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For the Japanese Psychedelic band, see Joujouka

Jajouka (sometimes spelled 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 Master Musicians of Jajouka and the Master Musicians of Joujouka. The village attracted the attention of beat generation writers Paul Bowles and William Burroughs in the 1950s because the Sufi trance musicians there appeared to still worship 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, and at the end of his stay, he recorded the master musicians for the LP Brian Jones Presents The Pipes Of Pan At Jajouka, which originally used the spelling "Joujouka", a spelling later occasionally used in memory of the album by some journalists. The LP was released in 1971, some two years after Jones' death, on Rolling Stones Records. The release brought an influx of westerners, including some who later recorded there, like Ornette Coleman and Bill Laswell.

A second album by the group, 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. Leader of the group was for many years Hadj Abdesalam Attar, who died in 1982. His son, Bachir Attar, claimed the leadership but his leadership was challenged briefly by another set of the elder Attar's musicians who eventually reunited to play with Attar in the 1990s. Bachir Attar's group made recordings in the 1990s and 2000s using the name Master Musicians of Jajouka. In the mid-1990s Hamri managed a group he called Master Musicians of Joujouka, whose recordings on Sub Rosa were released in 1995, 1996, and 2006. Both groups live in the village and perform today.

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 who are grazed out on common land. Poultry are raised by the women. In the summer shepard 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 has 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 locally, or alternatively, 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.

References

• Davis, Stephen (2001). Old Gods Almost Dead. Broadway Books, 135–37, 172, 195–201, 227; 233–34, 248–53, 270, 354, 504–505, 508.
• Gysin, Brion, Wilson, Terry (1982). Here to Go Planet R 101 revisited , Ouartet. ISBN 0-7043-2544-6 p; 29, p. 30, pp.33-4, p.76.
• Hamri, Mohamed (1975), "Tales of Joujouka". Capra Press.
• Ranaldo, Lee (August 1996). "Into The Mystic". The Wire. Retrieved Jan. 14, 2007.

Further reading

• Davis, Stephen (1993). Jajouka Rolling Stone. Random House. ISBN 0-679-42119-X.
• Davis, Stephen (2001). Old Gods Almost Dead. Broadway Books, 135–37, 172, 195–201, 227; 233–34, 248–53, 270, 354, 504–05, 508.

See also

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

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

• Jajouka
• Villages in Morocco