RACHID TAHA
"Diwân 2" (2006)
With his previous album, "Tékitoi", providing some outstanding contemporary ideas in the realm of raï, Rachid Taha returns on "Diwân 2" to more rootsy sounds, reminiscent (of course) of "Diwân". The sound is derived from some of Taha's musical influences: largely from Algeria and the exile population in France, but with a couple of originals, some French influences, and a couple from Egypt. The album starts out with an old piece from Mohamed Mazouni and a much more relaxed tone than many of Taha's opening tracks on other albums. After a quick romp through a bit of music from Oran, he returns to a relaxed sound with "Agatha", a piece on racism and interracial adultery, before moving on to a form of slightly higher-energy chaâbi, "Kifache Rah" (with some musical similarity to the massive hit "Ya Rayah"). The energy finally picks up to his usual levels with some ney, call and response, and thicker drums on "Josephine". "Gana El Hawa", as well as Umm Kulthum's classic "Ghanni Li Shwaya", provide an opportunity for the Cairo String Ensemble to come into their own as accompaniment (though indeed they are present on a number of tracks besides the Egyptian ones). Throughout the album, the mood is perhaps more relaxed, but also more somber than in many of his previous works. The energy never rises too high, and seems nearly suppressed when it does get closer to his standard levels. The focus is entirely on the structure of the music and the references to the past, both musical and historical. Still, an excellent album by any standard. It does seem like Taha is quietly unwound on this recording, trading anger for melancholy.
Adam Greenberg
"All Nusic Guide"
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Two years on from his celebrated reworking of THE CLASH anthem, "Rock El Casbah", Rachid Taha has gone back to his roots. It's been eight years since the wild man of French-Algerian music released his first "Diwân" album, explaining: "This is my version of John Lennon's "Rock'n'Roll" album - like him, I want to sing the songs that influence me and pay homage to my culture". This time there are songs from Blaoui Houari, a major star in Algeria in the 1950s, and Mohamed Mazouni, whose "Ecoute-Moi Camarade" was discovered by Rachid in his parents' attic. They are updated with classy, rhythmic production work from Steve Hillage, making use of anything from hand drums to sweeping strings.
Taha proves that he can handle slinky, declamatory songs and ballads, but the best tracks are the two written by him and Hillage, with the reed flute and percussion driving on his urgent vocals.
Robin Denselow
"The Guardian", October 13, 2006
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A belated follow-up to his 1998 classic "Diwân", Rachid Taha's latest again pairs the French-Algerian with producer Steve Hillage, once guitarist with proto-trance pranksters GONG, on a selection of songs old and new designed to offer a survey of North African styles and concerns. Musically, this accommodates everything from the cascades of kora glissandi on "Agatha" to the blend of ney flute and oud on "Rani", with the breathiness of Kadi Bouguenaya's Gasbar Oranais lending a wonderful grainy texture to the hypnotic desert-blues of "Josephine" and "Ah Mon Amour". Contrary to the edgy attitudes of some raï music, there's an underlying good humour and liberality to several songs: in "Agatha", a cuckolded husband makes light of his wife's light-skinned baby ("Oh pals, it's better to take it for a joke/No need to cry for so little matter"), while there's more humour in Taha's corpsing chuckle in "Ecoute-Moi Camarade", whose reggae-beat groove, Arabic strings and muted jazz trumpet is the CD's most intriguing crossover.
Andy Gill
"The Independent", October 20, 2006
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On the cover of Rachid Taha's 1998 album "Diwân", the singer's caught in the throes of ecstasy, his head tossed back and his shaggy hair arching through the air. His eyes are closed and he's smiling. He's wearing a shimmering red shirt. He could be dancing on stage, or maybe even at a party.
The cover of Taha's belated sequel "Diwân 2" features the singer somber and unsmiling. He's wearing a rumpled suit. He's bearded, and a carefully wrapped turban covers his hair. His eyes are cold, hard, tired. He could be at a funeral.
