In Turn completes its coverage of Morocco’s Master Musicians of Jajouka with a review of their Toronto performance. Photos by Joel Trenaman. (Read the interview/show preview.)

The nine men of Jajouka arrived at the Phoenix Concert Theatre for a July 15 performance—their first in Toronto in fifteen years — to almost otherworldly expectations.

A tradition passed down over thousands of years. The originators of the world music genre. Spiritual expression rooted in transcendental mysticism. These are some of the heady descriptions that have followed the Master Musicians of Jajouka around the globe for decades.

A week before the show, featured performer and hereditary standard-bearer Bachir Attar told my fellow blogger that, “This music can build, for the human being, mercy in the heart.” So, for a night, I put the details of the history and debates over rightful group representation out of my head, and focused on the visceral experience of a cultural legacy. (more…)

Hercules gets the initial credit for discovering purpura. He was strolling along the seashore with a svelte nymph, Tyros, and his dog was trotting along ahead in the sand. When they caught up with the dog, its muzzle was smeared with a brilliant, deep red-purple colour—a colour neither of them had ever seen before. Tyros begged Hercules to make her a garment with that hue (in fact, she told him she wouldn’t be with him unless he produced it), so he began collecting shells from the beach.

Shells? Yes, the famous Tyrian purple dye was made from snail shells: from the murex mollusk (shown above), a type of sea snail. It would take 250,000 murex shellfish to obtain one ounce of Tyrian purple, so the dye was highly valued. Purpura (its latin name) became the colour of royalty. It was produced in the city of Tyre, by the Phoenicians (whose name came from the Greek word phoinos, meaning “blood red”). They had been producing dyes in Tyre, and beyond, since 1000 BC.

“The Tyrian colour is most appreciated when it is the colour of clotted blood,” Pliny wrote, “dark by reflected and brilliant by transmitted light.”

By 400 AD, the murex mollusk was on the brink of extinction—a colour vanished from the world, perhaps.

Can a colour really go extinct? (more…)

“Legend has it if they ever stop playing the world will come to an end…”

These words appear on a flyer for the upcoming Master Musicians of Jajouka concert in Toronto (July 15 at the Phoenix); the flyer shows the Master Musicians in white robes, with their leader, Bachir Attar, front and center. Is he smirking? Pouting? Keeping a mysterious secret?

Legend certainly surrounds this group of Moroccan musicians, layers upon layers of it. To fully understand the legends, one would have to excavate beneath the recent bohemian myths surrounding them—beneath the mystique of the Interzone-Tangier scene in the 1950s, and the iconic writers and musicians like Brion Gysin, Paul Bowles, Brian Jones, and William S. Burroughs, who brought the power of Jajouka music to Western ears. The deeper mystique is that of the music itself: it has been taught in early childhood and passed down from father to son, through the Attar family, for centuries. Master Musicians would travel with the sultans of Morocco as official royal musicians; in more recent times, the clan performed as royal musicians for the Moroccan king. Trance-like, hypnotic, this Sufi music is reputed to possess power. [Listen to the track "Memories Of My Father", written by Bachir.]

Listening to this music, I wonder: what is “powerful” music, really? Or: what can music do? Most of us would agree that it can lift the spirit. Some would say that music has the power to transport a person; others credit music with giving strength, or even with healing.

Through a stroke of luck, and the wonders of globalized communication, I was able to interview Bachir Attar via a shaky Skype-to-cell connection two nights ago. It was 1:30 a.m. in the village of Jajouka, Morocco, but he was awake and passionate, ready to discuss the power of his music, his musical heritage, and its possible disappearance.

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