"This was actually a mixtape," says Yassine Boussaid, Saturday 9 April 2016 after his concert, "as my cousin used to give me, for the long way back from Morocco to Amsterdam. Yassine is the business leader of the Amsterdam Andalusian Orchestra (AAO). Together with artistic director Mohamed Chairi and director-writer Mohamed Aadroun, he puts together concerts at breakneck speed that cannot be compared to anything on Dutch stages. So that Saturday, in a packed Podium Mozaïek, it was a mixtape: icons from the Maghreb, music from the 1980s and 1970s and even further back, played by the orchestra with guest singers in all those different styles.
The AAO has become part of Amsterdam in the same way that those long car journeys to Morocco and back have become part of this city's collective memory. Whether you experienced them yourself or not, you see it before you: the heavily loaded car, endless hours on the motorway, the cassette deck on 10 and in the back boys like Yassine, hypnotised by the songs and fantasising about the singers' hairstyles and clothing style, the studios where the music was recorded, the streets outside, the world around it.
Teahouse
That world is unpacked on this evening. The stage has been turned into a teahouse, the bartender wears a black bow tie, board games are on tables and on the big screen Morocco is playing against Portugal at the 1986 World Cup: 3-1. 'Then we should have been world champions!' The footballers, in red, are stylish, technically virtuoso, tough when they need to be - just like the guys on stage tonight, presenting us with classics like polaroids from glorious times. Photos and nostalgic videos bring back the atmosphere of Tetouan, Granada, Casablanca - a narrator's voice takes us through bygone streets.
Karima al Fillali, in a long black dress, opens with one of those worn ballads by the legendary Oum Kaltoum. The magician Imad Nouinou on keyboard, supported only by violin and percussion, plays out an entire orchestra, with those swishing unison notes from low to high and back again that lift your heart until it is in your throat. Reproduced life-size on the backdrop, the Middle Eastern nightingale looks sternly out over the audience of headscarves and hipsters, girls singing along and their gently nodding parents.
Then a love song by Cheb Hasni, the Algerian rai singer who was murdered in 1994 for singing about alcohol, sex and drugs. Anas Soudfa, all the way nineties, with plaid shirt and high-waisted jeans, shouts Haiwa! and the audience picks up the rhythm, clapping exuberantly with their flat hands. Clapping against melancholy, because few party tunes have been as tragic as the rai since Algeria's dark 1990s.
Favourite
My own favourite is Abdel Attahiri, a boy from Amsterdam North with the voice of a Moroccan Hazes. He takes us to 1950s Paris, where Algerian chaâbi-singer Dahmane el Harrachi, son of a muezzin from Khenchla, caused a furore with rousing songs - before our eyes, the theatre transforms into something between a classical concert and a wedding party, the brakes are off but the musical level remains undiminished.
The sole heir of Abdessadeq Chekara, the singer and oud player who rediscovered Arab-Andalusian music until his death in 1998, is his nephew Rida - and he lives in Utrecht. Tonight, in djellaba, with red fez and yellow shoes, he transforms from a gnarled Moroccan you would just walk past on the street into a crystal-clear crowd-pleaser. There is no smile but the music comes from his toes. The centuries-old but vibrant music, with which this orchestra, having grown up in Amsterdam-West and studying daily on compositions of which hardly anything has been handed down on paper, digs up something from the memories of their parents and grandparents and gives back to Amsterdam - one of those numerous cities in Western Europe where the Andalusian heritage has blown in.
Cheb Chaled
We can still hear flamenco by Paco de Lucia, the bone-chilling loutar-play belonging to Atlas legend Mohamed Rouicha, and the trance-like harmonies of Nass el Ghiwane, once known as the Stones of Morocco. Then the orchestra leaves the stage to cheers and cheers. Michel Knoppel, the silent black bartender with the bow tie, walks forward and starts cleaning up. The first visitors are preparing to leave the stands, when he opens a music box, pulls out a soprano sax and starts playing, hip-swaying and seductive. There is the orchestra again. All singers now in a row, the finale is the classic Abdelkader, famous in Cheb Khaled's version. Abdel Attahiri and Rida Chekara rise above it, the audience is on the benches: a mixtape of allure it was, the kilometres and decades have flown by, Andalusia is Amsterdam and Amsterdam is Andalusia.
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