Cheikha Rimitti

Cheikha Rimitti was born on the 8^th May 1923 as Saadia El Ghizania; she died on the 15^th May 2006. She was a popular Rai female musician from Algeria.

source of picture: en.hibamusic.com

Early Life

Rimitti was born in Tessala, a tiny village in the western part of the country in the year 1923; she was named Saadia, which means joyful. The name that was given to her never matched the reality of her life a she had been orphaned as a kid and started to live a rough life, making a few franks as she was working in the fields and as she was doing some other menial works in the village.

Early Musical Life

When she turned 15, she joined a troupe of traditional Algerian music player and she started learning how to sing and dance. In the year 1943, she relocated to the rural town called Relizane and started writing her own music. Her songs talked more about the rough life that was endured by the poor members of the society, focusing more on the everyday scuffle of living, pleasures for sex, love, alcohol as well as friendship and the realities of fighting war.

Recognition

Rimitti’s fame spread by word of mouth across the country at the time of the World War II until she was taken under patronage of a popular musician at that period, Cheikh Mohammed Ould Ennems that took her to Algiers, it was there that she made her first radio broadcast, and soon after that she adopted the name, Cheikha Rimitti.

Her first record was produced in the year 1952, a three-track on Path Records with the name Cheikha Remettez Reliziana. This was not the record that launched her career. The record that launched her career came two years later, when she caused a sensation with the releasing of the album called Charrak Gatta, a daring hit record at that time that encouraged the young women of that time to lose their virginity and that shocked the Muslim Orthodox. Her music never stopped her from fighting for the nationalistic freedom of the country from the French rule at the time of the Algerian War of Independence who condemned her for the singing of folklore depraved by colonialism. When her country won the independence in the year 1962, the government of the country banned her from singing on the radio and TV because she played them under the French control at the time of the War for independence. The music she made remained popular with the working-class poor members of the country and she continued to sing at weddings and at some feasts in the country.

By the 1970s, she was mainly playing music for the Algerian immigrants’ community in France, she briefly came back to the country in the year 1971, and she was badly hurt in a car accident in which three of her music players were killed. 4 years later, she went on a hadj to Mecca, and after that her way of life was changed. She stopped smoking and drinking, though she continued to sing and dance and by the middle part of the 1980s, when the Rai music was introduced into the culture of the nation as the rousing dance music of angry young youths of the country, she was being hailed as a mamie du Rai, the grandmother of the music pattern.

In the 1980s, she relocated to Paris, France. She kept on with her music career until she died. Two days before her death, she was rapturously received by the audience of about 4,500 at the Zenith in Paris, France. She died in Paris from heart attack on the 15^th May 2006 at the age of 83.

Selected discography

Over a period of 50 years she recorded more than 400 cassettes, 300 single songs, more than 50 78rpms and the handful of CDs. These are selected discography of Rimitti;

Ø  Ghir al Baroud (1996)

Ø  Sidi Mansour (1994) witn Flea (Red Hot Chilli Peppers), Robert Fripp (King Crimson) and other.

Ø  Cheika (1996) witn Flea (Red Hot Chilli Peppers), Robert Fripp (King Crimson) and other.

Ø  Trab Music (2000)

Ø  Nouar (2000)

Ø  L'etoile du Rai (2001)

Ø  Live European Tour 2000 (2001)

Ø  Salam Maghreb (2001)

Ø  N'ta Goudami (2006)