Mohamed Hassan

Sitting in the Indian Ocean, a stone's throw away from Africa and Madagascar, the Comoros are a crossroads whose inhabitants arrived in Arab dhows, Malaysian boats and African pirogues. While Islam is the cultural cement, it is tinted with Madagascan, Bantu, Persian and even Melanesian colours. Brought to the Comoros by East African immigrants at the beginning of the 20th century, the Twarab is a musical style with Arab origins that quickly took the place of the traditional music present before. Played by large orchestras, the Comoro Twarab is above all based around the oud, the msondro (an earthen jug covered by a goat's skin) and the violin as it was a violinist from Zanzibar -Abdallah Mohamed Cheikh- who supposedly rendered this music popular throughout the rest of the archipelago. Nothing pre-destined that the young Mohamed Hassan would end up playing profane music. Born in 1932 into a very pious Muslim family (his mother was famed for her interpretation of the Koran and one of his uncles was the town Qadi), he was picked out when just 12 due to the quality of his singing and religious dancing. But : "It was somewhere around 1945. A group of musicians from a neighbouring village came to play in Ntsaoueni. There was a violinist and two ngoma players (local tam-tams). I was so impressed by the sound of the violin that the next day I tried to make a similar type of instrument out of a coconut. The following year we got our little group of popular music together and rehearsed every evening. We played in public for the first time in 1948. It was a big success and we continued playing for weddings." The group played songs brought over by travellers from Zanzibar and covers of classics by Farid El Atrache and Oum Kalsoum in Arab and Swahili.In 1962, Mohamed Hassan had an idea. To sing in Shingazida, the local dialect. Spectators immediately arrived from all over the island to hear him. He became THE singer en vogue, regularly recording for Radio Comoros. With the revolutionary Ali Soilih in power (1975-1978), the Twarab's era was soon over, considered too conservative. All of the old recordings were censured and Mohamed Hassan - like many other musicians - went back to his native village and a rural lifestyle. At the beginning of the 80s he decided to take up music again, but he had gone out of fashion. By then it was electric mshago that ruled. The old musician was soon forgotten. To such an extent that when the German Dizzim Records producer, Werner Graebner, went to Ngazidja for the first time to try and find out about the old keepers of the acoustic Twarab, some people told him that Mohamed Hassan must have died and that if he was still alive, he was certainly not fit enough to sing any more. Others believed that he had turned to religion and spent all his time singing verses of the Koran. But when Werner Graebner finally met Mohamed Hassan and Mohamed picked up his oud (which he had not touched for over 10 years), all of the producer's anxieties vanished : the musician was on top form and his voice intact. Part of a day-to-day philosophy, Mohamed Hassan's songs are much more than ethno-musicological curiosities. Their simplicity has taken them through time and the nostalgic softness of their music is universal.

Magali Bergès