ABOUT
Mehdi Chamma is a Moroccan born artist based in Vienna, guitar and guembri player, singer, composer and arranger.
Born and raised in the small town of El-Jadida on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, his early musical memories were of north-west African songs and the spiritual Gnawa music.
He was exposed to blues, jazz music and rock as well as to Arab-songs and moroccan folklore music. Out of this blend of the secular and the religious, the traditional and the modern, as an autodidact Mehdi developed the distinctive style, harmonies and musical vocabulary that are inimitably his own.With a warm guitar tone and an unerring gift for melody, Mehdi is a multi-cultural musician and composer of music with grace, warmth, and humanity that transcends boundaries, genres, and languages, possessing the quality to bring the listener to his own world. His album “Layla wa Bahr (Night and Sea)” is a unique blend of Ethno, fusion, jazz and psychedelic rock sonorities with a deep resonance of north west African roots, resulting in a refreshingly distinct and authentic sound, powerful groove filled with original lyrics and poetry in his mother tongue, the Moroccan Darija, and Arabic, recorded in the studio together with: Jakob Mayr (Trombone & Trumpet), Erik Asatrian (Keys), Michael Acker (Bass) and Walter Sitz (Drums).
