revol olutionqr u y 
periuu 01 uriibnc TransTorrnuTion ana renewa renew >wa all i inn 
m thee
career of Ornette Coleman. In the previous two 
years, Coleman had consolidated two decades of 
d b k i k ii d 
ave 
jent 
to ejnpqrK on a music musicaal pilgrimage that wqula nav 
profpuhd and far-ran r-rangin g g effects on his subseque 
aesthetic conceptions ptions.. Inspired by the music h 
hat his friend Robert Palmer, musi 
ne 
i t i t h d d d i ti t 
pt the l\// 11 iyui MUM i_ 
known locally as the site of the SIIMIK 
Shikh, the learned saint, bejr ' * 
servants of the saint who accompanied his prayers 
with instrumental music played on ana/fa, a piercirpg 
wooden obop, and tb$l, ajarge double-headed 
ie musicians. 
•n Frii 
emony ot music and pi. 
lameness, insanity, or intertilm 
tread upon them and touch ..._ 
ujsicians to 
! insfruments 
in hopes of obtaining a cure. 
The Master Musicians also perform in secular contexts, especially 
<GLENDORA REVIEWxAfrican Quarterly on the ArtsxVol3@No3&4>
in the late summer, when the 
demand for musicians to perform 
at weddings, circumcisions, 
and other important 
evenfs in neighboring villages 
reaches its peak. 
Moreover, until the early 
years of this century, generafions 
of Master Musicians 
served as royal musicians at 
the court of the sultan in Marrakesh, 
an honor that left 
them with a substantial musical 
legacy.1 Today, the most 
notable musical event in 
Jajouka occurs during the 
Muslim celebration of 'Aid el-Kebir, when the Master 
Musicians perform a profane ritual of ancient origin: 
the annual festival of Bou Jeloud ('the man in skins'), 
the primeval nature spirit who taught their ancestor, 
Attarin, to play lira (cane flute). Having heard from 
Palmer about the awe-inspiring music accompanying 
the Bou Jeloud masquerade dance-drama, Coleman 
arrived in Jajouka just in time to witness the entire 
CGrnivalesque spectacle. 
In addition to attracting crowds of pilgrims, tourists, 
and villagers from the surrounding area, the annual 
Boujeloudiya in Jajouka has also drawn a steady 
stream of Western poets, artists, and musicians up the 
mountain trails from Tangier since the 1950's. Many 
of them first learned about the musical events there 
from Brion Gysin, an expatriate writer and painter who 
became Jajouka's most important postwar patron and 
promoter. Some of the friends and acquaintances he 
brought to the village included composer and author 
Paul Bowles, writer William S. Burroughs, and Rolling 
Stones, guitarist, Brian Jones. Although he stayed only 
one night in the summer of 1968,2 Jones' visit probably 
had the greatest impact on the subsequent career 
of the Master Musicians, since he brought along an 
Uher recorder and a sound engineer to tape the music 
he heard for eventual release on Rolling Stones 
Records. Finally issued in 1971 at the crest of a wave 
of publicity that included a three-page illustrated article 
in Rolling Stone magazine by Robert Palmer, the 
record sold tens of thousands of copies worldwide and 
established the Master Musicians of Jajouka as one of 
the first marketing successes of the nascent world music 
industry. 
In 1971, as the sounds of Jajouka were about to 
reach mass audiences worldwide through the Brian 
Jones recording, Brion Gysin brought Palmer up the 
<GLENDORA REVIEWxAtrican Quarterly on the A**Vol30No3M> 
<42> 
mountain to research the Master Musicians for the latter's 
Rolling Stone article. Amazed by the sights and 
sounds of the Bou Jeloud rites, Palmer soon "went 
back, stayed for a while, started playing with the musicians, 
and eventually took part in some of their rituals"3. 
When Palmer returned to the United States and played 
the tapes of these impromptu sessions to Coleman, 
Coleman decided that "he would not go only to hear 
the musicians of Jajouka, but that he [also] had to 
play with them"4. "Let's go," he told Palmer, "let's go 
over there and make a record"5. 
