Who Hears the
Desert's Call?

“Where are the women?” I ask, as around 35 people – their sunburnt skin conflicting with the worn carpet – lounge patiently on a hay-strewn stage, three sides of it draped in green and red. Frank Rynne, a tall Irishman in a striped yellow jellaba, looks at me in silence before leading me by the hand to a kitchen hidden away in a clay quarter. The courtyard’s fig tree unofficially demarcates the gender boundary, and he leaves me at the door of a windowless room. Three women seated on the floor, making bread that will feed dozens of guests from all over the world, smile with tired faces.

I sit for half an hour on a small plastic stool. I don’t speak Berber, but my salaams and choukranes are accepted with sweaty grace; my skin color and cotton kameez allowing for a sudden sense of belonging in the quiet room. Insects rub their legs together in the amplified heat of summer. The women's hands pound dough to be passed on and pummeled again, the results of their expertise ready to be flattened for the oven.

Then the sounds of a furious traffic jam, alarming in intensity and, curiously, in its sonic precision, explode into this tranquil scene. A shrieking melody held together by astonishing drum rhythms that echo across the Ahl-Srif peaks. The Master Musicians of Joujouka have started to play.

A special type of sound is found in Joujouka, one of hundreds of humble villages dotted across Morocco’s mountainous rooftop. It is the resting place of Sufi mystic Sidi Ahmed Sheikh, the “healer of crazy minds,” who brought Islam to the area in the 15^th century. At the time, he also gifted the village’s musicians with their own special abilities to heal crazy minds, via double-reed woodwind pipes and booming tbel drums. At this annual festival, 15 of them play for hours at a time over three days and nights.

The patterns of their sets change constantly and deliberately. Often starting off slow and melodic, they ease the listener into their trademark pattern, invariably increasing in speed and intensity until a secret signal is passed between them. Then, the drop. “That's usually when people do one of two things,” my sister Syra says. “Put their head in their hands, or jump up to dance.” The magic ensues in the sudden stops and changes, the synchronized polyrhythms emerging from controlled chaos: frequencies you feel with your whole body. The art of playing this music has reportedly passed down from father to son for centuries, earning legions of loyal fans from all over the globe along the way.

Frank, the self-appointed manager of this supergroup over the last 20 years, is today the official representative of the Sufi clan to the rest of the outside world. He started this festival in 2008 after being introduced to the village by famed Moroccan painter Mohamed Hamri before making this place his home. His eyes are intelligent, his accent soft and his Berber fluent. His friendship with my sister and her Scottish husband, who have been coming to his festival for five years, revolves around asking them for assistance, ranging from borrowing rolling papers to assisting at the Masters’ rare foreign appearances, such as opening the main stage of the Glastonbury festival in 2011 and, soon, a mini-tour of Japan. Syra had been begging me to come to Joujouka for years, after they had become enthralled with the legends borne from this remote corner of the Maghreb – legends that can’t be separated from the act of discovering this masterful music itself.

The first noted visitors to Joujouka include the artist Brion Gysin and the writer William S. Burroughs – both based in Tangier at the time – as well as LSD guru Timothy Leary. The most famous guest is probably Brian Jones of The Rolling Stones, who recorded with the musicians in 1971. Hamri had introduced all these countercultural heroes to the village. The restaurant, 1001 Nights, opened by Gysin in Tangier, hired the Master Musicians of Joujouka as its house band, such was his love for the intensity and freedom their music permitted. Small groups of musicians from Joujouka rotated six at a time to play for bohemians, embassy staff and diplomats.

Western male-centric cult histories of less than agreeable characters in Morocco rendered me a bored listener, though I did try to understand the connections and the stories for the sake of my sister. However, it was her enthusiastic tales of unashamed dancing, Sufi mysticism, and her insistence that the music healed her own crazy mind that convinced me to finally join the ride, to take a low-cost flight booked to Tangier and then a 90-minute train ride to the mountains.

A professional historian, former rock star, and expert in all things Beat Generation, Frank mediates more than just this annual gathering, where a maximum of 50 people pay €360 each to listen to music for hours on end, sleeping afterwards in the homes of the musicians they came to see. A splinter group, calling themselves the Master Musicians of Joujouka, led by a wealthy, English-speaking cousin of the musician whose home I am staying in, believes that they, and only they, are the rightful owners of the title “Masters.” Frank is ingrained in this complicated conflict as much as anyone in the village, with the troupe he manages seen as the imposters – and vice versa. None of this is apparent to us as guests, however. Sitting in the courtyard of the house, where we are served tea, honey, figs and eggs every morning, this feels like a refuge from any kind of conflict.

Though largely a long-running clan feud that could take a while to understand completely, one thing is clear, like most family feuds – it is related to money, and entitlement. On the rooftop of el-Muniria, a simple Tangier inn where Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch and likely brought young local boys back to his room, Frank tells me about the importance of the Sufi village. “Joujouka is a place of pilgrimage, and has been for hundreds of years,” he says. “I recorded two CDs with the Masters over a period of three months. Hamri had died in 2000, but he had taught me how to deal with the musicians. In 2006 we did a show in Portugal. We had a lot of trouble getting the visas for all of them, and I thought, if visas to go abroad are a hassle and cost a lot of money, and there is still this controversy with the other group going on, why not bring people to the village?”