To say Taha straddles two different cultures would be an understatement. In Algeria or even France (his home in exile) he's a Molotov cocktail firebrand, a populist punk with his ear to the streets. In the Western realm, he's relegated to the nebulous "world music" gulag. On one hand, he's as cosmopolitan a pop star as they come, an international figure on the Raï scene of nearly unrivaled popularity. On the other, to much of the world, he's an Arab first and foremost - a "person of interest", as it were - whose appearance supplants his considerable talents as a singer, writer, and performer.
Taha's always been a little pissed off and politically outspoken, but the timing of "Diwân 2" clearly relates to current events. Just as 2004's "Tékitoi" reclaimed the Arabic melodic underpinnings of THE CLASH's "Rock The Casbah" (notoriously blasted by U.S. troops during raids in Baghdad), "Diwân 2" proudly embraces traditional North African music when said music arguably signifies more than ever before, albeit often cast through Taha's distinctly modernist, polyglot spectrum.
And yet, at a time that calls for anger and outrage, the subjects of the songs on "Diwân 2" - mostly covers from the likes of formative Taha influences Blaoui Houari and Dahmane El Harrachi, sung primarily in Arabic and French - tackle the more universal themes of love and loneliness. It's the timeless soundtrack of exile, given Taha's and longtime co-conspirator Steve Hillage's distinctly modern interpretations, rife with traditional instrumentation and ancient melodies but never shirking its commitment to contemporary pop.
That means the programmed dance beats pulsing beneath songs such as "Rani" and "Mataouel Dellil" are less contrivances than an emphasis of implied or subtle rhythmic elements already inherent to the songs. Even as recorded here, "Kifache Rah" could be 50 years old, but it's hard to imagine anyone sitting completely still through the song, either then or now.
For that matter, two Taha originals, "Josephine" and "Ah Mon Amour" (prominently featuring Kadi Bouguenaya's wheezing, oddly funky reed flute), fit seamlessly among the other tracks on the album, both musically and thematically, with the former a character piece whose minimally sketched-out protagonist confesses, "my native country is missing me". Thanks to the included translations, the sadness and resignation of many of the other songs comes through loud and clear as well.
Taha obviously feels close to the sentiments of such songs as the equally lost and hopeful "Maydoum", written by El Harrachi (whose Algerian anthem "Ya Rayah" led off the first "Diwân"). "Only truth, but also faithfulness and purity, stand time", sings Taha, underscoring the implied mission of both "Diwân" discs. Taha's music, for all its radical twists and turns, is part of a long musical journey, and Taha, rather than hide or flee his heritage and whatever mislaid stigma comes attached to it, is compelled to make obvious and apparent the debt he owes the Raï and Chaâbi pioneers who came before him. Don't be surprised if, in 50 years, people start doing the same for Taha.
Joshua Klein
"Pitchfork Review", January 24, 2007
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It is tempting to view "Diwân 2" as a "roots" album: there is a preponderance of covers of older material, and the instrumentation leans substantially less on distorted electric guitar than did Rachid Taha's last album, the phenomenal "Tékitoi" ("Wrasse", 2004). As on that album, the musicians - notably guitarist Steve Hillage, mandolute player Hakim Hamadouche, percussionist Hossam Ramzy and the string ensemble - perform beautifully. Hillage's production and Taha's arrangements likewise shine.
The new album is a roots album, but with two important caveats. First, in an important sense, all of Taha's music is roots music; and second, the roots in question are to be found in the desolate French banlieues as much as they are in Taha's native Algeria.
The Arabic music was equally present on "Tékitoi", where Taha was likely to segue from full swirling Cairo string section, with lute and Arabic percussion, into a techno groove or an electric guitar and screaming vocal that would sound at home on a NIRVANA record. Not so much NIRVANA this time round, but the point is this new record is not a return to Arabic roots, for Taha never left them behind.
Moreover, in Taha's music, a rock and roll sensibility is wound around those Arabic roots, as impossible to disentangle as a double helix of DNA. Sometimes the mesmeric North African beat masquerades as rock and roll, as on "Ah Mon Amour" or "Josephine" from "Diwân 2": this was the approach of the great Moroccan chaâbi band NASS EL GHIWANE (one of whose songs Taha covered on his first "Diwân" album in 1998). Nevertheless, NASS EL GHIWANE looked like rock stars but sounded essentially Maghrebi; by contrast, when rock and roll guitar is added to Taha's songs, it's clear we are in the presence of genuine cross-cultural fusion.
