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JJ LIVE 01: Munchie Mike and the Master Musicians
JJ: Let's welcome Munchie Mike. What's new in your world?
Munchie Mike: I got some new music today. I been wanting these guys a long time. They're from Morocco, and all they do is smoke kif all day and play music all night. Next day, they get up and do it again.
JJ: Nice work, if you can get it.
Munchie Mike: Their weed is so good, they throw away the leaves. They mix it with tobacco, and they think because we don't do it that way, it proves we're crazy. Or maybe it's that we're crazy on account of we don't do it that way, I'm not sure which..
JJ: This is where exactly?
Munchie Mike: Jajouka. The Master Musicians of Jajouka. Their place is way the hell up in the mountains, you gotta be a sherpa to even try it. It's a real pilgrimage. But Ornette Coleman went up there in the early Seventies and did some recording with them. He gave them a violin.
JJ: Isn't that against the Prime Directive or something?
Munchie Mike: It's not like they wouldn't run up against a modern instrument sooner or later. It might as well be a violin. Some of those old-school rock and roll guys made it up the mountain too. That dead Rolling Stone.
JJ: Brian Jones?
Munchie Mike: Drowned in the swimming pool, right? Yeah, Brian Jones. He discovered them, him and some other English guy. So they record the Master Musicians, and it's like overnight fame and a bunch of hippies show up at their door. They start touring and they're in movies and stuff. They went to England and played at King Arthur's grave.
JJ: So Brian Jones was responsible for turning the larger world on to this music.
Munchie Mike: Oh yeah, he's like their patron saint. They got his picture in their headquarters. They wrote a song for him.
JJ: What attracted world-class artists to the Master Musicians? What is it about their music?
Munchie Mike: The main thing is, it has mystical healing power. Check out this movie The Sheltering Sky.
JJ: Sure, I remember. John Malkovich has a fever, and the guys in long robes play music at him.
Munchie Mike: Right. In their village they do a lot more. If you're sick, they'll lay you down on the floor and pile up their musical instruments on top of you. They take off their pointy yellow slippers and walk on your head. These guys are hard-core.
JJ: Do they specialize in one particular ailment, or are they general practitioners?
Munchie Mike: They mainly cure, like, mental illness kind of things. The music puts you in a trance, it grabs hold of your brain waves and lines them up in a way that makes sense, or something. But they can fix physical injury too. This one writer who was hanging out in Morocco slammed his hand in a car door. It was all swole up and purple. He says one of the Master Musicians took over, threw everybody out of the room and closed all the windows, sat down on the floor with him and poured some mineral water on his hand. Then he rubbed all the fingers and said these prayers, and spat in the guy's palm and rubbed in the spit and said some more prayers. In like fifteen minutes it got down to a dull ache, and when he went outside his freakin hand was like new, not even a bruise.
JJ: That's pretty impressive.
Munchie Mike: Have you seen Bad Timing? Where the guy is sick of his old lady fooling around, so when she ODs on pills, he sits around for hours and waits until she's almost dead, before he calls an ambulance. So while he's waiting, he plays this record of the Master Musicians and remembers when they went on a trip to Morocco.
JJ: But it's supposed to be curative. If he wants her to die, wouldn't that be counterproductive?
Munchie Mike: Exactly. That's like the, you know, irony of it all. He doesn't know it's healing music, and that's why she pulls out of the coma, after they work on her for a while.
JJ: Interesting. So, the Master Musicians, is this one big family?
Munchie Mike: They're all in the same clan, Ahl Sherif. It means saintly, because they're descendents of Mohammed the Prophet. And they all have the same last name, Attar.
JJ: Does the last name mean something too?
Munchie Mike: Perfume maker.
JJ: So is the making of perfume another cottage industry up in the mountains?
Munchie Mike: I think it's, like, metaphorical. People who've been there say when the Master Musicians are really into it, like way up on that ecstatic plane, there's a scent in the air, like a blend of incense and ozone.
JJ: Not something you smell every day.
Munchie Mike: It gets weirder. You know how some things can't be photographed? There's supposed to be stuff in Jajouka music that can't be recorded. You hear it live, but the technology doesn't exist to pick it up.
JJ: What are the instruments?
Munchie Mike: They have a bunch of different kinds of drums. Hourglass shaped ones made out of clay or something. Round flat ones, they're made from cedar, and the sticks are orange wood or olive wood. There's a wind instrument that's like a cross between an oboe and a bagpipe.
JJ: And made from what kind of wood?
Munchie Mike: Apricot. It has 15 note holes. And there's a kind of lute, made from a gourd, with three goatskin strings. And some kind of flute.
JJ: A lute and a flute.
Munchie Mike: Playing that bagpipe thing, they have a technique, like those Mongolian dudes.
JJ: The Throat Singers of Tuva
Munchie Mike: Right. Circular breathing. You breath in through the nose and out through the instrument. It's this complicated deal where they work out with their neck muscles like body builders, and the inside of their throat somehow. Some of the real old masters could hold a note for half an hour at least. The guy who smashed his hand, he timed one note at twelve minutes.
