Brian Jones Presents The Pipes of Pan at Joujouka - Background

Background

Painter/novelist Brion Gysin first heard music from the area with American writer Paul Bowles at a festival in Sidi-Kacem in 1950. Entranced with the music's sound, he later was led to the village to hear the music in person by Moroccan painter Mohamed Hamri. Gysin, along with Hamri, brought Brian Jones to hear the village music in 1968.

The album's music included songs meant for the village's "most important religious holiday festival, Aid el Kbir". The festival's ritual of dressing a young boy dressed as "Bou Jeloud, the Goat God" wearing the "skin of a freshly slaughtered goat", involved the child's running to "spread panic through the darkened village" as the musicians played with abandon. Gysin connected the ritual, performed to protect the village's health in the coming year, to the fertility festival of Lupercalia and the "ancient Roman rites of Pan"; he referred to the Bou Jeloud dancer as "Pan" and "the Father of Skins". This name stuck, leading to the reference to Pan in the album's title.

Jones, recording engineer George Chkiantz, and Gysin travelled to the village in 1968, accompanied by Hamri and Jones's girlfriend Suki Potier to record the musicians using a portable Uher recorder. Jones worked on the two-track recordings in London, adding stereo phasing, echo, and other effects. Jones edited the full-band selection to 14 minutes by "cross-phasing fragments of a work that runs to some ninety minutes in uncut form".

The album included three types of music: repetitive vocal chants "similar to those employed throughout Islam", flute and drum music featuring "several distinct melodic motifs and improvisations over a drone" played by two flutists and several drummers, and the full village orchestra's drum and horn music played to accompany the "frenzied dance of Bou Jeloud, a Moroccan Pan".

The New York Times reviewer Robert Palmer reported that the call-and-response horn motifs are "handed down from generation to generation". Palmer, noting the "drumming rhythms are definitely African", paraphrased Gysin as connecting the musical origins to Spain, "from the Moorish courts of Cordova and Seville".

The cover illustration on the 1971 album was originally a painting by Mohamed Hamri depicting the master musicians with Brian Jones in the center. Jones edited the album and prepared the art work together with designer, Al Vandenburg. He put one of Hamri's son’s paintings on the inside cover. Jones finished producing the LP several months before his death in 1969.

Jones' ex-girlfriend Anita Pallenberg said that Jones had wanted to incorporate the Jajouka sound into the music of the Rolling Stones. In the Jean-Luc Godard movie Sympathy for the Devil, Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts is seen playing a Jajouka drum during a rehearsal.