Electric Jalaba

• country:United Kingdom
• region:London
• label:Strut Records
• type:Band
• artist posted by:Electric Jalaba

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The best music takes you away. It reconnects, and renews. It has a vibe born in the ancient culture of immediate creation, a heightened state summoned by the shapes of psychedelia and the echoes of Jamaican dub, by the cyclical trance of electronic music and the transformations of jazz. By the hypnotic pulse of Moroccan Gnawa music, a North African tradition with healing at its core. All of which and more swirl inside the music of Electric Jalaba: six musicians with an empathy that feels telepathic, and a groove that immerses and dazzles. In Arabic, the mother tongue of Moroccan-born singer and guimbri player Simo Lagnawi, a leading practitioner of Gnawa music in Britain, they call this subcurrent, this indefinable quality, ‘el hal’. The feeling. “It’s the feeling that comes when we’re grabbed by the music and lost in the groove." says producer and bassist Olly Keen. "The transcendental, trance-inducing effect of Gnawa music is a powerful energy. We are connecting to each other through that energy when we play and at the same time communicating through each of our own individual musical languages."

Much of the musical chemistry stems from Electric Jalaba’s very own musical brotherhood: Henry, Olly, Nathaniel and Barnaby Keen, who grew up in Dorset (UK) playing music together and whose individual multi-talents alongside Lagnawi and Anglo-Italian kit drummer Dave De Rose - whose rebel prowess has made him drummer-of-choice for the likes of Moloko, Mark Ronson and Mulatu Astatke - make for cliché-defying fusion;

Electric Jalaba explore the myriad possibilities of Gnawa music while always respecting the genre’s spiritual roots.