JJ: The tradition must go back a long time.
Munchie Mike: It's some of the oldest music there is. It's like a time machine. I mean we're talking about ancient Greece and all that. There was a guy back in the 9th century who knew 10,000 songs. The call him the father of Jajouka music. Ziryab, his name was. Did you know there used to be Muslims in Spain?
JJ: I'd heard that. The Moors.
Munchie Mike: So, part of this music came from Andalusia. The Master Musicians were the sultan's house band. One of the good things about being rich in those days, you could have your own sound track.
JJ: Predating personal audio delivery systems by several hundred years.
Munchie Mike: They'd play a certain piece of music when the sultan went to the mosque in the morning, another piece when he left.
JJ: It's good to be king.
Munchie Mike: But it wasn't just for him, that's the cool thing about it. Like, when the sultan was going to leave out of the palace gates, the Master Musicians played this certain piece. When the people heard it, they would know to come over and line up along the road. The sultan would ride by and bless them. There was a different kind of music for that too.
JJ: Like belling the cat. I sympathize with the underlying principle, that the people should always know what their leader is doing.
Munchie Mike: Anyway, in 1492 they got kicked out of Spain and went back to Morocco.
JJ: So they are Muslims.
Munchie Mike: From way back. But it seems to be kind of a non-mainstream type of Islam. Like, in that part of the world you're not supposed to play music on Friday, it's against the religion. But the Master Musicians have always played for their saint on Friday, and they're allowed to. A lot of their customs, though, I guess they're not what we'd think of as any kind of spiritual.
JJ: How do you mean?
Munchie Mike: People who have hung out with them say they're pretty raunchy and violent. I mean, when these guys party, it sounds like they're a cross between bikers and the Three Stooges, at Mardi Gras. The boys dress up like girls and balance trays of glasses on their heads and jump over tables and stuff.
JJ: Not sitting around chanting "om".
Munchie Mike: It isn't the Maharishi vibe at all. There's a holy day every year, for like 2,000 years now, it goes back to the Dionysian cult and the old Roman Lupercal festival. Each year they pick one of the young guys to take the part of a goat god called Bou Jeloud. He puts on this stinking old bunch of goatskins and a straw hat and smears burnt cork on his face and gets possessed by the god. It's like those voudoun dancers in Haiti. They have a campfire all night with everybody dancing around it, and this Bou Jeloud character just goes nuts and runs around whipping people with tree branches.
JJ: And they let him?
Munchie Mike: Sure. It's curative. When the spirit of Bou Jeloud takes over the person, everybody he strikes, if there's something wrong with them, it makes them better. He hits the young unmarried girls to guarantee that they'll be fertile. The only danger is to the kid who's wearing the costume. The god really wears him out. Sometimes he uses up so much juice, the kid dies from being Bou Jeloud.
JJ: This is a colorful story. I'm surprised we haven't seen more about the Master Musicians in the press.
Munchie Mike: National Geographic had a ten-page story ready, this was years ago, but then the editor decided not to run it because there was so much about the kif, and pictures of them smoking their long pipes, and all that. It's probably been the same ever since. I mean, you can't talk about these guys without bringing up the kif. And they have a legend that if their music ever stops, for any reason.... the whole world stops.
JJ: And if that's true, the worst part is they won't be able to say "We told you so."
Munchie Mike: They have some different kind of ways. Like, the fathers and sons don't hang out together, they're not even supposed to sit in the same room.
JJ: Which must be difficult in such a small society.
Munchie Mike: But you know, when you think about it, most of the things that sons say to their fathers and fathers say to their sons, would be better off not being said. Staying in a different room is not a bad idea.
JJ: Still, an anti-marijuana activist might say, this is just another argument against it. Do we want people dressing up in smelly goat skins and lashing virgins with switches?
Munchie Mike: It's too late not to want it - or something like it. In fact, it was always too late. The same kind of group craziness is manifested in our society already. We got hockey games and mud wrestling and drag races and rock concerts and about a hundred kinds of events where people can group up and go crazy for a while.
JJ: You're saying the same type of energy shows up differently in different cultures?
Munchie Mike: Or in different ways in the same culture. It's nothing to be scared of, or any more scared than we already are, because it's already here. It's always been here. We humans want to get together with others of our kind, enjoy a little social lubricant, and cut loose. The Master Musicians of Jajouka aren't trying to get anybody to live their way. But for themselves, they're very desirous to live that way. And why shouldn't they?
JJ: And why shouldn't people in our society, who want to dance all night at a rave, or take part in a drum circle?
Munchie Mike: I can't believe the stupidity of a society that gives booze an advantage. If people had the choice, when they go out to have fun in big groups, I bet a lot of them would rather have some other kind of stimulant than alcohol. Big mass events would be a lot more peaceful. You'd think the law and order types would figure that out, one of these days.
JJ: And maybe they will.
JJ the fanciful joint is copyrighted intellectual property of Medicine Bow Gallery © 2006
Lit & Lovin' it! is a trademark of Medicine Bow Gallery - All Rights Reserved
Munchie Mike drawing: Dr. Agon
