Amazigh

Music in Amazigh languages, from Morocco, Algeria and the wider Berber-speaking world.

Amazigh is not one music. Tashelhit, Tamazight, Tarifit, Kabyle and Tuareg communities each carry their own repertoire, and the range runs from village call-and-response and ahwash drumming to Kabyle song written for a single guitar and voice.

What most of it shares is that the language is part of the statement. Amazigh languages spent decades shut out of state broadcasting in both Morocco and Algeria, which made singing in them a position whether or not the lyrics said anything political. Kabyle artists carried that furthest, and a great deal of the recorded catalogue was made in France, where both the audience and the studios were.

The Tuareg guitar tradition is filed under Desert Blues here rather than under this term.