⚠️ The date shown at the top of this event comes from the official source. The original description mentions other dates that may be outdated.
Sidi Bémol, alias Hocine Boukella, will present “Guellal Montréal” on Friday, September 25, 2026, on the Cabaret Sauvage stage (Paris, 19th arrondissement) at an album launch concert.
His 13th album as a singer-songwriter, marking the culmination of a 30-year career, will be released digitally and on CD on September 18, 2026, by CSB Productions / L’Autre Distribution. A book will also be published on September 18, 2026, featuring lyrics, translations, sheet music, and more. “Guellal Montréal” is a musical project born from the encounter between the Berber traditions of northwestern Algeria and the Indigenous cultures of Québec. Through this album, Hocine Boukella continues an artistic exploration he began several years ago around the guellal, an ancient Berber percussion instrument; melhoun, a form of sung poetry considered one of the forerunners of raï; and the possible connections between these traditions and Indigenous spiritualities. Lineup: Hocine BOUKELLA: vocals and guitar; Youssef BOUKELLA: bass and backing vocals; Abdenour DJEMAÏ: guitar and backing vocals; Maamoun DEHANE: drums and backing vocals. Guest: Mehdi ASKEUR: guellal and backing vocals. The album: The starting point for this album is the guellal, an instrument at the heart of Oran’s popular music. With its deep bass tones and sharp beats, it has accompanied melhoun songs for centuries—a rhythmic form of poetry performed by singer-poets who tell stories about the world in cafés, markets, and community celebrations. Hocine Boukella was deeply influenced at a very young age by discovering masters such as Cheikh Hamada. A passionate fan of blues and rock, he immediately sensed a kinship between melhoun and the blues: the same emotional intensity, the same way of turning poetry into vibration. During his travels in Québec, he discovered Indigenous cultures through their music and, above all, their poetry. The writings of Joséphine Bacon and Natasha Kanapé Fontaine stirred in him an emotion similar to what he had felt when encountering traditional Berber poetry. Despite the distance between these peoples, he found a shared relationship with nature, memory, and the living world. Guellal Montréal grew out of this intuition: a dialogue between languages, rhythms, and imagined worlds. The songs blend Arabic, Kabyle, French, and English, drawing inspiration from melhoun as well as traditional and contemporary Indigenous texts. To bring this project to life, he collaborated with Tacfarinas Kichou, an Algeria-born Québec percussionist and luthier whom he met in Montréal. Passionate about traditional rhythms from around the world, Sidi Bémol has developed a distinctive approach to the guellal by designing his own instruments and incorporating contemporary and Indigenous influences. Guellal Montréal is therefore an album about cultural transmission and cross-pollination, in which traditions engage freely with the sounds of today. A musical journey between Algérie and Québec, between ancestral memory and contemporary creation.
Price: Standard price: 26.25 EUR Early-bird price: 21 EUR
Source: paris.fr — photo: CSB Productions