Despite hardships, Sarazino’s spirit is upbeat

“The tragic experience that my family lived is what convinced me to keep a happy groove, a happy mood in all my songs,” says Fellah, whose band, Sarazino (French slang for a person from North Africa), plays the Design District club Bardot on Wednesday.

“We need it so much. It’s so important for me to keep this joy, this happiness, even if life is hard.”

Fellah, 40, has found that joy in the music of Africa and South America, where he now lives. When he was a teenager, his father’s work took the family to Burkina Faso, Chad and Burundi, where he fell in love with African music.

“When I was a kid I thought music was something very complicated, because I never studied music,” he says from a Los Angeles stop on his first U.S. tour. “African musicians think of music in a very spontaneous and easy way. That was the dynamic I really liked.”

He was also attracted by the accepting attitude of African musicians toward an upper-class Algerian kid. “They are so open-minded to other music, other things — they love to learn. I was accepted very naturally.”

Such tolerance was scarce in Algeria after 1992, when the military-backed government canceled parliamentary elections that the fundamentalist Islamic Salvation Front seemed set to win. Extremist factions reacted with a wave of terrorist attacks and massacres that continued through the ’90s.

Fellah says his music, with its joyful blend of reggae, African and Latin elements and its message of inclusion, is his way of speaking out against the repressive forces that claimed his father’s life.

“My father was really strong in defending principles of justice, freedom and tolerance,” he says. “In Algeria we have a big problem with tolerance. We’re looking for our identity — part of society wants to go forward and be part of the world, another part is Islamic fundamentalists. So through Sarazino I try to defend the values of my father.”

He moved to Canada from Africa at 18 to attend the University of Montreal. His mother and three siblings followed after his father’s death, and Fellah began the first incarnation of Sarazino in 1995.

After a trip to Ecuador in 1996, he decided to settle in Quito, attracted by the culture and music. He came out with Mundo Babilon in 2003, which got the attention of Cumbancha, a small independent label based in Vermont that specializes in innovative world music. Last year Cumbancha released Ya Foy!, “No problem!” in the Dioula language of West Africa.

It’s a collaborative, eclectic effort. Fellah wrote the music and the French lyrics, while other songwriters contributed lyrics in Spanish and English. Revelino Aguidissou, the lead singer on many tracks, is from Benin.

There’s a pulsing reggae beat to many songs (Toots Hibbert of Toots and the Maytals makes a guest appearance on one track, as does rapper Blanquito Man of rock/ska group King Chango), but there’s rock, Latin, Afrobeat and plaintive traces of Middle Eastern and North African music. The songs talk about social justice and freedom, but also about the power of love.

“The first thing I noticed when I went to South America was the importance of the rhythms, that is very similar in Africa and South America,” Fellah says.

“But more than the music is the spirit. South Americans are very emotional people, and they need to express it — they have this dynamic of always needing to express the emotion behind everything. Human feelings are much more present in [African and South American] cultures.”

For his next project, Fellah is thinking about traveling to Brazil to work with musicians there. The itinerant life has become his inspiration.

“I do have a home; I just change it every few years,” he says.

“To be a nomad is also to feel the freedom of being wherever you want to be and doing whatever you want to do. My father always said the most important thing is freedom to explore the world, and this is very, very important for me. My home is the planet. It’s a nice home, actually.”