Group Doueh

Dakhla

Group Doueh is the family band of Salmou Baamar, known as Doueh, a guitarist born in 1964 in Dakhla, the former Villa Cisneros, on a windblown Atlantic peninsula at the western edge of the Sahara. His father, brother and grandfather were musicians, and Hisham Mayet likened the family line to a musical caste. As a boy in the 1970s Doueh built his first guitar from an oil can nailed to a plank and strung with fishing line, and he heard Jimi Hendrix and James Brown on cassettes that came in from Spain. He names both as influences, and the band sets their example against Hassania sung poetry and Mauritanian modes.

After playing in many groups since childhood, Doueh formed his own. It is a working wedding band: weddings and private parties are its living, and because guests tip the musicians, longer and more intense performances earn more. His wife Halima Jakani sings lead, plays the ardin harp and the tbal drum, and runs the money and logistics. Doueh plays electric guitar and the tinidit, a Moorish lute he fitted with pickups and plays through distortion and phase pedals. Off stage he ran a cassette shop in Dakhla. In the 1980s he turned down recording offers from Moroccan and European parties and taped the band himself at home.

A song on the radio

In 2005 Hisham Mayet and Alan Bishop of the Seattle label Sublime Frequencies heard a song called Eid for Dakhla on the radio in a hotel room in Essaouira, part of a documentary about the local scene that never named the artist. In February 2006 Mayet's expedition reached Doueh's compound in Dakhla, near the Mauritanian border. When Mayet played him the recording, Doueh laughed and said it was him.

Mayet recorded two songs at the compound that month, and they joined Doueh's own home tapes on the debut, Guitar Music from the Western Sahara (2007), an LP of a thousand copies that took about seven months to sell out. Treeg Salaam (2009) drew on Doueh's cassette archive from 1989 to 1996. In May and June 2009 the band made its first tour outside Africa, through Britain and northern Europe with the Syrian singer Omar Souleyman, and in 2010 Doueh hosted Tony Allen in Dakhla and joined some of his European dates.

Two sides

Two records made in Dakhla in 2010 show the band's two faces. Beatte Harab, recorded that April, is the traditional, mostly acoustic one, with Halima's ardin, Traicha striking tea glasses on a tray and Doueh's son El Waar on synth. Later that year Mayet recorded Zayna Jumma, a turn toward rock: El Waar moved to organ and keyboards, and another son, Hamdan, played drum kit, the first on a Doueh record. It opens with its title track. Robert Christgau gave it an A minus, and Tiny Mix Tapes four out of five.

The album came out in 2011 to coincide with the band's busiest touring year. In May they played the Barbican, the All Tomorrow's Parties weekend at Minehead curated by Animal Collective, Paradiso and Villette Sonique. Then came their first North American tour, from Chicago's Old Town School of Folk to the Montreal and Vancouver jazz festivals and Central Park SummerStage. In Vancouver they played one traditional set seated on pillows and one electric set, and invited the audience to dance on stage. The line-up has always revolved, Mayet said: the singer Bashiri Touballi and Doueh's son Jamal, both on the debut, later left.

Rough and crude the way garage revivalists, for instance, only wish they could be.

Robert Christgau on Zayna Jumma

Cheveu and after

A session in Dakhla with the French band Cheveu, set up by the Moroccan promoter Jose Kamal and overseen by Born Bad Records, became Dakhla Sahara Session (2017). Cheveu's David Lemoine said it was not a fusion but two musics laid over each other. Christgau gave it an A, and it won the Prix des Indes in Paris in October 2017. That summer the two bands played Roskilde, the Eurockeennes de Belfort and Dour, and in October Group Doueh toured the United States, including a concert for WFMU in Jersey City that is free to stream.

The same year Mayet and Cyrus Moussavi released the film Oulaya's Wedding, about the family's preparations and performances for the 2016 wedding of Doueh and Halima's eldest daughter, which drew more than five hundred guests over three days and nights. Roads and Kingdoms called Doueh the greatest musician in Western Sahara, and Guitar.com has argued the band should be heard as a guitar band rather than filed under world music.