After the first song it was question and answer time… and as the audience only contained three members – one woman who sang along to every word, my friend and myself – pretty soon the spotlight was turned to us: in 25 words or less, what is your definition of chaâbi?

Like fish out of water, we gulped a few times with stunned expressions on our faces, downed another slurp of lemon-infused beer and confessed that we really had no idea.

This wasn’t a university lecture, but an evening’s suggestion of entertainment. Last weekend I had my attention sparked by a small street press advertisement announcing a chaâbi concert, and thinking ‘Algerian Dockers blues from the 1920s’ might be interesting, I roped in a friend and off we went.

The gig was Hafid Djemai at Bab-Ilo, which is just over the back of the butte de Montmartre, and being a bit of a map-reading novice, I suggested that we just take the most direct route there – which unfortunately was charging straight up the hill to its Sacré-Coeur peak, and then charging straight back down again. But we made it, and made it to a modern-looking bar that seemed to be frequented by nothing more than old men, emptiness and silence.

Umm… the music is where?

Directed down to the basement, we encountered more sparse settings. Us. One barman. One woman. One drummer. Great…

The impromptu world music tutorial came into being when we responded with blank expressions to the fact that the next song would be ‘Ya Rayah.’ Incredulous that we were even there without knowing this song, we had the origins of chaâbi explained to us, we were given a brief run-down on the finesse and tone of the traditional Algerian mandolin-meets-guitar-meets-lute instrument and then told a little more about the song. Rachid Taha sings it. I’ve seen Rachid Taha play with Brian Eno in St. Petersburg. He does an Arabic version of ‘Rock the Casbah’, amongst other great songs. Turns out I even have an MP3 of ‘Ya Rayah.’ So it goes…


Rachid Taha performing ‘Ya Rayah’ live.

Luckily, more chaâbi fans turned up and we were spared anymore attention, until the interval came and we found ourselves telling our life histories to the assembled audience.

Do we speak any Arabic? (Ha, we’re struggling with French!)

Are we familiar with Algerian music? (Honestly, to sheepishly admit the truth, we’re not even all that familiar with Algeria…)

My friend let it slip that she was from Australia and we began to hear about cousins in Melbourne, a form of guitar/lute typical to Lebanese music, and the most famous Egyptian singer of the 1960s. We only managed to slip out when the musicians started with the opening notes of the second session… but it was well worth it!