This music can't be played by anyone but the family of Attir. You have to learn this music when you are a child and you have to be from the family. The Master Musicians are a special caste exempt from farm work. The sons and grandsons of Master Musicians, they have done nothing else since birth and perhaps before. While they differ widely in age and appearance, they all have the mark of the professional, of someone who does what he does superlatively well.
Musicians are magicians in Morocco, and they bear the mark of the conjurer, the magic man.
In the early 1990s, the Master Musicians Of Jajouka were led by Bachir Attar, whose father had led the group in the late 1960s. Attar, who lives half the year in New York, has subsequently left the band to pursue a solo career. The Master Musicians Of Jajouka's first tour of the United States, in 1997, included a reenactment of the week-long lunar feast of Aid El Kabir. In 1999, the group was visited bv Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Renaldo. Like Renaldo, many pseudo-hip figures with pristine international reputations have been shameful in their uncharacteristically discreet negotiations with the Musicians on the mountain.