Master Musicians of Joujouka
Morocco's legendary trance music
Mohamed Hamri - Obituary in The Independent (London)
By Frank Rynne
The Independent (London), October 19, 2000, Thursday.
OBITUARIES; Pg. 6
“IN MY life I have been through many doors,” the Moroccan painter Hamri once said. Cook, smuggler, and mentor of the Master Musicians of Joujouka, Hamri was the only Moroccan intellectual to participate in the activities of the Tangier beat generation and to deal with them on their own level. He is immortalised in The Spider’s House (1957) by Paul Bowles, Burroughs called him a “phoney primitive” in Interzone (1989), and Timothy Leary dubbed him “the Napoleon of Painting” in Jail Notes (1970).
From a family of ceramic artists, Hamri spent his childhood escaping alternately to the ascetic pleasures of the mountain village of Joujouka or to the louche attractions of the city of Tangier. In Joujouka he would stay with his uncle, the leader of the Master Musicians of Joujouka, Rif Sufis, whose rituals resemble the rites of Pan. In Tangier he was famous as the “king of the trains”, smuggling contraband between the International Zone and the outer territories. When not smuggling, the young Hamri was sketching and drawing in the Tangier train station. Paul Bowles picked him up there and brought him home.
Bowles bought him paints and drew his attention to Western painters, but held Hamri captive in his apartment. Unhappy with this oppression, the boy borrowed the suit in which Bowles had in 1938 married the writer Jane Auer, and escaped to the Rif mountains. Weeks celebrating his freedom wrecked the suit so, the next time he visited Tangier, he sent it off to be repaired. He then tried to sell it to a rich American in the Cafe Central.
The American asked him where he had got the garment. Hamri explained how Bowles had locked him up. “I’ve known Paul Bowles for years!” said the man – it was the painter Brion Gysin, whom Hamri later introduced to William Burroughs. Gysin would prove invaluable to Burroughs, developing the “cut up” method of writing with him. Gysin altered Hamri’s life in a fundamental way, and vice versa. Hamri brought him to Joujouka and Gysin devoted himself wholeheartedly to promoting the village’s raggle-taggle of percussionists and pipe players.
In 1952 Gysin and Hamri opened a restaurant in Tangier, 1001 Nights, where the Master Musicians played, brought down in shifts from the Rif. Guests at the 1001 Nights included Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, the Rolling Stones and the gangsters of the Interzone.
The Stones’ guitarist, Brian Jones, falling apart in Morocco, met up with Gysin and Hamri in 1968. Hamri brought him to Joujouka since the music was said to heal crazy minds. Jones immortalised Joujouka through the iconic 1971 album Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Joujouka which features lavish artwork by Hamri.
Hamri’s early paintings contained stark black lines forging strange primordial creatures but the mature painter used exploding colours which justified Burroughs’s claim that “the djnounn forces of Morocco ripple and frolic through the paintings of Hamri”. From the barrios of Marrakesh to the gilded palaces of Casablanca, his vision of Morocco became a dominant cultural voice.
In 1992 the artist and writer Joe Ambrose and me invited Hamri to a Dublin Interzone festival. He brought the Master Musicians with him and Irish painters, musicians, and writers encountered his untrammelled spirit. Joe Ambrose received a series of faxes claiming that Hamri was an impostor. Paul Bowles had contacted Burroughs, who was backing the event, and told him that Hamri was a fake. Burroughs replied: “People have accused Hamri of being many things but nobody has ever accused him of being a fake. Hamri is the real thing.”
Hamri’s legacy was challenged by a pop version of Joujouka, supported by the American musicians Philip Glass and Sonic Youth. Their premise was that Hamri had nothing to do with formulating the music or bringing Brian Jones to Joujouka. Glass organised a controversial reissue of Pipes of Pan, which did away with Hamri’s cover artwork.
Hamri led an international protest campaign, doing serious damage to Glass’s reputation, but considerable collateral damage to himself. He was the victim of a vicious knife attack in his home at Joujouka in 1997. This sent him into a spiritual and physical decline. On the day of his death Radio 4 broadcast a documentary acknowledging him as the inspiration behind Joujouka.
On my first visit to him in 1994, we catalogued the songs and playing styles of generations of Joujouka musicians. The resulting CD, Joujouka Black Eyes, released the following year, features Hamri’s song “Brian Jones Joujouka Very Stoned”. This song extolled the beauty of the village and chronicled the visit of the Rolling Stone to Joujouka. Hamri stressed that an important spiritual message was at the core of the music. He hated to dwell on the negative.
Mohamed Hamri, artist and musician: born Ksar El Kebir, Morocco 27 August 1932; married (one son, two daughters); died Joujouka 29 August 2000.
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Brian Jones
In 1967, the Rolling Stones were busted for drugs after police raided Keith Richards’ country house, Redlands. To escape the media frenzy they decided to go to Morocco, where they met Brion Gysin
Brian Jones, the musical experimenter of the group, became fascinated with Moroccan music. Through Brion Gysin and Hamri he got to hear the music of Joujouka. Jones found the music had a deep effect on him. According to Anita Pallenberg: “Brian wanted to learn the secrets of the Joujoukan music and incorporate it into the sound of the Rolling Stones”.
