Master Musicians of Jajouka led by Bachir Attar “Dancing Under The Moon” (Glitterbeat, 2022)

Sufi poetry and music has a noble and long tradition. Sufism is the exstatic and mystic faction of Islam. Few decades ago, Syrian poet Adonis wrote an intriguing essay titled On Sufism and Surrealsim where he compared the twos, assuming that the poems of Rumi and those of Bréton have many things in common. It is not my intention to summarize the essay here, but I want only you to be conscious about the fact that letting our inner self speak is not easy but important, since our rational part is only a small percentage of our abilities.

Having composed a little surrealistic poems myself and for myself, I can deeply understand that, even if our science is nowadays criticizing the idea of a ‘subconscious’ that psychoanalisis posed as angular rock of its exploration of the mind, there’s something hidden into ourselves that social life and rationality try sometimes to hide from our conscience. This hidden part is strictly related to our desires. I remember, as an example, that sensation of hunger and sexual desire I felt before I ended my first painting (horrible as it was, being my first attempt, but this is not the point). Gentle feelinga, not related to the phenomenon of craving as it happens to you when smoking a joint.

Obviously Sufi music is not related to desire, but if you read Rumi poems, being near to God is quite often comparted to be near a beautiful lover, or to being drunk from love. Sufi music, instead, is varied and you can find different kind of music with different kind of intent. Sufi music from Morocco, called Jbala, is a particular style whose goal is to induce into the listener, with performances during many days, a state of trance, in particular related to the loss of the sense of time.

The psychedelic qualities of the music of the Sufi from Joujouka hit for sure the first journalists that from the 1950s on started to testify their existance. At the same time, the following decade, the same qualities attracted both Brian Jones from The Rolling Stones and Beat poets like Paul Bowles, William S. Burrooughs and Bryon Gysin. After being introduced to the world by Jones himself who issued the album Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Joujouka (1971) and their following collavoration with Ornette Coleman for the album Dancing In Your Head (1977), the group of musicians started to being recognized all around the world.

In a way anticipating the so called ‘world music’ along with other pioneers discovered in the Flower Power era as Ravi Shankar, the Master Musicians of Joujouka recorded many record and toured throughout the entire world before splitting. In fact, in the early 1990s two groups were nowadays residing in the small village of Joujouka: the ‘original’ Master Musicians of Joujouka and the Master Musicians of Jajouka led by Bachir Attar, the son of the leader of the band during the 1960. Obviously it is harsh to understand what is the original or the best band from the twos.

In fact, both contaminated themselves with the world of contemporary music: the “Joujouka” masters played with Jarvis Cocker and The Orb, while the “Jajouka” were produced at least in one of their albums by Bill Laswell. So in this post we’re gonna describe last album issued, this year, by the second combo, titled “Dancing Under The Moon”. Produced by Jacopo Andreini, drummer of the post punk Italian-French band L’Enfance Rouge (one of my favourite groups ever apart from jazz music), and featuring a booklet full of photos from the sessions and liner notes by the famous journalist Stephen Davis, author of books about Led Zeppelin and Jim Morrison, the album foresee sessions recorded on November 2019.

The band is comprised of seven members playing different instruments as ghaita (a double-reed flute), guinbri (a large plucked half-spike lute), lira (a crossbar lute) , violin, and different types of percussions. There are pieces of music where the percussions are widely spreaded as in Dancing In Your Mind, or where a sweet flute and the lutes introduce a crescendo as in The Bird Prays For Allah, and other where singing is on the foreground as in Yes, Yes, Be Patient My Heart. As I can understand through the titles of the pieces, the themes are the classic sufi themes: the love of God, the chant of love from nature, being ‘intoxicated’ or exalted  by the love of God himself.

Don’t be surprised to read about such music in a blog related to jazz and improvised music. On one hand, these musicians played with a jazz master like Ornette Coleman in one of his most beautiful records, on the other hand this music deserves to be recognized since I truly believe that music can root all human beings into another dimension from where we can go back with new tools and skills in order to improve our world. You don’t need to believe in God for that, it is enough to look at the climate change and the war to get how much we need a new way of thinking. 

