Photo by Cherie Nutting
Robert Palmer
Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, Palmer worked as a contributing editor for Rolling Stone for nearly three decades. He became The New York Times’s first full time rock writer in the late 1970s and its pop editor in the 1980s. Palmer is also known for his book-length studies of American popular music, which include Deep Blues and Rock & Roll: An Unruly History. A member of the seminal 1960s band, The Insect Trust, Palmer was an avid musician until his death in 1997. As a lecturer in ethnomusicology, he taught at Yale, Bowdoin, The University of Mississippi, and Carnegie Mellon. Palmer was also involved in keeping contemporary blues alive through his work as a producer for Fat Possum Records. For more on Robert Palmer click here.
Bachir Attar
Bachir Attar was only 5 when Brian Jones visited Jajouka, studied the traditions of the Master Musicians under his father Jnuin, the leader of the musicians until his death in the 1980s. Bachir has lived in Paris and New York as well as Jajouka. He has played gimbri, rhaita and lira all over the world, both with the Master Musicians and as a solo artist. He has collaborated with a wide range of musicians, including Deborah Harry, Ornette Coleman, Talvin Singh, Bill Laswell, Maceo Parker, Lee Ranaldo, and The Rolling Stones. For more information about Bachir and the Master Musicians, visit www.jajouka.com
Photo by Paul Misso
Jajouka
Jajouka became a counterculture icon in the late 1960s, when Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones proclaimed that even he had trouble keeping up with the “constant strain of the festival” during Jajouka’s ritual performances. Tradition says that the village’s musical tradition was a gift to the Attar family from Sidi Ahmed Sheik, one of the first Islamic missionaries to visit the region. The village’s music and rituals may also be survivals of the worship of Pan and Astarte, or the rituals of the Roman Lupercalia. Each year, Bou Jeloud emerges from his cave in the form of a villager dressed in goat skins, and the Master Musicians celebrate his arrival with music from blaring rhaitas and pounding drums. They offer him Crazy Aisha as a wife and allow him to run amok, flailing local women with tree branches reputed to make them pregnant in a year’s time. A long list of Western musicians – from Ornette Coleman to Talvin Singh – have made their own pilgrimages to hear Jajouka’s music. Such attention has produced amazing musical collaborations, but has also stirred up jealousy and allowed the musicians (and sometimes their visitors) to become lost in translation.
For more about Jajouka and its history, visit link http://www.jajouka.com/
Augusta Palmer
A painter, scholar and filmmaker, Augusta was a toddler in Arkansas when her father first visited Jajouka. Augusta studied film production at Sarah Lawrence College and went on to earn a Ph.D. in Cinema Studies from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Palmer is the co-director of the recently completed If You Succeed (2006), a verite documentary about a young black entrepreneur’s struggle to start a business on a troubled Brooklyn block. As a film scholar, Augusta specializes in Chinese cinema and has taught film history and criticism at several universities, including N.Y.U., Brooklyn College, and Sarah Lawrence College.
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