Brian Jones and the musicians, painted by Hamri – original cover art on the “Brian Jones presents …” album.
In 1968 Jones decided to go to the village and record an album there. He brought a young sound engineer from E.M.I.’s London studio and spent just two days in the village. When he returned to London he spent several week manipulating the sounds in an effort to recreate what he had heard in the village. He supervised the cover design, which was dominated by a Hamri painting of Brian with the musicians.
However, before the album was released in 1969, Jones died in mysterious circumstances. The resulting album Brian Jones presents the Pipes of Pan in Joujouka was eventually released in 1971 and was the first LP released on the Stones’ own record label, Rolling Stones Records. The album drew global media attention to the tiny village. Rolling Stone journalist Robert Palmer came to Morocco and wrote a feature on the group. This attention led to further western visitors and Joujouka inadvertently became the first group to be identified with what is now called “World Music”.
In honour of Jones, Hamri wrote the lyrics of “Brian Jones Joujouka very Stoned”, which the musicians put to music. This song has become an essential part of the musicians’ repertoire.
Ornette Coleman
The year following the release of the Brian Jones album brought a flood of visitors to the village. That year Hamri arranged an album called The Master Musicians of Jajouka recorded by Joel Rubiner and Ricky Stein. Stein went on to manage Youssou N’Dour.
In January 1973 the free jazz innovator Ornette Coleman arrived in Joujouka with a large retinue and recorded for three days. The results can be heard on the Dancing in Your Head album. This new interest in the music and the influx of young people on the hippy trail caused great problems in the village and drew some musicians away from the traditional music and lifestyle of the Sufi masters.
Among these was Bachir Attar, who moved to New York and formed bands with musicians there. The American author Stephen Davis, who wrote Hammer of the Gods and Reggae Bloodlines, noted in his 2001 history of the Rolling Stones that by the late 1980s the group had fallen out with the young Attar as he was not a “traditionalist”.
Brion Gysin
The modern reputation of The Masters Musicians of Joujouka is deeply associated with the Beat Generation.
In 1951, Hamri introduced Brion Gysin to the music and musicians of Joujouka. Gysin was instantly captivated and wished to hear the Sufi trance masters every day. Together with Hamri he set up the 1001 Nights restaurant in Tangier and they brought Joujouka musicians to play there on a rotation basis. At this time, Tangier was an international zone (the Interzone of William Burroughs’ fiction). For several years the Masters played daily to the Western audience that the 1001 Nights attracted.
When Morocco gained its independence, the restaurant’s clientele disappeared and Gysin moved to Paris. Having earlier shunned Burroughs in Tangier, he accidentally met him on a Paris street and was soon living in the same cheap “Left Bank” hotel in rue Git le Coeur. The hotel became known as “The Beat Hotel” and was a hotbed of creativity.
William Burroughs
It was in the Beat Hotel that Gysin came up with the Cut-Up Method with which Burroughs revolutionised the modern novel. William Burroughs described The Master Musicians of Joujouka as a “four thousand-year old rock’n’roll band”. He admitted that what he termed “the panic music of Joujouka” influenced his writing.
As well as citing their sound in his novels, Burroughs used pieces of Joujouka music in the experimental sound “Cut-Ups” that he, Gysin, and their young protégés, filmmaker Anthony Balch and inventor Ian Somerville, made in the early 1960s. These sound experiments were the aural equivalent of Burroughs’ writing and connected the musicians of Joujouka with the avant-garde art scene of the early 1960s.
Hamri Mohamed
Mohamed Hamri, known as “The Painter of Morocco”, was born in 1932 in Ksar El Kebir, the nearest town to Joujouka, at the southern end of the Rif Mountains. His father was a ceramics artist who painted his pieces following an ancient tradition. Hamri’s mother was born into a family of Joujouka musicians. Hamri attended school for a short time but disliked it. Whenever Hamri ran away from school he went to his uncle’s house in Joujouka. His uncle was the leader of the musicians there and the music of Joujouka had a strong effect on Hamri. As a boy he often danced as Boujeloud sewn into goatskins.
After World War II, life in Joujouka was very difficult as there was very little food available. Hamri helped the musicians avoid this famine by bringing them to Tangier to play. One day, when Hamri was fifteen years old, he was killing time outside the train station in Tangier by drawing in the dust on the ground. He was approached by the American writer Paul Bowles who admired his drawing. This fateful meeting was Hamri’s introduction to the sophisticated set that was attracted to Tangier. Bowles soon employed him as a cook. Paul and his wife Jane encouraged Hamri to paint and bought him his first set of watercolours.
In 1951 Hamri met the Canadian painter Brion Gysin. Together they brought the musicians of Joujouka to the attention of the Beat Generation writers and musicians as varied as Rolling Stone Brian Jones and the American jazz master Ornette Coleman.
Hamri continued to promote the music of Joujouka until his death in August 2000. He is buried in the centre of the village, close to the tomb of Sidi Achmed Sheich.