Music preview: Master Musicians of Jajouka

"What is Pan but the mystical child…the eternal boy, Oh fly, fly, fly!" Patti Smith reveres the woodland god of antiquity onstage at London's prestigious Royal Festival Hall while Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers kneels on the floor grinding dense bass riffs.

Standing behind the scruffy rock musicians and draped in elegant green Moroccan robes, the Master Musicians of Jajouka, playing thunderous drums and shrill Moroccan oboes, known as rhaitas, drive an ecstatic tradition older than the pantheons of Greece or Rome.

As seen in clips circulating on the Internet, Jajouka, as guests of London's 2009 Meltdown Festival, were well matched in terms of intensity and skill with a program that included artists as diverse as Ornette Coleman, Charlie Haden, Carla Bley, Robert Wyatt, Patti Smith, Yo La Tengo and Yoko Ono.

The LP Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Joujouka, released on Rolling Stones Records in 1968, has sparked the imaginations of rock 'n' roll cognoscenti ever since. While the trance characteristics of Jajouka's sound fascinated listeners, among the expat writers living in Tangier during the '60s, vivid stories circulated of a goatskin dressed dancer ritually whipping the women of the village in annual spring rites. It was as if Pan himself had come to life.

Despite the acclaim drawn from popular culture, it is important to remember, as band leader Bachir Attar told The Prague Post via phone from his mountain Moroccan home, "There is a book by the 12th-century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun called The Presentation that talks about the music of Jajouka. … Jajouka existed a long time before Paul Bowles, Burroughs and Timothy Leary!"

A few hours south of the strait of Gibraltar and east of the ancient Phoenician ruins of Lixus, the village of Jajouka is perched on the western edge of the Rif Mountains. In this part of the world, rural villagers are known to surprise travelers with musical know-how that embraces the width of North Africa, the Sahara and in some cases the entire perimeters of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. As Attar puts it, "Jajouka music is the bridge between the cultures of the earth."

And he may well be right. Jajouka's ancient rhiatas are direct relatives of instruments spanning the Arab world in an interconnected reed music tradition that extends into China's western provinces. The gimbri lutes that Jajouka play point to the Sahara, and some go as far as to say the Sean Nós singing of Ireland has roots in North Morocco.

More down to earth, the overblown methods applied to Jajouka's wind instruments combined with an extraordinarily fluid music sensibility point Jajouka to Texas, where saxophonist Ornette Coleman first pioneered his free-form jazz concepts. Coleman's ideas in connection with North Africa were best expressed with the help and inspiration of the musicians of Jajouka in 1975 with the groundbreaking LP Dancing in Your Head.

While Jajouka's music clearly fits into the streams of jazz and pan-Islamic music, unlike the bass-driven Gnawa music from the south of Morocco and what these days is generally called desert blues, it does not have an immediate similarity to rock music. Such details did not intimidate The Rolling Stones when Attar and his group were asked to help the Glimmer Twins out on their 1989 recording of a hypnotic homage to Brian Jones. The resulting track, "Continental Drift," may be the most captivating thing the Stones have recorded since Jones, Billy Preston and Mick Taylor left their camp.

In discussing how contact with avant-garde and mainstream music has shaped his approach to performance and production, Attar says, "I've kept the old music, and at the same time I composed new music as my father did before. I've lived most my life between my village, Europe and America, where I was for almost 20 years before returning to my village."

On their 2010 album The Source, any influence of the 20th century on Jajouka's ancient music remains sublime as they deliver a spectrum of moods from the pastoral to the loud musical celebrations they are famous for.

 "On The Source, there are things deep and some things that I've discovered with my travelling and connecting world music, my family's music and this universe of music," Attar says.

It's this deep universe of music that Attar and the Master Musicians are bringing with them when they arrive at Prague's Lucerna Music Bar. On top of a repertoire that is bound to move those on the dance floor, the ensemble is also packing a stack of hard-to-find recordings from Jajouka to be made available at the concession stand.

Hearing Jajouka live will be a memorable musical experience. After all, this is a musical legacy with a reputation for delivering a sound that Attar says "is different from the music of the rest of the world; even here in Morocco it is distinct. Our music is peace music."

Darrell Jónsson can be reached at
features@praguepost.com