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Karim Ziad and Hamid El Kasri, between their roots and future Both artists have drawn their original inspiration in their respective heritages, Algerian for Karim and Moroccan for Hamid. What has brought them together is their shared passion for the popular Sufism tradition of the Gnawa, whose ritual had been largely marginalized at a time, if not ignored or even scorned. It should be reminded that when Paul Bowles, the American writer settled in Tangier, travelled across Morocco in the 1950s in order to collect Gnawa music, the authorities, both intrigued and aloof, asked what he could possibly find in this worthless repertoire: "Your recordings are going to sound like primitive noises, and if you publish them, everyone is going to think that Morocco is a land of savages." Instead, they advised him to go into Andalusian art, more refined and highly appreciated by the elite. Of course, the author of The Sheltering Sky ignored the advice and the audio archives he then proceeded to collect are still counted among the masterpieces of the Library of Congress in New York. Ten years later, during the "beat generation", big names of literature, poetry, experimental theatre and music such as Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, the Living Theater, Archie Shepp ou Jimi Hendrix landed in Essaouira. They attended wild evenings where Gnawa musicians led bodies into a trance to free them from bad "vibrations". Shortly afterwards, Randy Weston, who did several recordings with Gnawa musicians from Tanger, and much later Jimmy Page and Robert Plant (ex-member of Led Zeppelin), Les Rita Mitsouko, Louis Bertignac (ex-member of the group Telephone), Sapho, the Rolling Stones and Imhotep (from the hip-hop group IAM) - among the last non-Moroccan musicians to travel to Essaouira, all bewitched by the Gnawa "groove", set foot in Essaouira (formerly called Mogador), the so-called capital of the Gnawa. This place is the most important zawiyya (a place of meeting and learning) of the Sharifian realm, and it also hosts the most important festival dedicated to this genre - a festival whose artistic director is none other than... Karim Ziad.