Gnawa Festival electrifies Essaouira, Morocco

Jazz was in the air at the 24th Essaouira Gnaoua and World Music Festival: in the fusion created on the fly by guimbri-wielding maalem-masters and their troupes of musicians, acrobats and dancers (kouyous), some of whom jostled for space onstage with such international artists as US saxophonist Jaleel Shaw, Pakistani qawaali icon Faiz Ali Faiz and Afro-Cuban collective El Comité. Each guest act is tasked with finding a way into the propulsive vibes of Gnawa music, into its pentatonic melodies and syncopated rhythms, rapid-fire handclaps, Arabic call-and-response poetry and peak moments of frenzied polychoral hocketing.

Over the years the Gnawa festival has seen various jazz-leaning visiting musicians try and fail to gel with big name Gnawa masters on the main outdoor Moulay Hassan stage. The success stories, however, are now legend. Maalem Hamid El Kasri with Joe Zawinul in 2008 (and Snarky Puppy in 2018). Maalem Mahmoud Guinea with Omar Sosa in 2013. Maalem Mustapha Baqbou with Marcus Miller in 2014. To that list add Cuban pianist Rolando Luna and his fellow El Comité hotshots, among them trumpeter Carlos Sarduy and percussionist Yaroldy Abreu (last seen alongside Chucho Valdes at Ronnie Scott's), pouring their Janus-faced aesthetic and diverse influences - Afrobeat, funk, reggae, Latin jazz - into a jam with innovator Maalem Khalid Sansi. Leaning in to his bluesy riffs. Referencing African tradition. Creating a new African sound.

Of the stand-alone sets, Real World signings Bab L'Bluz set the Scene de la Plage beach stage ablaze with their psychedelic visuals, ululating war cries and electric riffs zinging from frontwoman Yousra Mansour's awisha (small guimbri) and Brice Bottin's guimbri, kit drums crashing behind them - a power quartet intermittently lifted by passages of jazz flute, and buoyed by Mansour's glorious vocals.

There was jazz, too, in the random meet-ups of reggae-loving Moroccan youth - down dark medina alleyways, on the Atlantic-whipped Portuguese ramparts - whose guembri-and-krakeb-scored religious songs, cherry-picked from the age-old Gnawa repertoire with its Arabic lyrics and words of West African Bambara, felt beloved, progressive. "The youth know the traditional chants," tweeted an impressed Jaleel Shaw, having cast his golden sax lines into the polyrhythms and call-and-responses of both the Drummers of Burundi and the brotherhood of Maalem Mohammed et Said Koyou, before a main stage crowd estimated to be 300,000 strong. Most of them young. Most of them singing along.

It was the biggest and best festival yet. A spirit-expanding festival of goodwill and exchange, where support for the next generation of Gnawa musicians - and the awe of visiting jazzers - was palpable. There is nothing like it anywhere in the world. Long may it continue.