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36 albums · 1975–2025

The Moroccan guembri, the bass lute of the Gnawa

· 1 min read · by 1001 Albums

A Gnawa musician seated against a blue wall, playing the guembri
Mehdi Qamoum playing the guembri on stage at the Gnaoua Festival BerlinA nineteenth-century Moroccan guembri in a museum case
A guembri player in Rabat. Photo: Lars Curfs, CC BY-SA 3.0 NL, via Wikimedia Commons. · Mehdi Qamoum at the Gnaoua Festival Berlin, 2019. Photo: Daniela Incoronato, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. · A Moroccan guembri of the nineteenth century, in a museum. Photo: Sguastevi, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The guembri, or sintir, is the three-stringed bass lute of Gnawa music, a Moroccan tradition with roots in West Africa. It is a skin-covered trough with a long neck, played with the thumb, and it leads the lila, the night of trance, with the iron qraqeb clapping around it.

The list has maâlems, the masters of the lila: Mahmoud Guinia of Essaouira and his sons Houssam and Mokhtar, Hamid El Kasri, Hassan Hakmoun and Saïd Damir. Majid Bekkas, Aziz Sahmaoui and Simo Lagnawi took the guembri into jazz, and Nass El Ghiwane put it into Moroccan song in the seventies.

The list has 36 records from 1975 to 2025. Many more maâlems play than are on record here. About 34 hours of music, 4 days of a few records each.

By genre

World 93%Jazz 6%Electronic 1%
  • World 93%
  • Jazz 6%
  • Electronic 1%

The genres named most: gnawa, world, jazz, chaâbi, electronic.

The colours of the covers

A stripe for each cover, in the colour Tidal picks from it, sorted by hue; the greys at the end.

Where the music comes from

Music from 1 country: Morocco 36. The deeper the colour, the more albums: one, two to four, five to nine, ten and more.

The 1970s

  • LhmamiNass El Ghiwane · 1975

The 1980s

The 1990s

The 2000s

The 2010s

The 2020s

More lists

Lists of Instruments first, then others; all of them on the blog. The blog.

29 albums · 1976–2024

The kora of Mali, the harp-lute of the jeli

· 1 min read

The kora is the harp-lute of the jeli, the griots of Mali, Guinea, Senegal and the Gambia: 21 strings over a large calabash covered in cowhide, played with the thumbs and forefingers of both hands.

World 89%Blues 3%Classical 3%Other 5%
  • World 89%
  • Blues 3%
  • Classical 3%
  • Other 5%

Read and see the list