By the time Palmer returned to lead Coleman up 
to Jajouka, Coleman had reached one of the peaks of 
his success as an artist in the commercial music industry. 
One of the founders of the avant-garde jazz 
movement, Coleman was then expanding his artistic 
horizons in as many directions as possible: performing 
on trumpet and violin, composing concert music 
for woodwind quartets and symphony orchestras, and 
beginning to explore non-Western musical traditions. 
His symphonic work, Skies of America was inspired in 
part by his participation in the sacred rites of a Crow 
Indian community under the starry skies of their Montana 
reservation. In the early 1970's, he invited an 
East Indian classical vocalist to record with his group, 
and traveled to a village festival in northern Nigeria, 
where he played saxophone along with an ensemble 
of Hausa traditional musicians. Both the improvisational 
mode of interaction evident in these latter two 
encounters (conditioned, no doubt, by the timehonored 
modern jazz practice of 'sitting in'), and the 
compositional approach manifest in Skies of America, 
contributed to the conception of intercultural collaboration 
that Coleman would bring to his work with the 
Master Musicians. 
At the time of his trip to Jajouka, Coleman was 
in the process of formulating the compositional and 
improvisational ideas he had developed, over the 
course of his multi-faceted career, on the principles of 
a Harmolodic music-theoretical system that would embrace 
all varieties of musical experience and transcend 
all stylistic or geographical boundaries. One of the 
themes which emerged amidst this project of philosophical 
retrospection and analysis was the notion of 
music as a healing force, an idea widespread in Islamic 
North Africa since the time of Al-Kindi. In an 
article he wrote discussing his Harmolodic system, 
Coleman described the spiritual qualities of his music 
in terms that suggest parallels to Sufi mysticism. Accordingly, 
Palmer's descriptions of Jajoukan musical 
healing rituals at the shrine of Sidi Hmed Shikh must 
have strongly resonated with Coleman's own musical
i ~.ience and spiritual 
convictions, calling to mind 
his early experiences in 
Texas playing for "a country 
evangelist, healing people" 
in settings where "the 
piano would be in [the key 
of] G, H, there'd be no 
such thing as key...I"6. 
The untempered tuning 
of the Moroccan 
' aitas, whose notes fall 
tween the semitones of 
the Western chromatic 
scale, no doubt accorded 
well with Coleman's unconventionally 
expressive 
intonation. And the transcendent 
quality of the 
Jajoukan music, blending together classical, folk, sacred, 
and ritual musics into a polyrhythmic dance of 
untempered melody, apparently struck a chord deep 
in Coleman's musical psyche: "I could see that, for 
once, I would be able to play whatever passed through 
my heart and head, without ever having to worry about 
whether it was right or wrong" . 
Before departing for North Africa, Coleman had 
composed some saxophone lines to play along with 
the themes he had heard on Palmer's tapes, and h_ 
composed many more after jamming with the Master 
Musicians on his first night in Jajouka. In live record- 
<GLENDORA REVIEWxAfncan Quarterly on the ArtsxVol3@No3&4> 
<43> 
The Master Musicians 
of Jajouka with Bachir 
Attar in 
the centre (Photo below) 
ing sessions with various Jajoukan ensembles, Coleman 
played freely over tunes from their sacred and secular 
repertoire, working intently in the course of performance 
to match the lines he had composed to the themes 
the Master Musicians played and spontaneously improvising 
other motives and melodies to blend with 
their traditional music. These sessions demanded his 
utmost concentration, since he often had little more 
than his ear to guide him through the intricacies of 
Jajoukan performance practice. Recognizing and responding 
appropriately to the subtle musical cues that 
signaled sudden transitions represented one of the great-
est challenges Coleman faced in playing with a group 
that would "change tempos, intensities, and 
rhythm...together, as if they all had the same idea, yet 
they hadn't played what they were playing before they 
played it"8. As Coleman's account of the circumstances 
makes clear, achieving this sort of synchronicity represented 
quite a feat: "[It] sounded as if I had rehearsed 
it with them. It wasn't true. Not at all"9. 
