29 f A Complex Life
With an Algerian Kabyle father and French/ Italian mother, Iness Mezel’s background is as rich as her music. Elizabeth Kinder offers tea and ears.
T
he beautiful Paris-based French Algerian singer/songwriter Iness Mezel is in my front room. She is making a surpris- ing announcement. “English
people are said to be flexible and open and very into music.” Has she seen X Factor? “So I felt I should check,” she con- tinues. “I felt I only had to shake some- thing and it would happen.” Clearly she wasn’t talking about auditioning for Simon Cowell or indeed any of the other self- satisfied cloth-eared fat-cats that the mainstream music business is overstuffed with. Though obviously if Mezel swam in the mainstream she wouldn’t be talking to fRoots. She is in fact discussing her search for a producer for her very fine genre-busting third album, Beyond The Trance (Wrasse). The person she found for the job was Justin Adams.
Having heard about Adams through a friend, Mezel decided that he would be someone who “would get the complexi- ties” involved. And listening to the album on which he also sings and plays bass, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, drums, ban- jos, tehardant, (I’ve started so I’ll finish) lute, gambri and djembe, he doesn’t just ‘get’ them but relishes every single one. Though I should point out that there are many other brilliant musicians on the album, including Seckou Keita on kora.
The “complexities” to which Mezel is referring are those thrown up by her mixed identity, her late politicisation because of it and her need to express her experiences and her heritage – with all the innate and myriad musical sensibilities these have engendered – through her songs.
Born Fatiha Messaoudi in Paris to an Algerian father and a French/Italian moth- er, Iness moved with her family to Algiers when she was seven. It was for her one of those defining moments in childhood. “I discovered here that I was different. I was French. Also I was Kabyle, so I was differ- ent from the Algerian children again.”
As Andy Morgan explains: “The Kabyle are the largest Amazigh minority in North Africa, descended, like all Berbers, from the tribes who inhabited the region before the arrival of the Romans, the Visigoths, the Arabs, the Ottomans and the French. They speak their own lan- guage and are fiercely proud of their dis- tinct culture, which is Mediterranean rather than Middle Eastern or Arab. They inhabit the lofty heights and foothills of the Djurdjura Mountains that rise up to the east of the Algerian capital Algiers… Kabyle women are strong, proud and
independent. Not for them the veiled sub- servience prescribed by fundamentalist Islam. Like all Berbers, the Kabyles love music and poetry.”
Iness Mezel’s father was born and raised in Ighil I Azzouzen, a tiny Kabyle vil- lage not far from the Kabyle capital Tizi Ouzou. Iness went to school in Algiers where she would speak French and Algeri- an and in the holidays, when she’d get up at four in the morning to take the long bus ride to the mountains and her father’s village, she would speak Berber (Tamazight) with her aunts. “I remember the colours, lying on the grass which is not really green, more brown, and watch- ing the sky. I recall the scent in the air, full of the flowers that grew there and of my aunts’ dresses, infused too with the cooking which they did on an open fire in the yard. I remember them brushing their hair and eat- ing these things that would make their lips red when they were preparing for the fiesta.”
Music in the vil- lage was bound up with the rhythms of daily life, with the ceremonies that marked its passing and ‘the fiesta.’
“I remember the women walking in from the mountain in the night, carrying flam- ing torches. I would sit in a tree in our yard and in the distance you could see the torches, and hear the women singing and when they arrived in the village we cele- brated and sang together.”
Life in the city was very different and the music that surrounded her then was “all the different songs you hear on the radio: Berber music, Arabic, Moroccan, French music. When you’re a child you’re a
sponge,” she smiles.
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