"That no one believed in at the beginning"

At the Gnaoua and World Music Festival in Essaouira, music lovers were treated to a magical sequence of four big names, who, through their multiple influences and universal perception of the arts, abolished the borders between music and between cultures. On the Moulay El Hassan stage, it was Karim Ziad, the drummer with multiple inspirations, who set the tone with pieces where jazz easily rubbed shoulders with popular Arab sounds, before spicing up the evening with the entry on stage of a Gnaoua troupe and the sublime Oum, who imprinted a joyful Arab-African melody on this performance. The sequence was almost perfect, once the baton was taken up by Richard Bona, a virtuoso Cameroonian bassist, singer and songwriter and one of the must-sees of current Jazz and African music. You didn't have to be an expert to perceive the strong presence of the singer's roots, and suddenly an African ton…