The very beginning of the originally issued recording 
bears witness to this synchronicity, as Coleman 
somehow manages to fit his free-rhythm line exactly 
within the Jajoukans' dauntingly complex 32-beat 
rhythmic cycle (3+3+3+3 + 3+6+8+3).10 Aside 
from this initial metrical concordance, though, as 
Coleman begins improvising over the Jajoukans' 
music, his interaction with them more or less fits 
Palmer's description of the music as "a meeting of two 
worlds"'1. For the most part, in this section, he 
introduces and develops his themes without any 
obvious reference to the Jajoukan melodies, shifting 
his tonality independent of their mode, and tending to 
play across their rhythms and in between the beats. "I 
was struggling to sound natural," he later explained, 
"without sounding forceful, without sounding like I had 
to get inside [the Jajoukans' music] to find out what 
was happening"12. 
Coleman's musical strategy seems to pay off soon 
enough, as the Jajoukans' abrupt accelerando into 
the next section gives rise to a shift in interactive dynamics 
that brings the two worlds into much closer 
alignment. As the Jajoukan drummers settle into a 
driving quadruple-time rhythm, Coleman begins to 
comment on the ghaita lines, whose thematically linked 
chains of short melodic phrases strikingly parallel those 
characteristic of his own improvisational style. This 
intensifying musical interaction reaches a peak as 
Coleman joins the ghaita players forthe first three notes 
of a repeated phrase, then continues downward in 
imitation of their previous motive.13 As he repeats a 
modally independent variant of this blues-inflected riff, 
it is clear that he has succeeded in his attempt to "conceive 
a line that would fit in with them instantly," and 
thus achieved his musical goal of "playing improvised 
compositions"14 with the Master Musicians. 
Bachir Attar, the current leader of the Master 
Musicians has listened to "Midnight Sunrise" with me 
and commented that the recording shows the participants 
achieving progressively deeper levels of interaction. 
Moreover, there is evidence to suggest that even 
at the time they felt that a significant intercultural musical 
rapport had been established in collaboration 
with Coleman. According to Jordan, by evening on 
<GLENDORA REVIEWxAfrican Quarterty on the Artsxvol3eNo3&4> 
<44> 
Coleman, unlike other 
jazz artists like Randy 
Weston, neither attempts 
to play Jajoukan 
music in a jazz context, 
nor tries to play in a 
traditional 
collaborations along similar lines with other Western 
artists including the Klezmatics, Sonic Youth, and 
Marianne Faithful have played a significant role in the 
development of their career in the years since, the 
Master Musicians regard their work with Coleman as 
the most successful of all. One possible reason for 
this distinction lies in the fact that Coleman, unlike 
other jazz artists like Randy Weston, neither attempts 
to place Jajoukan music in a jazz context, nor tries to 
play in a traditional Jajoukan style, but rather uses his 
Harmolodic system to establish a middle ground between 
the two, one which offers considerable opportunity 
for mutual interaction. 
In preparation forthe trip, Coleman and Jordan 
had negotiated a production contract with Columbia 
Records that provided financial backing forthe project 
in return for the rights to release a double-album set of 
Coleman's collaborations with the Master Musicians. 
However, when Coleman and Jordan returned with 
mixed-down master tapes, contractual disputes over 
international distribution delayed the release of the 
planned 'Ornette In Joujouka' album. Before these 
issues could be resolved, Coleman was dropped from 
the label, along with most of its other jazz artists, and 
the project was shelved. The master tapes containing 
the day of their arrival, Coleman had been accorded 
the status of an honorary Master Musician, given a 
traditional jelaba to wear and invited to sit among 
them and play. While Coleman's standing as patron 
and guest may well have contributed to the warmth of 
his reception, such a gesture of respect represents an 
honor rarely, if ever, bestowed upon other visiting 
musicians. 
