The Village

Jajouka (or Zahjoukah, as some villagers pronounce it) is a village of about eight hundred people, located two hours south of Tangier in the Jbala region, an area of Arabic speakers in the foothills to the west of the Rif Mountains in Morocco. Like most villages in the region, Jajouka has special local industries to generate cash or trade goods, beyond the subsistence provided by its flocks of sheep and goats and its crops of grain, vegetables, and olives. In other villages the specialty might be pottery or weaving, basketry or pickpocketing, military service or marijuana smuggling. In Jajouka the specialties are music and, for want of a better word, mysticism. The musicians are best known for their performance on the ghaita, a short oboe, and the tbel, a double-headed side drum, which are played together for processions during weddings and circumcisions and for the weekly hadra, a healing ceremony. For more intimate occasions and, especially, for training and practice, the ghaita may be replaced by the lira, a small recorder-like flute. The musicians also perform secular entertainment music in a chamber ensemble consisting of a kamanja (viola), a lotar (plucked lute), and various drums.

The spiritual and geographic center of Jajouka is the tomb of Sidi Hmed Shikh, who is credited by the villagers both with bringing Islam to the region and with providing them with their livelihood, music. The saint’s name might be translated as “Lord Hmed the Leader,” or “Mr. Hmed the Old Man.” In Moroccan terms, that is roughly equivalent to calling him (with apologies to Jane Goodman [1995]) “Saint John the Unknown.” His name offers no hint of his origin or his biological or spiritual lineage. According to the historian Hamid Triki (pers. com.), he appears in none of the major volumes of Moroccan hagiography. Indeed, his tomb may be empty, but that is not unusual: of the thousands of shrines in Morocco, hundreds are equally open to question. In sacred real estate the tenant is sometimes less important than the location. Thus many tombs are associated with some prominent natural feature, such as a grotto or a waterfall; in Sidi Hmed Shikh’s case, there was apparently once an impressive fig tree in the courtyard of his shrine, but it has died and been replaced by a smaller successor. Nevertheless, a few pilgrims from the surrounding villages still visit the shrine in search of a cure for various ailments, principally infertility and insanity.

In the normal course of events, the descendants of the saint would care for the pilgrims, manage their treatment, and accept their donations. If necessary, the saintly family would also hire professional musicians to accompany certain rituals. But Sidi Hmed Shikh’s descendants—if he had any—have died out, and the religious duties have fallen to the musicians. This is, as far as I can tell, the one feature of the village that is unique.

The musicians are of two lineages, named Rtobi and, most prominently, Attar, who together make up about half the population of the village. The musicians perform at weddings and other events in the surrounding region—or at least they used to—but it seems that the best and brightest have always exported themselves to the cities, where there was more consistent demand for their services. Many of them also enlisted in the sultan’s army, as musicians or in other capacities. In either case, they returned whenever possible for holidays and, eventually, retirement.

This brief description, which differs somewhat from the Master Musicians’ publicity, is what I have been able to deduce from the villagers’ accounts and from my contacts with performers from other similar musical villages in the Jbala region. In any case, it seems that at the end of World War II, the village of Jajouka was in very straitened circumstances. Sidi Hmed Shikh was very much a local saint, who did not inspire great pilgrimages or generate great income (when compared, for example, to Sidi Mohammed ben Aissa in Meknes, Moulay Abdallah in El-Jadida, or Moulay Brahim in the High Atlas). The military option had been lost to the musicians during the Protectorate period (1912–56), when Morocco was split between the Spanish and the French, along a line just to the south of Jajouka.^[1] Even as entertainers the musicians were not widely known. Unlike, say, the village of Mtiwa, farther to the north and east, which is famous for many kilometers around, Jajouka was virtually unknown to Moroccans outside the immediate area. As recently as fifteen years ago, one could mention the name to musically knowledgeable people in Rabat and they would understand—and repeat—“jaqjuqa,” that is, “the shaking of a rattle” or, by extension, “meaningless noise” or “unruly behavior.” Mention the name in Qsar el-Kbir, a large market town thirty kilometers from the village, and people would say, “Which one?” There are, I was told, three villages of that name in the region.

Paradoxically, the musicians’ local obscurity may have facilitated their rise to international stardom (without the concomitant acquisition of fabulous wealth), as they were willing to entertain ideas—and people—that more prosperous musicians might have rejected. In this respect (and, indeed, in their music) the Master Musicians resemble Les Musiciens du Nil, discussed by Katherine E. Zirbel in this volume. As Zirbel points out, “World beat music producers and audiences have focused most on ethnic minorities and peripheral groups to the exclusion of national popular culture.” Marginal groups may appear more exotic to Western listeners and more malleable to producers. At the same time, musicians who are well established in their own culture may not want to take the time to deal with strangers.^[2] Clearly, the Master Musicians of Jajouka did not arrive at American record stores, radio stations, and concert halls by magic—although the idea of magic is an important part of their promotional strategy. Their success in the West is the result of record producers’ use of exoticism and difference as a marketing tool, and the trajectory of their career follows a path determined by, as Steven Feld puts it, “the workings of capitalism, control, and compromise.” But Feld, an ethnomusicologist writing about his own experiences as a producer, also notes that such “transcultural record productions tell specific stories about accountability, authorship, and agency” (1994, 258). In the case of the Master Musicians of Jajouka, whatever impersonal forces may eventually have come into play, the initial promotion of their music was, at bottom, a labor of love, the work of one man, Brion Gysin, with the help of Mohamed Hamri.