This is our weekly ritual: we board the plane, fasten our seatbelts, and prepare for take-off. This week, our destination is Marrakech. The airline? STR. And instead of a boarding pass, all you need is a playlist.
What awaits us on arrival? A journey through North African and Arab musical heritage, with Morocco firmly at its centre. But before we press play, it helps to know what you are listening for. Throughout the playlist, two of the region's most distinctive musical traditions keep appearing again and again.
- The first is Tarab — music that rewards patience. These are songs that unfold slowly, allowing emotion to build layer by layer while the voice remains the undisputed star of the show. You will hear it in the music of Umm Kulthum, Naima Samih and Abdelwahab Doukkali. Different artists, different eras, but all sharing a gift for turning a song into a story.
- The second is Trance. Here, the rhythm takes the wheel. Repetition and hypnotic grooves pull the listener deeper and deeper into the music. Listen out for Hamid El Kasri, whose work is rooted in the Gnawa tradition, and Nass El Ghiwane, who helped bring Morocco's folk and spiritual sounds to a wider audience.
And just when you think you have figured out the route, the playlist reveals its final trick: it is also a time machine. Over the course of an hour, you will travel through more than seventy years of musical history — from the Arab Golden Age of the 1940s and 1950s, through Moroccan modernism in the 1970s, into the revival of Gnawa traditions and their encounters with jazz and blues, before arriving back in the present day with contemporary reinterpretations of these enduring sounds.
Not bad for a one-hour flight.
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