 

 

Blue Notes “For Mongezi” (Ogun 2008, reissued in 2022)

Mongezi Feza was one of the best trumpet player to come out of South Africa. Born in Queenstown in 1945, he started studying his instrument at the age of 8. In 1962 he joined pianist Chris McGregor, altoist Dudu Pukwana, bassist Johnny Dyani and drummer Louis Moholo-Moholo in the Blue Notes. Their first concerts, as testified by my latest review, were an hommage to the flamboyancy of Charlie Parker and bebop and the hipness of Thelonious Monk, to whom many themes of their original fist compositions are paying openly hommage.

The Blue Notes played in different clubs and venues, universities comprised, even if with great difficulties and always clandestinely, being a racially mixed band. After 1964 and their appearance at the Antibes Festival, they started to reside first in Europe and then in the UK, where they had a huge influence both on the scene of improvised music and of rock music. After playing together in a large ensemble called The Brotherhood of Breath, Feza eventually died on December 14, 1975.

This album, For Mongezi, originally issued only in 2008 and now reissued this year, comprises the music originally played at Mongezi’s memorial service. The original music, here in this reissue completely restored, was longer than 2 hours. It is useless to describe point by point what this music sounds like. It is obviously vital, forceful, dense, intense, of impact. Differently from the last record reviewed, this album is not devoted to bebop or post bop music. It is, indeed, a session of music that is keen on free improvisation and roots music, as Coltrane’s Kulu Sé Mama, if we want to find out a far away relative.

On many occasions we can hear Dyani great work on bass, pinched and arcoed, accompanied by drums and small percussions, McGregor ability to play atonally, influences coming from the US more than from UK anyway (The Blue Notes improvisations are never “non idiomatic”) and also from South African folklore, mixed with Pukwana and Moholo-Moholo invocations. Pukwana style on alto seems to have been developed from the original Charlie Parker influence to that of the late great Jimmy Lyons, with that oblique melancholy and bitterness who abruptly develop itself into a cascade of notes without being a clone.

But this record is important, as it is the memorial service for John Coltarne where Albert Ayler played captured in the monumental box set Holy Ghost, because we can feel how much different for African-American culture a departure is from European culture. It is not a matter of believing in the spirits or in a different life, or maybe is, but mostly is a difference related to agency. I remember you, so I’m here playing for you. I’m not only feeling emotions, but I’m sharing those emotions with the world, so maybe, I argue as a critic and as a listener, you are still alive with us throughout our playing, as a source of  inspiration.

Music to be listened to carefully, music filled with love and compassion, music that gives you at once that feeling of intensity and those nuances of depth into the souls of the players involved. If, as someone said to me, the Live in South Africa from 1964 showed us some musicians in love with jazz and willing to recreate that music but not completely mature, this For Mongezi instead leavea us listening the music of four complete and original musicians.

One can hear how important this music was for European improvisers, giving them that feeling of being rooted somewhere even if maybe only technically. Possibly Evan Parker, Alan Skidmore and Mike Osborne were compelled to develop their style incorporating that ritualistic element you can hear through this record. I wonder, as an example, if the binaural sound of Parker, that is his ‘playing through the void’ as he asserted during one concert I attended in London, was influenced somehow by Pukwana and friends’ way of creating music.

Obviously every music need an element of grounding, every form of art. The Blue Notes developed an intense link with ancestor’s rituals, stripped from their original believing – or maybe not? – but dedited to create a sound and a meaning that is modern and ancient at the same time. After all, music is still a ritual nowadays. For many people is a way to meet their idols and the community of listeners to have some fun, for others is a way to beign recognized by and recognize a community, for others again is a way to develop human skills as compassion and brotherhood, but always the spirit of the music is trying to uplift people outside of the everyday problems giving you the opportunity to enter into another dimension so that you can take it and bring it into the realm of reality. To make it better.