In fact, the Master Musicians' collaboration with 
Coleman appears to have not only established a model 
for, but also set the standard by which all subsequent 
intercultural encounters have been measured. While
me seiecnons rnaT ^oieman ana joraan naa proaucea 
for commercial release remain unissued to this day. 
However, the hours of session outtakes, private recordings, 
and video footage from his Jajoukan adventure 
that remained in Coleman's possession played 
a pivotal role in inspiring one of the most momentous 
developments of his professional career: the electric 
Prime Time band. 
The story of Prime Time begins in 1 975, 
when Coleman started auditioning young musicians 
for a new group. From the summer of that year, the 
new group's line-up was pretty much settled, with 
Jamaladeen Tacuma (formerly Rudy McDaniel), guitarists 
Charles Ellerbee and Bern Nix, and drummer 
Ronald Shannon Jackson. The new group's members 
all moved in or stayed over at Coleman's Artists House 
loft on Prince Street, studying his harmolodic system 
and listening to tapes and watching videos made during 
his trip to Jajouka. The new group then traveled 
to France to perform in a concert of'Skies of America,' 
and shortly thereafter recorded the material released 
with 'Midnight Sunrise' on Coleman's Dancing In Your 
Head LP in a Paris studio. The testimony of James 
Jordan, who organized the journey to Jajouka, underlines 
its importance to the young musicians: "The 
players in Prime Time have all heard the Jajouka tapes. 
I can hear it in almost everything they play." Asserted 
Jordan, "The guitar harmonies get a sound like all 
those non-tempered horns, and the two drummers get 
those rhythms; it's almost symphonic" . 
Thus far, I have suggested that Coleman's trip 
to Jajouka set the stage for an artistic encounter in 
which initially formidable cultural differences were 
bridged through a process of musical interaction. 
Before concluding, I would like to suggest that something 
analogous transpired in the political-economic 
domain. Despite certain superficial parallels to Paul 
Simon's collaborative approach on recordings such 
as Graceland, Coleman's collaboration with the 
Jajoukans represents a qualitatively different mode of 
interaction, stemming from his unique position within 
the structures of the multinational music industry. 
Unlike Graceland, and despite Coleman's own protestations 
to the contrary, Coleman's record was not 
expected by his record company to sell in the millions 
of copies. Rather, Clive Davis, Columbia's president 
at the time, seems to have funded Coleman's recording 
projects mainly for the prestige value of having an 
artist of Coleman's stature associated with the label. 
In this regard, Coleman's position was not unlike that 
of many artists on Columbia's classical roster, although, 
as he has pointed out, his racially predicated 
<GLEND0RA REVIEWxAfncan Quarterly on the ArtsxVol3@No3&4> 
<45> 
classification as a |< 
smaller budgets for his projects than Pierre Boulez received, 
for example. 
In the end, Coleman spent nearly all of the money 
that Columbia had allocated him for the project on 
production-related expenses, not the least of which 
were the union-scale wages he paid the Master Musicians 
for the rehearsal and recording sessions. His 
copyright and royalty interests in the recordings, which 
represented his only means of realizing any significant 
income from this project, never amounted to much 
since Columbia decided not to release the album, and 
the inclusion of the 'Midnight Sunrise' excerpt on his 
later A&M release, Dancing In Your Head, contributed 
negligibly to revenues from record sales or publishing 
rights. In short, although Coleman structured 
his relations with the Master Musicians according to 
the appropriative corporate conventions of the mass 
media industry, his marginal status within it ensured 
that these structures functioned neither in intention nor 
in actual fact to his unfair advantage. Rather, his 
maverick posture vis-a-vis the industry enabled him 
to circumvent and to some extent transcend its characteristic 
relations of production. 
