I’ve just returned from a week-long cultural exchange in Morocco, and I’m absolutely buzzing!
For the past seven days, I’ve immersed myself in Gnawa music in Taroudant, learning and playing alongside Gnawa folk star Monssif Bouboul and local musicians from the city. Monssif invited me to Morocco at the behest of the Gnawa Cultural Association of Taroudant, with the idea of beginning a cultural exchange: I would share some of the “Western” folk traditions and musical styles that have shaped me, while Monssif and the musicians of Taroudant would introduce me more deeply to their music, rhythms and traditions.
This is a project that Stefanie and I have been dreaming about for many years. To see it finally START to unfold was truly special.
When I started The Trouble Notes, cultural exchanges like this were at the heart of what I dreamt the band could become. I wanted to travel, meet musicians from all over the world, learn from them, share what I knew, and see what happened when those musical worlds collided.
And for many years, that’s exactly what we’ve done.
But this experience elevated that idea to an entirely different level.
When I first started travelling with my violin, I still had so much to learn. Sure, I had talent with the instrument and an enormous passion for music, but I didn’t yet have the life experience that I carry with me today. The past 13 years of travelling, performing, listening and collaborating have given me a very different perspective.
I’m still as energetic and passionate about music as I was in 2013. But now I arrive somewhere like Taroudant with more experience, more patience, and perhaps most importantly, a better understanding that a cultural exchange isn’t about arriving somewhere and asking, “How can I fit this music into what I already do?”
It’s about listening.
It’s about sitting together at eye level and saying: show me your world, and I’ll show you mine.
That was perhaps the most beautiful part of this past week. We weren’t there to manufacture some predetermined “fusion.” We were musicians sharing ideas, stories, rhythms and sounds with openness and respect. Sometimes I was teaching. This time, more often I was the student. And somewhere in between, new musical ideas began to appear. A fusion project between The Trouble Notes and Gnawa musicians was unfolding before my very eyes.
For me, this is what folk music has always been about.
Traditions survive because people carry them forward, but they also travel. They meet other traditions. They absorb stories from new places and new generations. They remind us where we come from while giving us a language through which we can understand one another.
It also brought me back to the spirit behind “Sands of Time.” Our cultures may be different, but together they form this extraordinary quilt of human experience. The more we genuinely exchange with one another, the richer that quilt becomes.
And this is very much only the beginning.
What happened in Taroudant was the first step of something Stefanie and I hope can grow into a much larger cultural exchange project. There are musical ideas that came out of this week that I’m still processing, friendships that have only just begun, and possibilities for what comes next that have us incredibly excited.
I returned home with new rhythms rattling around in my head, new ideas for the violin, and a renewed sense of why I started this whole journey in the first place.
Travel. Listen. Learn. Share. Create.
Thirteen years later, the dream is still the same.
I'm just getting better at understanding what it means and how to make a reality.
Love and Troubled Melodies,
Bennet