 

 

The Blue Notes “Legacy Live in South Africa 1964” (Ogun 1995, reissued in 2022)

If you would listen to fresh improvised or experimental music in 2020 or so, outside of Europe or the United States, you have to go to Mexico. If you would listen to something similar and at the same coordinates, but in 2010, you had to go to Turkey. There, in particular, you would be able to find musicians striving for their freedom of expression issuing new records and setting new collaborations, as the one with european genius saxophonist Peter Brotzmann and US incredible bandleader and multireedist Marshall Allen.

But what if you were searching for a new, exciting sound during the 1960s? Obviosly the answer would be: go to South Africa. There, despite of the apartheid, a bunch of simply brilliant and original musicians, mostly exhibiting through Universities or small clubs, were trying to overcome the barriers dividing people from people using music as a tool, as a device, as a peaceful weapon.

Why are you reading on this blog about this bunch of courageous musicians? Because label Ogun is now reissuing Blue Notes catalogue, and luckily enough last saturday, hanging around into some small record shops, I found out some copies of these records. In this review I will tell you about the live album Legacy – Live in South Afrika 1964, originally released only in 1995 because printing records of mixed bands during their lifetime wasn’t easy in the land of Nelson Mandela for many decades.

Legacy is a record that features the music of a sextet. The performers involved are pianist Chris McGregor, altoist Dudu Pukwana, tenorist Nick Moyake, trumpeter Mongezi Feza, bassist Johnny Dyani and drummer Louis Moholo-Moholo. This line up of The Blue Notes recorded in Durban this session of live music that, according to the first two pieces, Now and Coming Home, is more keen on Thelonious Monk as far as themes and development.

Life was not easy for a racially mixed band in the 1960s in South Africa, and so they moved quickly to London where their influence on both improvised scene and the so-called Canterbury Style was highly praised during the decades, giving the musicians involved the opportunity to become keener on a less non idiomatic and more direct way of expressing themselves through music, or the possibility to expand their palette with one foot into jazz and not only into rock style.

McGregor and his pals gave life to the Brotherhood of Breath when in the UK, but this record from the ‘segregation era’ is vivid, pulsating and interesting. If the first and second tracks are monkian as we have written here above, with I Cover The Waterfront they give life to an intense cover of a classic from the jazz repertoire; in listening to it one wonders what if they would have played it at the Juan-Les-Pins festival the same year. I strongly believed a black panther like Archie Shepp would have approved.

Two for Sandi is an original by Dudu Pukwana reminiscent of the bebop or post bop era, where he gives life to an incendiary performance along with his friends reedists, starting from Feza, after a quick introduction and a tutti-exposed theme. After some rest, with the mid tempos of McGregors’ Vortex Special, where the solos of alto (Pukwana is simply telling a story with all its nuances in there) and trumpet (Feza expresses himself through different colors and shapes here), while the tenor of Moyake plays far beyond the limits of a human voice as this particular saxophone is compared, there’s time for a little hommage to Miles Davis and So What thanks to the piano and reeds, before going back to the main theme of the original composition.

B My Dear and Dorkey House are a couple of themes from Pukwana. The first is a ballad still indebted to Monk, as the title itself can suggest, with an evocative tutti from the three horns which gets a round of applause by the audience, followed by a beautiful piano solo, while the last piece is another hommage to bebop, with flamboyant solos by Pukwana himself, Feza and Moyake. Far from being pure improvised music, this album shows a love for different traditions in the jazz area but with a cooperative more than a conflicting attitude.

In fact, the musicians are proud to expose their style and sound but without fighting for being recognized as the best performer over the others: we can feel yet that cooperative mood that from the following decade will hopefully become the norm in the jazz world. But the importance of this record is that of a hystorical testimony for all those who are interested in how jazz music had an impact on different lands and traditions, and how these new expressions modified the process in the mainstream communities of the free jazz and avant garde era.