Fes tour a musical, spiritual spectacle Festival to arrive at MCA Wednesday

ORONO – More than a decade ago, a Muslim mystic was searching for a way to create an international religious forum that would foster healing after the Gulf War.

Faouzi Skali first considered a film festival showing the world’s spiritual traditions, but the language and cultural barriers seemed insurmountable. Finally, he opted for music and helped launch what has become the weeklong Fes Festival of Sacred Music, held each year in the 1,300-year-old city of Fez, Morocco.

“I think, we could almost do some miracle through music,” he said of the festival in 1998.

To mark the 10th anniversary of the event, an abbreviated version of the festival is touring 17 cities in the United States. The Spirit of Fes tour will stop on Wednesday at the Maine Center for the Arts on the last leg of its trip.

The tour, which blends music from Jewish, Islamic and Christian traditions, began March 6 at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

Undoubtedly, the crowd at the MCA will be much smaller than the 30,000 who attended concerts at the festival last year in the capital city of Morocco, from which it takes its name.

“The festival was founded with the mission to bring people together and promote the idea of peaceful coexistence, respect and tolerance for other religions and people,” Zebya Rahman, a director of the Fes Festival for the past five years, said earlier this month when the tour performed in California. “To my mind, if we actually experience each other, we will find there is more common ground than we imagine. We belong to the same species, after all.

“As we become pressed up against each other and more and more entwined regionally, politically and economically, the more we need to know about each other,” she said. “At the Fes Fest, we are dealing with this.”

John Patches, MCA executive director, learned of the interfaith festival when he attended a workshop on Arab countries last year. That experience led him to a trip to Morocco and eventually to booking the Fes Festival in what may be the smallest city on its tour.

The concert will open with Argentine-born Israeli Gabriel Meyer and Palestinian Sufi Yacoub Hussein chanting sacred texts from their respective faiths in what was called “eloquent counterpoint” by a reviewer for the Washington Post. Christian music that is uniquely American also will be performed by the Anointed Jackson Sisters, a North Carolina gospel group.

The Algerian-Jewish vocalist Francoise Atlan will perform Iberian and Sephardic repertoires that that mix Muslim, Jewish and Christian forms. Farid El Foulahi, who plays the Moroccan oud, a kind of lute, and Lebanese American percussionist Jamey Haddad will accompany her.

Hadra des Femmes de Taroudant, a Muslim women’s ensemble will perform ancient tribal music and dance from the Taroudant region in Southern Morocco.

The Washington Post reviewer described the group’s performance as “a delightfully raucous surprise.” The women chant Islamic praise songs in a call-and-response style more characteristic of sub-Saharan Africa than the Middle East.

“The blue-robed septet sang and occasionally danced, sometimes overwhelming their own voices with exuberant banging on clay pots, tambourine-like tars and the piercingly metallic nakous,” wrote Mark Jenkins. “This was the evening’s least professional performance, and its most stirring.”

Similar to the African griot or praise singer’s tradition, the ensemble traditionally performs at important events that mark the cycles of life to bless the occasion.

“The intent of this music is to draw our souls onto another plane,” Rahman said of the Spirit of Fes tour. “Different genres of music have different purposes. Sacred music has the intention of healing and drawing people together, so we thought this would be wonderful medium to reach out to people.”

The Spirit of Fes tour will perform at 7 p.m. Wednesday at the Maine Center for the Arts in Orono. For tickets, call 581-1755. Judy Harrison can be reached at 990-8207 or jharrison@bangordailynews.net.