NEXT STOP MARSEILLE: THE NYTIMES CELBRATES THE ISLAMIZATION OF FRANCE

Marseille Sways to a Maghreb Rhythm

Christophe Margot for The New York Times

Over 120,000 immigrants from North Africa, like this man near the Arc de Triomphe de la Place d’Aix, can make Marseille feel like a Sahara on the sea.

AS a warm Saturday night hung over the Mediterranean, the Algerian-French band Yazmen shuffled under the spotlights with its instruments — hand drum, flute, electric bass and a boxy, long-necked stringed instrument called a guembri — while a crowd filed into the hot confines of the windowless Tankono club.

In Marseille, North Africa Seems Right Next Door

Couples arrived with children while bespectacled record-store geeks and a bald guy in a dashiki made toasts with Kronenbourg beers. Close to the stage, a dozen or so French bohemian types in their 30s pressed together in their best thrift-store finery.

“We’re going to start with some traditional gnawa, but a bit more modern,” the lead singer, Nabil Acef, said in French. “Are you familiar with gnawa?”

Anywhere else, the question would very likely be met with pin-drop silence. But not in Marseille.

“O-o-o-o-u-u-u-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i!” came the explosive reply, as the musicians, all smiles, began a rollicking, jazz-fusion take on gnawa, a centuries-old music heard throughout North and West Africa.

Because of Marseille’s geographical proximity to North Africa and France’s colonial history there, which ended only in the 1960s, Marseille may be more deeply linked to Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria than any non-African city. Some 120,000 to 150,000 people from those three countries — known collectively as the Maghreb — live in Marseille, a bustling and slightly raffish port city of around 800,000.