Algeria Overview:
Certainly, raï is the most popular Algerian genre at home and abroad, even it has struggled to be heard in the shadow of civil war and the rise of violent Islamic fundamentalism. Even so, the country's multifaceted heritage means that Algerian music represents a wealth of styles.
As was true elsewhere in the Maghreb, Algeria inherited the classical tradition of the Andalusian empire; its music, which was the fruit of the intertwining of Jewish, Christian and Muslim cultures in Al-Andalous, was imported into northern Africa after the Moors and Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492. In the following centuries, Andalusian classical music had flowered into distinct local traditions: hawzi, from the area of Tlemcen; aaroubi, from Algiers; and malouf, from the city of Constantine in the east. Algeria also has a lush tradition of rural Bedouin music, bedoui, which includes the chanting of epic sagas called melhun sung to the accompaniment of the rough-sounding gasba flute and the small, metallic guellal drum. In turn, hawzi and bedoui were two of the styles which gave birth to raï.
Another style is still vigorous in Algeria, despite raï's seeming hegemony: the Berber tradition from the area of Kabylia. It is a music that has resonance not just at home, but among the diaspora community as well: by the 1980s, nearly half of Algerian immigrants to France originated from Kabyle provinces. Their music originally addressed rural life and was performed with ajouag flute, ghaita (bagpipe), the bendir frame drum, and t'bel (tambourine). Once a Kabyle community was established in Paris by the 1930s, however, Kabyle music took on European instruments like violin, guitar, banjo and double bass. In the 1950s, when the films and television broadcasts of Cairo swept the Arab world, Kabyle music absorbed the lush, big string sound of Egyptian orchestras.
However, Kabyle always maintained its own profile, and soon after 1980, when Kabylia rose up against the government in Algiers, Kabyle artists became more front-and-center on the musical scene—or at least until the rocket-fast rise of raï in 1985 and 1986. —Anastasia Tsioulcas
