A Hackney Fantazy

Fantazia

The band emerged in the late ’90s from the thriving musical melting pot of the Samuel Pepys pub (now the Marie Lloyd bar underneath the Hackney Empire). As founding member Karim Dellali remembers, “Out of the Pepys, I met another Algerian, Yazid Fentazi, an oud player, and just started making music.

“We realised that we can do something interesting here.  We were both into jazz and fusion, so we found a bass player and saxophonist and, us being two Algerians and two English, we tried to work around a fusion between Orient and Western music.”

Karim arrived in the UK in the early ‘90s after fleeing the brutal civil war in Algeria that killed 150,000 people.  This, he says, and adjusting to a new life as a minority in the UK, informs his work and compositions more than anything else.

“It’s reflective.  It reflects a country that arrives at a particular dangerous chaos, and how any regime reacts to safeguard the chaos.  The difference is that, in young countries like Algeria, when there is a lot of influence from the outside, regimes will go all the way through to oppression and start killing people.

“Having said that, the only politics in Fantazia and our music is about the freedom of cultural expression as an ethnic minority in the UK.  The Algerian community here doesn’t really exist as such, but we’re here and we do have a culture to play with.  I feel as British as I do Algerian, and because we are part of British society, then we have a say in the cultural diversity of the UK.”

Fantazia have represented Britain and Algeria around the world. Their live performances have been celebrated for their ‘potent grooves, impassioned singing, soaring improvisations and the ever-present power of percussion’.

To the initial quartet of oud, derbouka, bass and sax/flute, they soon added violin and drums, and released their first CD in 2000, the instrumental The Lost Place.

The 2004 follow up, Mul Sheshe, featured the same Orient and Western jazz fusion, only this time saw swirling Algerian wails and funk-ridden lyrics added to the confident bombast of Fantazia’s sound.  The result is a tour de force of the passion, politics, history and culture of two distinctly different countries.

“At the end of the day, whatever music we do, it is definitely fusion as it’s experienced here in Britain and not Algeria.  The music, maybe,” Karim concedes with a smile. “Some of the rhythms and the melodies might be Algerian, but the fusion is definitely from here.  That’s not coming from anywhere else.”