CHEIKHA RIMITTI

Location:
ORAN, DZ
Type:
Artist / Band / Musician
Genre:
Afro-beat / Dub / Folk
Site(s):
Label:
BECAUSE / SONO
CHEIKHA RIMITTI



"It's as happy as funk is and as deep as blues is Being the heart of all hopes and all melancholies, raï music knows whom is keeping its soul." (Nourredine Gafaïti).



RIMITTI was born French, in the early 1920's, near Sidi Bel-Abbès, in Algeria.



She has become an orphan very young, had a hard and soon dissolute life, hanging around from one neighbourhood to another, sleeping in the hammams and even merging with illegality sometimes.

When she was twenty years old, she became close to a musicians' troop, the Hamdachis, with whom she shared a troubadour's life, singing in many cabarets et often dancing until her feet could not bear her anymore.

In those times, dreadful epidemics spread through the country (Albert Camus told this story in his novel taking place in Oran, "The Plague") and put the emphasis on the daily sordid difficulties.

Rimitti drew her inspiration from those desolation scenes and improvised her first verses : her repertoire is mainly based on that which has been lived. "It's misfortune that has educated me, words sing silent in my head until I sing them loud, no need to take neither a pencil nor a notebook."

From those days, she prefers to keep memories of celebrations : "I celebrated the Saints in Relizane, Oran and Algiers Celebrations longed a week and people came from all over the country. We invited the greatest singers, like Oum Keltoum and Cheikha Fadela The Great Not only was I singing, but I also was riding horses during the fantasia, with a rifle in each hand, and I was shooting to the sky. Soldiers clapped their hands and the prefect himself congratulated me a few times"



Her first recording was made in 1952, when Pathe Marconi released a single including the famous "Er-Raï Er-Raï", but it's in 1954 that Rimitti became an absolute reference with her song "Charrak Gattà" : her contemporaries heard in this song an attack against the taboo of virginity ("he crushes, whips and beats me [] I say that I'm going away but I still spend the night / pitiful me, I've taken bad habits").

One should remember that Rimitti has begun, in the 1940's, singing how hard it was to be a woman and introducing the notion of a sexual pleasure. But her thematic goes far beyond that : she explored all forms of love, celebrated friendship, tried to explain what it was to become an alcoholic, regretted the obligation to migrate and scolded the moralists. She, who dared singing an ode to the Emir Abdelkader in the Jewish coffee shops, in the middle of the Liberation's War, was going to suffer from great accusations, flying from the censors of the National Liberation Front.

Her poetry forces her out of the country in the 1960's : this "national excommunication" being then a disproportionate and cynical answer from the new regime entitled itself "national liberation", but that was still deeply stamped with religious traditionalism.



Since those times, she has written more than 200 songs, constituting a real "sing tank" for her successors, including Cheb Khaled whom has covered "The Camel", for instance.

For every raï musician, she is like a queen, THE Great Lady. All singers of the new generation venerate her and see her as "The Mother Of The Genre" (Rachid Taha dedicated her a song, "Rimitti").

A true legend has been built around this woman whom has been haunting the collective imaginary of the Maghreb, for more than half a century.

Re-discovered a few years ago by the new generation, Rimitti is a visionary woman. Her songs, hammered out, and her words, rapped out for more than fifty years have never been closer than they are to the reality of 1990's bloody Algeria, the decade of all dangers (especially for the women, for whom Rimitti has sung aloud in the most audacious and lucid way).



"In between times, the West has succumbed to her languorous, sweet but harsh voice, added to a great art of dancing" (R.Mezouane).



According to how prestigious concerts took place in big cities and worldwide capitals (New York, Paris, London, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Geneva, Madrid, Milan, Berlin, Cairo), Rimitti has become the main ambassadress of Raï.

She has been awarded with the Great Prize of Disc of the Charles Cros Academy, in 2000.

But she claims no title but the one of "Cheikha" (the Senior). And even more than a title, "Cheikha" is the sum of her life, the summary of her story, the one of a French-Algerian early rebel.



But yet, Rimitti does not want to get old Her heart and soul are as alert as ever, and she always acts as a representative of avant-garde. Introducing a modern band (bass, drums, keyboards and brass) playing along with traditional instruments (bendire, tar, gasbâ and gallal), Rimitti showed a new way, valuable as much for raï as for all Arabian styles of music.



Refusing, since her beginnings, the way of the variety raï, that has been taken by the "Chebs' generation", she preferred to explore the diversity of raï. She collaborated with Robert Fripp and Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppersin the "Sidi Mansour" LP in 1994, and that inaugurated a new electric form of raï, with a climax in the 1980's.



Resolutely progressive, she provides the transition from a traditionally based raï (allowing trance to take place) to an improved and refined raï, which rhythms and tones are more modern. She draws the lines of a raï that can be heard as a major musical style. A style that melts up the African influences of Gnawas and the Arabian-Andalusian harmonies of the Châabi music with often improvised coarse lyrics of this Algerian Soul.



Today, "N'Ta Goudami" is released, in the continuation of "Nouar" (2000). This new LP proves once again the diversity of Rimitti's Art, shows us the way to follow, and imposes her once more in her lifetime as the Diva Of Raï.



~ NEWS ~



Cheikha Rimitti : rai music legend dies



Cheikha Rimitti, the legendary rai music star, died suddenly today (Monday 15th May 2006), victim of a heart attack. She was 83 years old.

Rimitti, known as "the mother of rai", was still an active performer and recording artist - indeed, her latest album 'N'ta Goudami' ('Face Me') was released just last week and she was to have appeared at the BBC Proms season in August.

Cheikha Rimitti - who was born in Tessala, a small village deep in the countryside of western Algeria, has long been a legend to whom all the younger rai singers have owed their freedom of expression as well as their linguistic and moral rebelliousness, not to mention a significant proportion of their repertoire.



In a recording career that stretched back to 1952, Cheikha Rimitti was among the most crucial artists in North African culture, perhaps even the most popular singer among the poorest people. Her songs focussed on the struggles of daily living, on the pleasures of sex and love, on alcohol, friendship and war, all performed in the everyday language of the streets.



Rimitti's talents were recognised in every continent, and praised at festivals from Tokyo to Toronto. In 1994 she collaborated with Robert Fripp and Flea from the Red Hot Chilli Peppers on the album 'Sidi Mansour', produced by Fripp, which nudged the creative boundaries of the rai genre out further than ever before.

She always avoided the spangly cabaret pop approach to rai so favoured by the younger generation. Rimitti was nothing less than the incarnation of Algeria's long lost lust for life. Like some dauntless liberated aunt at a dysfunctional family feast, who sings, laughs, chides and surveys the psychological torture going on all around with her knowing eye, Rimitti continued to remind her fellow Algerians that spiritual faith can co-exist with a love of life and physical pleasure.



Her final album, 'N'ta Goudami', also made rai history as Cheikha Rimitti, once officially banned in her native Algeria, took the defiant step of recording it at the Boussif studios in the western Algerian seaport of Oran, the city where rai music was born over a century ago.
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