For both Coleman and the Jajoukans, this collaboration 
marked a critical juncture in their respective 
careers, sparking revitalization and opening up 
new aesthetic horizons. Not only did the Master Musicians' 
work with Coleman, as mentioned earlier, establish 
a precedent for future collaborations, it also 
helped further their opportunities and aspirations for 
a new career as international recording artists. The 
publicity surrounding the 1 977 release of Dancing in 
Your Head could not but have helped pave the way 
for their subsequent European concert tours in 1 979, 
1 980, and 1 982, which, in turn, appearto have made 
an indelible impression on the young Bachir Attar, 
soon to succeed his father Jnuin as the leader of the 
Master Musicians. Under Bachir Attar's leadership, 
the Master Musicians of Jajouka have reinvented themselves 
within the emerging discourses of world music 
and world beat, expanding into new markets, and exploring 
new musical possibilities. 
As for Coleman, Jajouka made a deep and lasting 
impression. It provided a powerful validation of 
his Harmolodic principles and liberated him once and 
for all from the confining Western paradigms against 
which he had struggled throughout his career. "Playing 
with the musicians of Jajouka was a natural," said 
Coleman's acting manager, James Jordan, since the 
ghaitas' untempered sound made it impossible to play 
in a particular key and the drummers' cross-rhythms 
made thinking in terms of bar lines futile. "When we 
recorded in Jajouka," Jordan recalled, "he seemed to 
listen to himself and say, 'Oh, that's what it was all
about.' And after that his music just seemed to coalesce"
18. Additionally, the responsive ensemble dynamics 
achieved in this collaboration,'9 and the heretofore 
unrealized prospect of blending his avant-garde 
improvisations with traditional music both provided 
significant inspiration toward the founding of Prime 
Time.20 From Palmer's perspective, this new musical 
self-awareness stemmed from the healing power of 
the Jajoukan experience. Despite "having created 
his own musical reality," Palmer believed, Coleman 
was "still fragmented" before his trip, "still hung up 
on the whole high art/folk art or art/entertainment dichotomy." 
According to Palmer, "Jajouka got him 
past all that. Jajouka gave him back his own soul, 
and gave it back to him whole"21.GR 
NOTES 
1 For example, the piece they recorded with Coleman, which they 
called "Hadra" (rather than Coleman's title, "Midnight Sunrise"), 
bears a close metrical relationship to qaim wa nisi, one of the five 
rhythmic modes of the classical Andalusian repertory. 
I According to Schuyler, Philip D. (1983. "The Master Musicians of 
Jahjouka." Natural History 92 (10): pg. 60-69), Bachir Attar once 
gave the year of Jones' visit as 1967, but he is the only dissenting 
source. I have used the 1968 date found in Davis, Stephen (1993. 
Jajouka Rolling stone. New York: Random House.) mainly because 
it accords with that given in the liner notes of the 1995 CD reissue of 
the Brian Jones recordings. 
3 Franklin, Drew. 1987. "Playing in the Register of Light." Village 
Voice (June 23): pg. 24. 
4 Carles, Philippe. 1973. "Ornette: Musique non temperee." Jazz 
212 (juin): pg. 16 (my translation). 
5 Franklin, Drew. "Playing in the Register of Light." Pg. 24. 
6 Litweiler, John. 1992. Ornette Coleman: A Harmolodic Life. New 
York: W. Morrow. Pg. 185. 
7 Clarke, Shirley (director). 1987. Ornette: Made in America (film). 
Fort Worth, TX: Caravan of Dreams Productions. 
8 Williams, Richard. 1973. "Ornette and the Pipes of Joujouka." 
Melody Maker (March 17): pg. 22. 
' Litweiler, John. Ornette Coleman: A Harmolodic Life. Pg. 161. 
10 The recently discovered alternate take of "Midnight Sunrise" - 
which features Coleman playing the same opening line over a 
completely different Jajoukan tune - strongly suggests that the line 
had been composed beforehand, quite possibly without reference to 
a particular Jajoukan tune. 
II Franklin, Drew. "Playing in the Register of Light." Pg. 25. 
12 ibid. Pg. 25. 
13 Critic Howard Mandel may well have had this feat of interactional 
rapport in mind when he remarked upon Coleman's ability to "draw 
a phrase from the Moroccans to turn into a barbecue riff (Mandel, 
Howard. 1977. "Review of Dancing in Your Head." Downbeat (Oct 
6): pg. 24.). 
