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Artist
Orchestre National De Barbès
12+ albums
worldWorld Musicarabicraimaghreb
about
Barbés is a piece of Africa stranded in the heart of Paris, at the foot of the Sacre Coeur. It is a neighborhood of couscous and chicken, of smoke-filled bars where dominos click on tabletops, of dish antennas transmitting floods of Middle Eastern music through TV sets. In Barbés, you could have met the late Cheikha Rimitti, the grand dame of raï, on the Rue Myrrha walking back to her hotel. Or a band hired to sing at a wedding stopping to pick up their musicians at a café- The Oasis, The Délice, or The Danton. People from every corner of Africa have crowded into Barbés, a refuge for exiles that directed Larbi Dida's raï towards Fateh's shaabi, and that brushed Aziz's guimbri up against Youcef's bass. It is encounters such as these that led to the formation of the Orchestra National de Barbés. In English, the name means The National Barbés Orchestra, implying that Barbés is a nation unto itself. It is a sentiment that few who visit the neighborhood would dispute. The story started in Belcourt, a working class section of Algiers, Algeria at the peak of the 1980 baby boom. Youcef Boukella's older brothers listened to rock and bossa nova, people watched Cairo film classics on TV and tuned to Kabyl folk music on the radio. Outside the Belcourt alleyways --pandemonium. Street peddlers, muezzins, Gnawa street performers, shaabi concerts, ghetto blasters playing reggae, funk and raï. "My style of music goes back to my childhood in Belcourt," explains Youcef. In 1985 he was
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