Jajouka Baraka / Boneshaker

Please join us for a thrilling double-bill featuring the trans-cultural trance music supergroup Jajouka Baraka with Bachir Attar (Master Musicians of Jajouka) and the international free jazz power trio Boneshaker.

The mesmerizing Jajouka Baraka teams experimental artist and saxophonist Arrington de Dionyso with Bachir and Mustafa Attar of the renowned Master Musicians of Jajouka, once called “a 4000 year old rock and roll band” by William S. Burroughs. Joined by drummer Ben Bennett, the band conjures hypnotic, globe-spanning trance music designed to inspire wild transcendence.

“The Master Musicians music is one of the great legal highs, a thundering, transporting chorale of undulating drones and shrill, ecstatic fanfare…”—Rolling Stone

The Master Musicians of Jajouka, from the Rif mountains of Morocco, are noted for their trance-inducing ceremony that predates Islam and is thought to evoke the ancient rites of Pan, the goat-legged fertility god of ancient Greece. The music of the Master Musicians has been described as “a firestorm of sound” (New York Times). Embraced in the 1950s by artist Brion Gysin and writer Paul Bowles, the village of Jajouka became a mecca in the 1960s & ‘70s for celebrities such as the Rolling Stones, Ornette Coleman, and Timothy Leary.

The trio Boneshaker, a particularly powerful iteration of the fruitful nexus joining the avant-jazz scenes of Chicago and Norway, features Windy City multi-reedist Mars Williams (Liquid Soul, The Psychedelic Furs) and bassist Kent Kessler (Vandermark 5, NRG Ensemble) alongside Norwegian drummer Paal Nilssen-Love (The Thing, Atomic). All three are charter members of the Peter Brötzmann Tentet, but even pared down to a trio they conjure a blistering energy and athletic leaps of imagination.