Satura Magrhibi

Jarrets' Satura is likened to the food metaphor. The song I listened to was from the Maleem Mahmoud Ghania and Pharoah Sanders. Structurally it is Saturnine in its deliberate mixing of seemingly disparate genres of music. Each ingredient retaining, as Jarrett describes it, a unique flavor which mixes. It is a powerful metaphor, though a well used one. And it is distinctly American, or is it?
Moroccan music and culture is a mixing. The Arabs and the Berbers. The mountain and desert peoples. The music that comes from Gnawa (Mahmoud's genre) is a delicious mixing in it's own right. Though I am not sure if the average Moroccan knows what the mixing is, it is infectious. Just as Jazz was a music that enlivened the American people, though perhaps middle America didn't know its underpinnings in racial expression, liberation and commodification.
The music evokes something ancient and it replies to and against itself. Gnawa music is music played in the streets and provides the roux, the base, around which many ingredients gather. In this case, it is jazz.
Moroccan Arabic culture is filled with proverbs. Proverbs are one of the primary ways in which philospohical meaning in conveyed. So perhaps the music has a base, a theoretical form, a framwork from around which improvisation can happen. Gnawa revolves on a repeated sound, the instruments and then the uud. The voices become the variance, singing call and response in a soft spoken answer form.
It is a music which in enlivened by participation. Here the Sanders horn plays with the form and weaves in and out.
So I would point out that if you look from a traditional form to a contemporary one, you might actually be troping, creating variations, which in turn then recreate themselves as new. A new dish from which we eat together, a dish that is shared by many hands.
In this sense, the parts come together to make a whole. Two cultures across the world that can talk to each other in the simple and complex language of music.