Aziz Sahmaoui carries a whole panoply of Mediterranean history. Born in Marrakesh, he is confronted with most of the popular music of the Maghreb, from the most electronic to those sculpted in gut or tanned skin. At the end of his studies in literature, he arrived in Paris and founded one of the leading groups of the 1990s, the Orchestre National de Barbès, a machine for scaring off identity groups and border guards.

University of Gnawa deploys a music in which trance is the ferment… You have to hear at least once this immense joy of playing, this way of not letting go of the music even when it plays very fast, this generosity choreographed in a flawless poetry and an epidermal refusal of exoticism. University of Gnawa is not a pretty architecture full of arabesques, but a rock band from the South.