had become accustomed to talking to them and sometimes to singing in front of them a “mssedar” or an “insiraf” from a nouba sika of good quality.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0He also relates that one summer day, around the family table topped with a “tbeykha”, a famous dish of beans and p’tits peas from Algiers, he saw the graceful wood pigeons approaching the sea.\u00a0 his father’s plate, which let them eat there.\u00a0 A way of emphasizing the affectionate communion between the artist and the piafs.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n