Watching and listening to Hamri and The Master Musicians of Joujouka playing on the DVD, they seemed to conjure up real spiritual vibe, you guys were there, what was the atmosphere like?
JA: The Musicians have conjured up their own spirit since a long time ago, probably since the Forties when Hamri started knocking them into shape up in the mountains. Then Hamri brought Gysin to hear them and he became a fan. Hamri brought the Musicians with him to Dublin because he thought, correctly, that no Gysin party would’ve been complete without his favourite music.
FR: The performances were amazing. It was The Master Musicians of Joujouka’s ethereal spirit and Hamri’s knowledge and vision of the Joujouka/Jajouka music, contextualized through his artistic genius, which so influenced Brion Gysin. Hamri understood the old Morocco and imparted his knowledge to many in small amounts and to a few in profusion.
Staying with the Moroccan Scene, the sentence "documentation is everything", to the Tangier Beat writers philosophy, keeps echoing in my head, what do you understand by this, their philosophy and the relevance to the Here To Go Show?
JA: I think up until the Beats came along there was more of a convention wherein, if writers were making work in any way autobiographical, there was a tendency for them to portray themselves as superheroes. This is fine or acceptable because being a creative person is sometimes just a kiss away from being bipolar but the Beats were part of what dismantled that self-glorification.
In what ways did they peel this convention apart?
JA: Kerouac, Burroughs, and Ginsberg made themselves available in a very public way.
FR: Continuous documentation, whether it is released or not is essential as so much is quickly forgotten by people involved in this oeuvre.
JA: Just in the last few months we had this extraordinary spectacle of seeing Saddam being put to death, seeing what he looked like as he dropped from the gallows, seeing him on a gurney with his neck broken, all that shit. Profoundly watchable and horrible. It seems to me to belong within the exact same universe as that which, say, Warhol or Burroughs occupied.
Part Two and Part Three to follow.
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