The Medina, or ancient walled city of Fez, is arguably one of the most beautiful places in the world, a millenary and mysterious labyrinth abounding in scents and colors. And one week every year in the summer for the last twenty-one, its walls have echoed melodies and rhythms from all over the world during the Fez Festival of World Sacred Music.

Each year, the festival’s curators structure concerts around a central theme, which this year was “Fez, An African Reflection”. The theme addressed Fez’s cultural and spiritual importance in light of the city’s privileged position of being at one end of a great trans-Saharan route which since the Middle Ages has connected traders and even more importantly, allowed sharing ideas, manuscripts, cultures and traditions.

The festival’s opening night concert was inspired in “The History and Description of Africa” written by Hassan Al Wazzan (c1490-1550) known as Leo Africanus, and featured dozens of the festival musicians in a tribute to the great mystical travellers who forged bonds between Morocco and the rest of Africa.

From this performance onwards, the festival highlighted a conscious dialogue amongst different cultures. In contrast to many unfortunate examples throughout our human history of cultures colliding in violence and conflict, this year as in previous editions, the Fez Festival of World Sacred Music shared beautiful examples of a different kind of cultural collision planned in art and harmony.

The most memorable concerts highlighted unique collaborations that may never be repeated, with artists listening to the other with care to find a common musical ground, and in very real ways, creating completely new musical languages that benefitted from the others’ viewpoint.

It’s true that finding a musical common ground meant that at times the intricacies and subtleties of the music of each artist’s culture were lost in translation. Nevertheless, some of the moments below of true musical communion that the Fez International World Sacred Music Festival offered this year remain in my memory as glimmering, shimmering examples of the immense possibilities of humanity united in creative harmony.

Création Marassa

Omar Sosa, the extraordinary Afro Cuban pianist known for his long-time explorations of African traditions in jazz, premiered Création Marassa, a collaboration with Urban Tap (superb French Guinean tap dance master Tamango and French video artist Jean de Boysson aka VJ Naj) accompanied by Venezuelan percussionist Gustavo Ovalles. The concert was a beautiful conversation particularly between Sosa and Tamango, who exchanged musical phrases back and forth via the melodic percussion of the piano and the percussive melody of a tap dance reminiscent of creole rhythms from Africa, Cuba and South America.

Ballaké Sissoko and Debashish Battarcharya

Mali’s Ballaké Sissoko and India’s Debashish Bhattacharya, two masters of stringed instruments from vastly different traditions, came together in concert under an enormous holm oak tree in the patio of the Batha Museum (one of the loveliest venues of the festival).

It was a beautiful and lyrical conversation that engaged the artists fully, who smiled and nodded as they traded riffs. Sissoko on the 21-string kora, provided delicate ripples tinged with Mali’s hallmark desert blues. Bhattacharya played amongst others, an instrument he invented-- Hindustani slide guitar. The fretless lap steel guitar and its additional strings allows him to create a sound that trilled, resonated and droned in classical Northern Indian styles as well as swinging to the blues. Together, Sissoko and Battarcharya took us on a delightful journey from the banks of the Ganges to the Niger River.

Diego El Cigala

The concert by flamenco master and Grammy awardee Diego El Cigala was a dialogue in several parts. One the one hand, as an individual musician, El Cigala has in particular in the last decade explored flamenco in the context of genres such as jazz, the Cuban bolero and tango. Much of the night’s music came from this facet of Cigala’s explorations, as his powerful voice, at turns gravelly and then velvety, soared in the Batha Museum patio, ably accompanied by a quartet that included several Cuban musicians. In a fascinating sense, El Cigala’s recent work creates a contemporary version of of cantes de ida y vuelta, or “roundtrip songs”, an older form of flamenco songs which centuries ago returned from the Americas renewed and transformed thanks to African and indigenous influences.

Additionally, Diego El Cigala sang one song with guest Benjamin Bouzaglou, a Moroccan-Jewish singer who has dedicated his musical career to Arabo-Jewish and Andalusian music. The song they chose to sing together, “Historia de Amor”, is a famous Latin bolero of immense popularity world-round, first sung in the Arab world by Algerian superstar Lili Boniche in the mid-20th Century.

El Cigala and Bouzaglou’s was an encounter that spoke to the magnificent complexities of human history, as we witnessed a plaintive lament about the loss of a great love composed by a Panamanian, sung by a Moroccan Jewish singer and a gypsy Flamenco artist, in the center of a city that has been for over a thousand one of the leading spiritual and educational centers of the historic Muslim world. A beautifully small world indeed!

Roberto Fonseca and Fatoumata Diawara

This concert paired the renowned Cuban pianist Roberto Fonseca (formerly of Buenavista Social Club) with the immensely talented African griot Fatoumata Diawara (Paris-based, born in the Ivory Coast to Malian parents) who linked the hybrid styles of the Americas and the Caribbean (blues, jazz, soul as well as salsa, rumba, merengue) with diverse African rhythms.

Together, Fonseca and Diawara created music of a beautiful complementary wholeness and buoyant energy. Theirs were also irresistibly danceable creations that brought the audience to its feet. For at least a few brief moments, we forgot any superficial differences that may exist in age, culture, religion, background or ethnicity to sway, clap and move in the joyous abandon of the most deeply human art of all: music.