14 Williams, Richard. 1973. "Omette and the Pipes of Joujouka." 
Pg.23. 
15 Franklin, Drew. "Playing in the Register of Light." Pg. 24. 
16 At a press conference conducted shortly after his return from 
Morocco, Coleman said, "I put all my money into my music, it's no 
secret. I went to Jajouka with less of a budget than I had for my 
Science Fiction record, and I spent all of what I had on this record 
(Ornette in Joujouka)." In Mandel, Howard. "Review of Dancing in 
Your Head." Pg. 17. 
17 These structures, according to Meintjes, do not "readily accommodate 
collaboration," but instead promote 'hierarchical, competitive, 
profit-oriented work* within exploitative structures "exacerbated by 
differentials in the global power of nation-states" (Meintjes, Louise. 
1990. "Paul Simon's Graceland, South Africa, and the Mediation of 
Musical Meaning." Ethnomusicology 34: pgs. 37-74). While 
Coleman's elite artist status relative to the Master Musicians' status 
as wage laborers could be viewed as a split that "replicates and 
<GLENDORA REVIEWxAfrican Quarterly on the A r t s x V o l 3 e N o 3 &4> 
expresses the differentials in sociopolitical and economic power" 
(Pg. 47), the framework developed by Steven Feld suggests that 
since "the economic stakes in this traffic are small, the circulation 
has the revitalization dynamic, of roots" (Feld, Steven. 1988. "Notes 
on World Beat." Public Culture 1: pg. 31-37.), rather than appropriation. 
In fact, Coleman's work with the Jajoukans took place under 
circumstances that approximate those Meintjes laid out for "genuinely 
collaborative projects," namely that "all participants contribute 
and benefit mutually" (Meintjes. Pg. 47-48). 
18 Franklin, Drew. "Playing in the Register of Light." Pg. 25. 
19 On the subject of ensemble dynamics, as well as the uniqueness 
of his Jajoukan experience, Coleman has said, "Non-tempered 
notes refer to collective creation, to blending with others, and it 
seems to me that the musicians of Jajouka go further than anyone in 
this respect. The musicians that I had heard in Nigeria played nontempered 
wind instruments as well. But in Jajouka, it was almost 
as if I had heard Skies of America [his then recently completed 
symphonic work]. They were thirty (musicians), playing in unison 
and changing tempo, intensity, and rhythm, each with his own 
intonation" (Carles, Philippe. "Ornette: Musique non temperee." Pg. 
16, my translation). This supports Peter Niklas Wilson's claim that 
"Jajouka was the starting point for which Coleman had long 
searched: a new concept of ensemble playing that could overcome 
the limitations of the conventional jazz combo (or symphony 
orchestra, for that matter)" (Wilson, Peter Niklas. 1989. Omette 
Coleman: "Sein Leben, seine Musik, seine Schallplatten." 
Schaftlach: Oreos/Collection Jazz. My translation and commentary) 
and thus provide a medium for the "orchestral dimension" implicit in 
"Coleman's musical thought since the dense sound-textures of Free 
Jazz" (Pg. 62, my translation). 
20 As far as inspiration for Prime Time is concerned, Robert Palmer 
has said that, upon their return, Coleman told him "that all his life 
he'd played either dance music, which he felt restricted him a lot, or 
his own music, which gave him the freedom to create but didn't 
always get that visceral connection with an audience he'd felt 
growing up, playing rhythm and blues. In Jajouka, he saw that you 
could have both at once, and he realized that with electric guitars 
and dance-based rhythms he could do the same thing in this culture 
- keep the freedom and make the connection" (in Franklin, Drew. 
"Playing In the Register of Light." Pg. 26). 
* ibid. Pg. 26 
*l would like to acknowledge and express gratitude to the following 
scholars, musicians, and music professionals for their invaluable assistance 
with this research project: Philip Schuyler, James Jordan, 
Bachir Attar, Bern Nix, Ronald Shannon Jackson, and John Snyder. 
<46>