World Music Innovators Take a Bow in New Exhibition at Arab American National Museum
From a small, isolated village in the foothills of Morocco’s Rif Mountains, the sounds of an ancient musical tradition reverberate worldwide. With a lineage tracing back several centuries, The Master Musicians of Jajouka carry on a family legacy to create ritualistic music imbued with healing powers that is central to village life.
Beginning in the 1960s, their recordings and collaborations with western musicians helped to forge what became known as the “world music” genre. Among those who came to know and help popularize the Jajouka musicians was Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, whose 1971 LP Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Joujouka remains a seminal recording.
Through Sunday, Nov. 2, 2014, the Arab American National Museum presents Jajouka: The Master Musicians of Morocco, a multimedia exhibition guest curated by Augusta Palmer, a documentarian and communication arts professor at St. Francis College in Brooklyn Heights, New York.
Featuring photography by Cherie Nutting, Joel Rubiner, Paul Misso and David Katzenstein, the images in the exhibition span several decades. American photographer Joel Rubiner and British photographer Paul Misso took photos of the group, their musical rituals and their home in the 1970s. New York-based photographer David Katzenstein photographed the group on assignment for Rolling Stone in 1988. Photographer Cherie Nutting, best known for Yesterday’s Perfume (her photographic memoir about Paul Bowles) has done the most longitudinal work with the Master Musicians, whom she has been photographing since the late 1980s.
This exhibition recounts the history and present-day lives of the Jajouka Musicians, whose descendants continue to produce this magical music in rare concert performances around the world. Recent gigs include a standing-room-only date at Trinosophes in Detroit, and a collaborative jam with DJ Logic, Marc Ribot, Shazad Ismaily and Billy Martin at the Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival in Manchester, Tennessee.
Led by Bachir Attar, the Jajouka Musicians also continue to record; their 2013 release, The Road to Jajouka, features guest appearances by western musicians including guitarist Marc Ribot, Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart, and Free Jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman. All profits from album sales benefit The Jajouka Foundation, a non-profit organization established in 2013 to foster awareness and preservation of this ancient ceremonial music.
“The music of Jajouka is trance music, ecstatic music, a music narcotic. From its source—a particular village in the southern Rif Mountains of Morocco—this magical music has migrated around the world, moving like clouds, like water, like smoke-flowing through the collective consciousness of its appreciators.” Director Jim Jarmusch says in the liner notes for The Road to Jajouka.
Arab American National Museum