It was in spring that I heard about the inaugural All Points West Music & Arts Festival. I was examining Radiohead’s website in hopes their tour would bring them close to my locale (then Winnipeg), within a couple of thousand kilometres even. I looked to August’s North American schedule and was puzzled to see not one but two dates booked at something called All Points West. Two consecutive concerts in one place—that must be something special, I thought, before looking up the festival. Little did I know that I would make it to New York—via Toronto—for those very shows. But while they may have been the festival’s biggest attraction, All Points West (APW), August 8-10, was more than a double dose of Radiohead. (more…)

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…)

“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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Picture this: it’s 2012 and a new Rick Rubin-produced American Recordings masterpiece hits the (by then entirely virtual) record store shelves. The album art features, in arty black and white, a solitary figure, perhaps hunched slightly, but with his chin held defiantly high, sitting at a grand piano in the Nevada desert under a vast grey sky, the panorama of the landscape that surrounds him somehow enlarging him rather than shrinking him. When you press play, you’ll hear the sound of a lone artist in an empty room, the absence heavy in the air as the tentative, almost muted simplicity of a few eerily melodic piano keys provides the solemn backdrop for the voice, once a belting baritone, now roughened up by the sandpaper of hard-earned wisdom and tamed by a reluctant familiarity with mortality. Men and women of America, I give you an artist chewed up and forgotten but not defeated. With the great beyond in sight, he’s perched at an elevation to survey the great before that was One Man’s Life — the showgirls and the bubbly drinks, the whole world as a chorus, the highlights and the bright lights alongside all the derision and disrespect — and to whisper in the only voice with which age can address youth; cracking, failing, but insistent: no regrets, no excuses; it’s sad, and lonely, and scary at the end, and though memories of a life lived on your own terms are a poor substitute for a life ahead of you, they become all that remains. Ladies and gentleman, in the tradition of Johnny Cash, the singer-songwriter as American Icon:

Barry Manilow? Nah, right? But if Rick Rubin can work his man-for-the-ages magic on Neil Diamond, you gotta figure it could be anyone. Manilow? Why not. Elton John? Step right up. Phil Collins? Of course, this came to my attention thanks to Diamond’s song “Act Like A Man,” which is frustratingly unavailable online in a form I can link to available for a free listen right here. (more…)