Indeed, Taha's best fusion - "Safi" from "Tékitoi", or, more subtly, most of the numbers here - provokes excitement, I would argue, because of an aesthetic similarity between the larger-than-life Egyptian urban music of the 1950s and 1960s and the larger-than-life rock and roll of the next few decades. Both forms take delight in the grandiosity of their orchestral sound. Thus, on LED ZEPPELIN's "Kashmir" or Taha's "Rani" on this record, what one hears is the unabashed joy of like recognizing like. As Duke Ellington said in Afro-Eurasian Eclipse ("Original Jazz Classics", 1971): "It's hard to know who is enjoying the shadow of whom".
There has been some carping about Taha's vocal abilities as he takes on the Egyptian late classical tradition. "Diwân 2" closes with no less than than Oum Kalsoum's "Ghanni Li Shwaya" (clocking in at under seven minutes, Taha's performance devotes a tiny fraction of the time that Kalsoum would have accorded the number). Taha is no Oum Kalsoum. And I don't think he's trying to be. His vocal gifts are somewhat limited, in the way that one would describe Louis Armstrong's or Bob Dylan's vocal gifts as "somewhat limited", but like those musicians, Taha deploys his talents with great agility. His delivery draws amply upon learned and popular Arabic music, particularly North African, but he seems equally influenced by the French chanson, where quirkiness is embraced (if not de rigueur), and by Anglo-American rock and rhythm and blues.
What one hears in the repertoire compiled for "Diwân 2" is not so much the classic Egyptian sound of the 1950s and 1960s, but the music of Taha's childhood in France, where he moved at the age of ten. Thus there are songs that might have come from his parents' record collection (Oum Kalsoum, Abdel Halim Hafez's "Gana El Hawa"), from the radio (Mohamed Mazouni's "Ecoute Moi Camarade"), and from Oran, the Algerian city from which Taha's family hailed, songs the family would know ("Rani" and "Mataouel Delil", here delivered with orchestral sumptuousness). The historical era thus recalled is a painful one, as a generation of immigrants' children tentatively sought to find their means of cultural expression in a society that looked askance (and still does) at the notion of cultural diversity.
Seen in this light, the inclusion of Cameroonian Francis Bebey's amusing "Agatha", with light-hearted kora accompaniment, might be an understated overture on Taha's part towards immigrants from south of the Sahara. Then again, maybe he just liked the song.
"Diwân 2" does not have the flash and dazzling immediate impact of "Tékitoi"; but what it lacks in surface sheen it makes up for in even greater depth. This may be Taha's masterpiece.
Jeff Dayton-Johnson
"All About Jazz", February 7, 2007
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Rachid Taha is a phenomenon in Arabic music. With his band, he brilliantly marries the driving rhythms and elaborate melodies of contemporary Arabic popular music with the forceful sound of post-punk guitar rock... The raw sweat of his music and a well-known stance against racism and hypocrisy have earned him a high standing throughout Europe, the US and the Middle East. Rachid's music is intrinsically political and topical, and very much the music of the Arab Street. He is a person who feels his role is to make both a cultural and political statement: he doesn't separate the two things. "Diwân 2" is a cornucopia of poetry and music - purity and truth - as only Rachid Taha can do.
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Rachid Taha has always made high quality music in which he incorporates a wide variety of styles. On "Diwân 2" he returns to the roots of raï but with some interesting additions. Some of the songs are in French and he has included English translations for all the songs. As previously stated, the music is more traditional and has more in common with "Diwân" than it does with more rock influenced albums like "Made In Medina" and "Tékitoi". This does not take away from the power of the music but gives it a very earthy, almost primal feel. Another thing which Rachid Taha does on all his releases is to assemble great musicians to support his excellent, expressive voice. Rachid Taha fans will appreciate this disc as will anyone interested in some Algerian roots music or for that matter, anyone who enjoys good music in general.
