Brian Jones in Morocco & in the studio – featured in the Winter 2020 edition of Ugly Things
To mark 50 years since the release of Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Joujouka an in-depth article examines the events that led to the recordings made by The Rolling Stones lead guitarist and founder in the village.
‘Brian Jones in Morocco & in the studio’ by David Holzer is featured in issue #55 of Ugly Things– available now.
The article looks at the circumstances of Jones’ life around the time of his trip to Morocco that included his visit to Joujouka and the legacy of the “talismanic” album five decades since it was originally released.
Brian Jones, who would have turned 79 today (28th February 1942 – 3rd July 1969), visited Morocco in August 1968, where he recorded the Master Musicians of Joujouka.
The tapes were later edited and mixed for what became the Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Joujouka album released on Rolling Stones Records in 1971.
Holzer wrote: “Produced by Brian, the album was his attempt to promote the music to an audience outside Morocco.”
He added: “Brian Jones Presents… would never have happened if it wasn’t for him meeting Brion Gysin and his friend Mohamed Hamri in Tangier. Gysin contributed sleeve notes to the album. The cover features a painting of the Master Musicians by Hamri.
“According to Gysin, the most portentious moment of Brian’s trip to Joujouka was when a goat was led past him on its way to slaughter. Gysin later claimed that the goat was pure white and that Brian “leapt to his feet and said ‘That’s me!’””
The article includes new interviews with Master Musicians of Joujouka manager Frank Rynne and Rikki Stein, who lived in the village in the 1970s and organised the group’s 1980 tour of Europe.
Rynne suggests a hitherto unexamined theory that Jones may have employed cut-up editing techniques, as used by Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs in their collaborations, in his mix of the recordings from Joujouka.
Rynne said: “No one’s ever spotted the fact that Brian took two sometimes three songs and layered them. People writing about the album have missed it because they have no clue what Joujouka music is. Listen to the women singing with flute and drum underneath them, that’s two songs playing at the same time. That’s why Brian deserves to have his name on the cover. He was making a cut-up of the music to recreate what he felt there.”
Dave Field, who designed the album artwork, is also interviewed, with additional insights from music writers Paul Trynka and Kris Needs.
Read Brian Jones in Morocco & in the studio published in Ugly Things
Article reproduced with kind permission from the author David Holzer, and Mike Stax at Ugly Things
Monolithic Undertow: In Search Of Sonic Oblivion by Harry Sword is available now
The new all-encompassing history of the mighty drone – Monolithic Undertow: In Search Of Sonic Oblivion by Harry Sword is published this week.
According to the publisher’s notes, Monolithic Undertow “alights a crooked path across musical, religious and subcultural frontiers. It traces the line from ancient traditions to the modern underground, navigating archaeoacoustics, ringing feedback, chest plate sub-bass, avant-garde, eccentricity, sound weaponry and fervent spiritualism”.
The book is available now from all good bookshops through White Rabbit Books.
A full chapter of the book is devoted to ecstatic music and Moroccan trance music features prominently, including extensive exploration into the impact of the Master Musicians of Joujouka.
Master Musicians of Joujouka manager Frank Rynne is interviewed in depth on his 25 years working with the group, their music, history and influence. “The music has an extraordinary effect,” he said. “They reach a point where you think “that is as far as they can go; they couldn’t possibly keep it at that pitch” but then the lead rhaita player goes up a little bit and the drone shifts up and the drummer gets up a level. And it goes on and on and on.”
Tracing a line through from the ancient origins of the Master Musicians’ Sufi trance music to the present day, Sword writes: “It wasn’t until the 1950s, however, that the Joujouka sound began to permeate beyond the Rif mountains, bewitching the emergent Beat culture as a viscerally intense audio counterpoint to the surreal dreamscape of the Tangier Interzone. That it has since been disseminated globally through counterculture figures like Brian Jones and Ornette Coleman – both of whom recorded in Joujouka – makes perfect sense. After all, the best rock ‘n’ roll and free jazz are about abandon, liberation, the breaking of restrictions, an embrace of the animalistic.”
Sword goes on to explore how the music of the Master Musicians of Joujouka played a part in influencing later experiments by Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs, in their writing and creating hallucinatory trance like states with the invention of stroboscopic light device the dreammachine – an effect similar to the impact of the music they heard in Morocco.
Monolithic Undertowis the first book by Cambridge-based writer Harry Sword, who is a regular contributor to The Quietus, Vice, Record Collector and The Guardian. It is the first book of its kind to focus solely on drone and also features writing on The Beatles, Ravi Shankar, John Coltrane, Alice Coltrane, The Velvet Underground, The Stooges, Ash Ra Tempel, Melvins and Sunn O))) among many more.
The minimalist music of composer Terry Riley, who the Master Musicians of Joujouka met on tour in Japan in 2017, is also discussed in detail.
Master Musicians of Joujouka manager Frank Rynne and group leader Ahmed El Attar with Terry Riley (centre) in Japan, November 2017
Ahead of the book’s publication the album Brian Jones Presents The Pipes Of Pan At Joujoukawas featured in an article by the author on starting points into a journey of drone music published in The Guardian.
The Master Musicians of Joujouka, a group of Moroccan Sufi trance musicians from the foothills of the Rif mountains, make a joyous, hypnotic cacophony. Their sound dates back centuries, using techniques passed from father to son. Long associated with the beat poets, who gravitated to bohemian Tangier throughout the 1950s and 60s, the Master Musicians of Joujouka were introduced to writers Paul Bowles and Brion Gysin by Moroccan painter Mohamed Hamri, whose uncle was one of the bandleaders. Gysin, in particular, was captivated by the music, stating that it was the sound that he wanted to hear for the rest of his life. He later employed the Masters as house band in the 1001 Nights restaurant that he ran in Tangier with Hamri.
Hamri also introduced his friend, Rolling Stone Brian Jones, to the Masters. In 1968, Jones recorded this live album, capturing the sound of the annual Boujeloud festivities that celebrate the appearance in the 15th century of a Pan-like half-man, half-goat figure said to bestow fertility, a bountiful harvest and musical secrets. Each year a villager plays the Bou Jeloud: sewn into freshly slaughtered goat skins, he exhorts people to dance by whacking them with olive branches, while the music focuses on fever-pitch pipe drones, gruff call-and-response chants, ethereal flutes and frenetic handheld drums.
The Master Musicians of Joujouka strongly contest the notion that drone-based music is calming: theirs is an energetic, frenetic sound. Jones’s sensitive post-production dub effects (mainly echo and reverb) were subtle, but add to the head-twisting psychedelic density of the music.
Read the full article published in The Guardianhere
Master Musicians of Joujouka featured in Monolithic Undertow – a new book on the history of drone music
