Master Musicians of Jajouka

From the foothills of Morocco's Rif Mountains....

Listen to this music, the primordial sounds of a 4000-year-old rock ‘n’ roll band.

- William Burroughs

I first heard John Zorn with Naked City at the 1991 North Sea Jazz Festival. I saw him again in Chicago in 1994 at the Vic. He was well into his “game pieces” shtick. I brought my girlfriend to that show. I liked it, but I think she feigned interest at best. We were married the following year, so I guess it didn’t scare her off. The last time I saw him was in 1995 as a part of Cobra at the Knitting Factory in New York City. I got there early and was intrigued by the music playing over the sound system. I asked the sound guy what it was. He just handed me a CD: Apocalypse Across the Sky by the Master Musicians of Jajouka:

This was the first time I knew I heard them. Although I had seen the Master Musicians of Jajouka playing in Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1990 movie of Paul Bowles’ book The Sheltering Sky, I did not know who they were at the time. Here’s a favorite from Apocalypse Across the Sky, El Medahey:

The Master Musicians of Jajouka are an all-male group from Jajouka, a small village in the foothills of the Rif mountains about 60 miles south of Tangier, Morocco. They perform trance music from the Sufi Muslim tradition. They’ve been a cult phenomenon among Western artists for decades. Brion Gysin and William Burroughs were introduced to their music by Moroccan painter Mohamed Hamri in the 1950s. When The Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones visited Morocco in 1968, Gysin and Hamri exposed him to their music, and Jones recorded them for his 1971 album, Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Joujouka. This caught the ear of Ornette Coleman, who recorded with them for his 1973 Dancing in Your Head. And then, in 1991, bassist/producer Bill Laswell recorded the group for Apocalypse Across the Sky.

I would learn much more about the Master Musicians of Jajouka in Cherie Nutting’s beautiful 2000 book Yesterday’s Perfume: An Intimate Memoir of Paul Bowles:

In the book, Nutting describes her first meeting with Bowles: “When I finally arrived mid-Feb 1986, I fell in love with the author straight away. I stayed for a month and was asked to return in summertime and so I did and never left.”

She spent seventeen years, until he died in 1999, photographing Bowles and his intimate circle in Tangier.

In this circle, she met the Master Musicians of Jajouka’s leader Bachir Attar. She recalls, “In one night in 1988, I met Bachir in Paul's apartment and then another adventure began. The 2 loves of my life are Bachir and Paul." In February 1989, Nutting married Bachir Attar and became the Master Musicians of Jajouka’s manager, a position she still holds today.

It was Bowles’ connection with both Attar and Nutting that introduced the Master Musicians of Jajouka’s music to the western world.

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In 1931, 21-year-old Paul Bowles, a student of music theory and composition, visited Morocco for the first time at the suggestion of Gertrude Stein. His travel companion was his composition teacher, Aaron Copland. They rented a home in Tangier. From Tangier, he returned to Berlin. The next year, he returned to North Africa, traveling throughout other parts of Morocco, the Sahara, Algeria, and Tunisia. In 1937, Bowles returned to New York. Over the next decade, he established a solid reputation as a composer, collaborating with Orson Welles and Tennessee Williams.

In 1937, he met and the following year married author and playwright Jane Auer.

In 1945, Bowles began writing prose, beginning with a few short stories including A Distant Episode. In 1947, he received a contract for a novel from Doubleday; with the advance, he moved permanently to Tangier, and took up residence on the top floor of this apartment:

Ever since that first visit in 1931, Bowles was fascinated with North African music. In 1959 he received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to document the musical heritage of Morocco for the Archive of Folk Culture of the Library of Congress.

He set out in a VW Beetle and recorded approximately 60 hours of traditional folk, art, and popular music. An early audiophile, he was very happy when the Library of Congress supplied him with a 28-pound Ampex 601 reel-to-reel tape recorder and training in its use and maintenance. Here’s what that looked like:

The Ampex offered superior audio quality but was extremely bulky and required an electrical power supply not often available in rural Saharan communities. This forced him to conduct most of his recordings in towns, where he would arrange for musicians to be brought to him.

Bowles traveled throughout northern Morocco and collected music from 23 villages, towns, and cities along the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts, from Goulimine in the Sahara to Segangan in the Rif country, and inland through the Middle and Grand Atlas ranges to Zagora in the Anti-Atlas. Here’s a map of that journey:

A selection of the recordings was released commercially on vinyl in 1972. An expanded edition, remastered and more extensively documented, was released on CD in 2016.

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In 1955, Brion Gysin was running a restaurant in Tangier called the 1001 Nights. However, his main interest was not in culinary creations but in showcasing the Master Musicians of Jajouka. According to Bowles, “For me, Jajouka never had a great musical interest but Gysin went mad about it.” 1001 Nights became a major Tangier gathering spot for expatriates and Moroccans - another connection that brought the musicians wider appeal and greater Western recognition.

At the height of his hippie period, The Rolling Stones’ Brian Jones arrived in Tangier. Intending to record some local ceremonial music, he accompanied Gysin, Moroccan painter Mohamed Hamri, Jones’ girlfriend Suki Potier, and Olympic Studios recording engineer George Chkiantz into the mountains to meet the musicians of Jajouka.

Here’s a handwritten account by Bachir Attar on the 1968 arrival of Brian Jones to the village of Jajouka:

Using a portable Uher two-track tape recorder, Jones made recordings during his visit to Jajouka that he later mixed on his return to London and released as Brian Jones Presents The Pipes Of Pan At Joujouka:

By the time the album was released in 1971, Jones had been dead a year -- he drowned a year after his trip to Morocco.

Here’s an interesting video from The Master Musicians of Joujouka Brian Jones 40th Anniversary Festival in 2008:

Interestingly, In 1989, for their Steel Wheels album, The Rolling Stones went to Tangier for three days to record Continental Drift with the Master Musicians of Jajouka led by Bachir Attar. Here’s Jagger with the musicians:

The Masters Musicians of Jajouka are still performing today. You can learn more about them at their website.

Here’s one more for the road. Again, from Apocalypse Across The Sky, this is The Middle Of The Night:

This is music that heals the mind, spirit, body, and soul. It is also music that promotes peace in all lands and for all cultures of the world. In recognition of his artistic spirit, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts recently announced that Bachir Attar is a 2023 recipient of their Gold Medal in the Arts.

In 1992, Willian Burroughs wrote, “Brion Gysin died in Pais in 1986. I remember he always used to say that if the Master Musicians of Jajouka ever stopped playing, the legend holds that the world will end. He often worried about the chronic poverty of the musicians, and the diluted effect of contact with the modern world upon the ancient music. But the Pipes of Pan survive to this day.”

Still today, over 40 years since the release of Apocalypse Across The Sky, the Master Musicians of Jajouka are alive and well and still holding true to their artistic and musical heritage. Collaborations aside, the arc of recordings of the Master Musicians of Jajouka has remained increasingly unadorned. In fact, their latest release Dancing Under The Moon (2022) sounds as though it could have been recorded at the same 1992 session as Apocalypse Across The Sky.

Next week on that Big River called Jazz, we’ll stay in North Africa and dig in our paddles to explore the waters of Tuareg Guitar music.

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Until then, keep on walking….