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For the Japanese Psychedelic band, see Joujouka

Jajouka or Joujouka is a village in the Ahl-Srif mountains in the southern Rif. The mountains are named after the Ahl-Srif tribe who populate the region.

The musical heritage

Jajouka is well known as home to the Sufi trance musicians the Master Musicians of JajoukaThe village attracted the attention of writers Paul Bowles and William Burroughs in the 1950s because the Sufi trance musicians there appeared to still celebrate the rites of the god Pan. Brion Gysin, who had been introduced to the master musicians by Mohamed Hamri, propagated this idea. Gysin linked the village's Boujeloud festival, where a boy sewn in goat skins danced with sticks while the musicians play to keep him at bay, to the ancient "Rites of Pan". In 1967 and 1968 Brian Jones, lead guitarist with The Rolling Stones, visited the village; at the end of his stay, he recorded the master musicians for the LP Brian Jones Presents The Pipes Of Pan At Joujouka. The LP was released on Rolling Stones Records in 1971, some two years after Jones' death. The release brought an influx of westerners, including some who later recorded there, such as Ornette Coleman and Bill Laswell.

The album was re-released by the Rolling Stones on CD in 1995.

A second album, The Master Musicians of Jajouka, was recorded by Joel Rubiner in summer 1972 and released on Adelphi Records in 1974. The master musicians who live in the village play the Sufi trance music handed down through generations. The group was headed for many years by Hadj Abdesalam Attar, who died in 1982. Today Attar's son, Bachir Attar, leads the group in the village called Master Musicians of Jajouka.

Life

Subsistence farming is the main activity of most Jajouki. The main crops are olives, tillage of vegetables such as carrots, turnips, potatoes, and the raising of sheep, which are grazed out on common land. Poultry are raised by the women. In the summer shepherd boys bring the herds to the higher slopes. They can be heard practicing on bamboo flutes from miles away. The livestock, chickens and high quality olive oil provide a cash element in this economy. There is also small-scale honey production by some enterprising villagers. In recent years, electricity and mobile telephony have arrived in the village and there is a passable road, which has reduced the cost of transporting essential goods to the village. The cost of transportation had previously made many items unavailable or prohibitively expensive to the villagers. The Ahl-Srif was also an area where kif (cannabis) was grown, but its cultivation has been recently prohibited. However, there seems to be no alternative cash crop for those who had depended on it in the past.

Further reading

• Davis, Stephen (2001). Old Gods Almost Dead. Broadway Books, 135–37, 172, 195–201, 227; 233–34, 248–53, 270, 354, 504–505, 508.
• Ranaldo, Lee (August 1996). "Into The Mystic". The Wire. Retrieved Jan. 14, 2007.

See also

• Master Musicians of Jajouka
• Master Musicians of Jajouka featuring Bachir Attar
• Master Musicians of Joujouka
• Music of Morocco

External links

• MSN World Atlas Map of Jajouka, Morocco
• MapQuest map of Jajouka
• A website about Moroccan music
• A website about Moroccan trance music with Jilali LP recorded at Jajouka

35°02′N 5°44′W / 35.033°N 5.733°W / 35.033; -5.733

• Jajouka
• Villages in Morocco