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Morocco

Moroccan-Jewish chaabi singer

Pinhas Cohen

Pinhas Cohen was born in Casablanca to a family from Fès and is remembered as one of the best-known voices of Moroccan chaabi, the popular song of the country's cities. He belonged to a generation in which Jewish performers were a major strand of Moroccan popular music. Little else about his life is documented in any detail. His recordings have lived on mostly through diaspora reissues, including anthologies of Jewish singers from Morocco, long after most of the country's Jewish community had emigrated.

Casablanca psych in Darija

Golden Hands

Golden Hands came out of Casablanca at the end of the 1960s playing a hard mix of psychedelic rock and funk, sung in Darija, Moroccan Arabic, and put out a run of singles in the early 1970s. They reportedly won first prize at a battle of the bands at Paris's Golf Drouot club in 1973, which brought more studio work and tours of Switzerland and Denmark. Their only album came out on cassette on the Moroccan label Disques Gam in 1978. It had to wait until 2019 for its first vinyl release, on Belgium's Sdban Records, and that finally got the band an audience beyond Morocco.

The Collection