Alaa Zouiten Sextett

Aficionado – Flamenco Moro by Alaa Zouiten Sextett

Fourteen kilometres separate Tarifa and Tangier. The world’s shortest crossing between two continents—and for centuries one of the most travelled. From the eighth century, the Moors brought their musical modes, their lutes, and their poetics to al-Andalus. Seven centuries later they were driven out, but the sound they left behind never went away. It lives on in flamenco—a music that is Spanish without ever having been purely Spanish. Aficionado – Flamenco Moro takes up this dropped lineage and rethreads it. The sextet’s leader is the Casablanca-born oud player and composer Alaa Zouiten who has been living in Berlin for years. He has released three albums and has been working for over a decade on transcultural projects between Morocco, Europe, and the Arab world. What Zouiten discovered in his years of engaging with flamenco was not least his own Moroccan tradition, heard through the ears of its distant sister. The name of the project is a tribute: in Andalusia, aficionado is the name given to those who live not from the tradition but for it—who sing in the peñas, who immerse themselves with patience and humility in this music that is not their own, but that can eventually become theirs. This is how Aficionado see themselves: as a declaration of love for flamenco from a Moroccan perspective, and as a rediscovery of the place where the two traditions had not lost sight of each other. And then there’s another, deeper place where Morocco and Andalusia meet: the duende. What Federico García Lorca described as the dark, obsessed depths where the true voice of flamenco is born, is known to Gnawa and other Moroccan trance-based practices under another name—the same frisson wandering back and forth across the strait. The group’s debut album, released in April 2025, quickly raised the project’s international profile: four stars in the British magazine Songlines, number 17 in the Global World Music Charts, tours to China and Morocco, invitations from all across Europe. At the festival, Aficionado fills a gap: in among Gnawa’s travels to Mali, Brazil, Cuba, Haiti, and Italy, it leads not across the Atlantic but across the strait—back to the southern Spain that has long been an echo of Morocco. Instead of crossover, then, what this evening has to offer is a homecoming in two directions at once.