WOMAD

Kadda Cherif Hadria

From Algeria

There is, in most cultures around the world, a style of music that comes from a country's underclass – its poor, dispossessed and disenfranchised. The blues is the most obvious example of this, and at this festival you can hear examples of Greek rembétika (Eleftheria Arvanitaki), and the songs and dance of black South Africa (Shikisha), among others. In Algeria, the music that speaks to the country's urban youth is rai, a style that developed earlier this century as the country became more industrialised and urbanised.Rai, with its use of street slang and liberal mix of rhythms, has always been seen as a challenge to authority. Its birthplace is the city of Oran, a port and provincial capital in western Algeria - and Oran is also the birthplace of Kadda Cherif Hadria.Throughout the sixties and seventies, artists from Oran such as Bellemou Messaoud began to mix rai with pop, rock and flamenco, a process continued in the seventies by the likes of Cheb Khaled and Chaba Fadela, who had achieved international success by the early eighties. Now, the music is developing again. Kadda Cherif Hadria and his group use accordeons, strings, African percussion and Latin brass to create a rai that has clear links with jazz and jazz-rock.Hadria's first album, 'Diri Kitabri', was released in 1995, and since then he has retained a nucleus of players including trumpeter Arthur Simon, violinist Mohamed Mokhtari (classically trained and now 60 years old) and percussionist Rabah Khalfa.