Master Musicians of Jajouka
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Although the tribe’s history stretches back 4,000 years, it wasn’t until the 1950s that prominent American expatriates like William Burroughs, artist Brion Gysin, and writer/composer Paul Bowles began spreading word of its existence west. Gysin hired the Master Musicians as the house band of his Tangier nightclub between 1954 and ’57. But it wasn’t until a decade later, when Gysin took Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones to visit them, that their music was heard by a significant number of outsiders. A few years after Jones died the Stones released Brian Jones Presents: the Pipes of Pan at Jajouka (1971), a set of recordings he’d made of the tribe. It has recently been reissued on CD by Point Music. Although the music was treated with various electronic effects to heighten its psychedelic intensity, its basic, highly distinctive sound shone through. And in 1992 a digital recording made by Bill Laswell in the Er Rif Mountains, Apocalypse Across the Sky (Axiom), captured the group’s powerfully seductive music with stunning clarity, unimpeded by extraneous electronic noodling.
The hypnotic music is characterized by an array of mesmerizing rhythms played on hand drums while polyphonic unison lines ride over top–played on either the ghaita, which produces a piercing, pinched sound somewhere between that of an oboe and bagpipes, or the lira, a small bamboo flute. Also prevalent is the gimbri, a three-stringed lute that produces a dry but rubbery twang. Mostly instrumental, the music exploits a repetitive cacophony. A half dozen ghaita players incessantly blare the same simple melody line, often slightly out of sync. Driven on by an unyielding primitive percussive groove, the music slowly puts listeners in a trance.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Dan Silverman.
