Electric Jalaba
El Hal/the Feeling
Electric Jalaba comprises six accomplished musicians with an empathy that feels telepathic and a groove that immerses. In Arabic, the mother tongue of Moroccan-born singer and guimbri player Simo Lagnawi, a leading practitioner of Gnawa music in Britain, they call this indefinable quality, 'El Hal' - 'The Feeling'. "It's the feeling that comes when we're playing and totally forgetting where we are," says producer and bassist Olly Keen. "The feeling of being grabbed by the music and lost in the groove." 'El Hal' is the third album from Electric Jalaba and their first release in five years. It's a multi-faceted work that finds the band tighter than ever, deploying a vast cache of influences across nine tracks improvised and developed in their south London studio then deftly produced by Keen. Some tracks pay homage to the origins of Gnawa music, whose repertoire of Arabic-language praise songs contains remnants of West African dialects - Bambara from Mali, Fulani and Hausa from the Sahel region - that point to a centuries-old migration.