Frank pauses, thinks for a second, and slows down. “And so, people see for themselves what it is about. Each person who visits us becomes an ambassador for the music. They each feel the special connection with the Masters.”

The night ends with the passing of a pipe atop the inn, which looks out towards the Gibraltar Straits. The American writers and artists who were entranced by this place, the special license and privilege it afforded them, that of hedonism and possibility, would have had a very different view. Much of the coastal sand is gone, as Tangier’s ports, part of the city’s free trade zone, engage in full-speed expansion.

Sidi Ahmed Sheikh’s shrine, draped in a light blue cloth, is the sacred hub of Joujouka, whose 200 residents (depending on the time of year) are spread out across a rocky green expanse connected by a single road. In the 17th century the ritual musicians of Joujouka served in the court of the sultans of the Alawi dynasty. They lived in the palaces of the Muslim rulers, played on festive occasions and performed regularly on Fridays before the sultans went to the mosque to pray. But the music is as related to paganism as it is Islam; its healing effect became known in the surrounding villages: the crippled, the mentally ill, and the sterile, all made the pilgrimage to Joujouka. 

After festival-goers stuff dirhams into the shrine’s wooden box, a couple of us are taken by Mohamed, a sweet boy with no front teeth, to Hamri’s grave. The swirling landscape framing it echoes the works of this “painter of Morocco,” one of the only Moroccans who participated in the Tangier Beat scene. The chirping cicadas seem to replicate the rhythms we had heard the night before. Away from the crowd – small for a festival, but big in terms of conversational duties – silence is a blessing. Back on the stage, we share food in groups of eight from huge tin platters, everyone leaning forward on their knees and grabbing salad, chicken or sardines with the bread in their fists. Everything that happens here is communal. I think about the women in the kitchen. The only time I see Ayesha or any of the other girls, who follow my sister around like puppies, is when a few of us sneak off to watch sunsets over the Rif valleys – sunsets so magnificent that they make you laugh.

Ayesha, an incredible darbukka drummer in her own right at such a young age, is becoming her mother, the wife of the most important Master Musician. Her sense of female duty and frustration is clear when she turns away moodily from the music, the smoking and the raucous dancing on the first night. The evening launches with an enticing pipe riff, the drummers pound the sheepskin hides that cover their drums, and I swear I hear yet more bass lines emitted from the landscape around me in response to their patterns.

The drums rest on their knees and are played with a spoon-shaped piece of wood in one hand and a thin stick in the other. The ghaita players carry on, trailing each other and using circular breathing techniques to maintain the notes. It is just the loudest music you could imagine.

How do they follow each other? How do they keep the same tune for hours, without talking, without set “tracks,” and still keep their breath?

During the many heat-soaked hours between these moments of musical brilliance, the conflicting pull and push of an authentic tourist experience versus your paying to witness rural poverty start to creep. The doubts are replaced by a wall of noise that dovetails neatly with the gaps between my neurons. “Do you like the music?” I ask local schoolteacher Mohamed Kharbach. He looks at me as if it is a silly question. The call and response technique of the Masters, who sit facing a row of photographers, audio recorders and filmmakers, is mesmerizing. Ahmed Attar, the bandleader and Ayesha’s father, our host, is thumping his drum with a determined expression reminiscent of Marlon Brando. The crowd gazes at them in wonder. Many of the core group of dancers in the center of the stage are Japanese – the ultimate Joujouka cult loyalists seem to be from that country. They, with the rest, twitch and sway without stop.

Mohamed el Hatmi is a small old man with shining eyes and a cheeky grin who in the slow heat of daytime can be seen strolling around in a woolen cap and an oversized jacket. For the final show of the weekend, just after village boys disguised as woman dance on stage around one anointed as Fatima, Hatmi appears transformed into Boujeloud, a character replicated across the region's Sufi ritual performances. Dressed in goatskins and a straw hat, he literally whips the musicians and the audience with olive branches while wiggling and jerking his hips in a manner that is both hauntingly feminine and troublingly possessed. This beating apparently brings with it fertility, and a good harvest. As spectacular as this is to watch, nothing can compare to what comes next. At around 2 a.m., as the young boys dance in circles on the stage, their hip shaking moves salacious and impressive in duration, Boujeloud jumps to join them, his body engaged in a quivering rave that makes him look like he has touched an electric live wire. This Panlike, half-goat, half-man figure, olive branches in hand, turns round and round to the Masters as they continue to play. The stage lights go off. Night and sound remain, before an explosion of light from a bonfire that has been lit behind us. Bouejeloud convulses around the fire and flames start blowing towards the wives and mothers of Joujouka. The crowd is beside themselves. This spectacular finale of three long days and nights forces an opening in the back of my mind. As the cameras and mics drink up this crazy legend, I stay at the back, dancing wildly in the dark.