Songlines Magazine (UK) - #46 - Sept/Oct. 2007

Berber women singers are one of the world’s least known musical treasures. For centuries they have been at work at village festivals, religious events and private parties from Algeria’s Kabyle region through the southern Sahara all the way to the Moroccan Anti-Atlas. Many aren’t professional musicians and few will ever be recorded.

Rayssa Fatima Tabaamrant, a pro singer since the mid-80s, is one of the greatest living exponents of this art form, and a refreshingly combative figure with it. This CD is the highest profile release of her career and it’s a triumph on all levels. Even by the standards of Berber female singing, a pretty uninhibited vocal form, Tabaamrant’s vocal attack is breathtaking. Given her chosen material and her fiery public pronouncements in the Moroccan media about the ‘debasement’ of Berber music, you feel she won’t be following the estimable Tinariwen down the supporting-the-Rolling Stones route.

But this is a masterpiece of live playing and singing, nowhere more than on the beautiful ‘Ssllam’, a 15-minute namecheck of some of the greatest Maghreb Muslim saints and a welcome to the audience for the evening. This sums up her commitment to the concept of awal lima’na, best translated as gauging the weight of your words, that Tabaamrant feels has been neglected.

Several tracks, such as ‘Ait l`aql’ (Common Sense) bear witness to her incendiary combination of outspoken feminism and Berber musical tradition. She is known in Morocco as an uncompromising character, and here you can see why. North African record of the year so far, by some distance.

Andrew Manley

The Guardian (UK) - June 29, 2007

Rayssa Fatima Tabaamrant is a raissa, a traditional itinerant female singer from southern Morocco, who performs in town squares, bars or weddings, and whose lyrics deal with anything from local to international affairs or social issues of the day. She is also a quite astonishingly rousing performer, with a declamatory style and the ability to improvise that make her sound like a traditional answer to a great blues or rock performer.

This may look like an album for ethno-musicologists with its erudite sleeve-notes, but the lady deserves a wider audience. Backed by a stomping band using hand drums, cymbals made from car-wheel rims, lutes and fiddles, she tears into this live set with a 15-minute track that constantly changes direction and ends up as a furious workout against a driving, insistent riff from her musicians. Exhilarating.

Robin Denselow