Jajouka is a small village in the stony foothills of the Rif Mountains of Morocco – located at a particularly fluid intersection of Dreams and Reality. The Master Musicians, in turn, are expert conjurers whose bewitching performances are alive with primal energies and shamanistic portent. But they are also very much of this world, a cultural marvel first revered by the Beat expatriates headquartered in Tangier in the Fifties and then by the Rolling Stones, the late Brian Jones in particular. The Master Musicians' music is one of the great legal highs, a thundering, transporting chorale of undulating drones and shrill, ecstatic fanfares performed on an oboelike horn called the ghaita and underscored with mesmeric circular rhythms.

Actually, Brian Jones did the Master Musicians a great disservice when, in a fit of psychedelic enthusiasm, he drenched his 1968 field recordings from Jajouka in a gelatinous pool of stereo phasing on Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Joujouka. Apocalypse Across the Sky, the first major-label recording of the Master Musicians in two decades, redresses that gaffe with a dramatic open-air clarity. In the opening piece, "Gabahay," a stark nasal annunciation on the ghaita blossoms into a ragged, vibrant chorus of horns charging boldly over a stubborn, steely drone and the impatient gallop of the drums. "Bujloudia," a paean to Bou Jeloud, the fearsome goat-god who stars in Jajouka's famed Pan ritual, explodes with almost free-jazz agitation in the pipers' hard, dark blowing.

This is a very familial music. The Master Musicians are, in fact, an elite class of artists literally born to their calling; the current leader, Bachir Attar, is the son of the late preeminent Master, Hadj Abdesalam Attar, who composed every piece on Apocalypse save one. For all of the blinding virtuosity on display, there are no solos, no grandstanding. The Master Musicians play as if of one mind, rising and accelerating as a group, spiking the hypnotic constancy of the music with unexpected melodic flourishes. In "The Middle of the Night," two competing lutelike instruments (gimbri) chase each other over modal scales, alternating between frenzied riff clusters and robotic plucking, before resolving into a saucy duet over the gentle surge of the drums.

Apocalypse captures the variety of voices that fill the air at Jajouka: the warmth of the women's choir; the delight of the strings and male chorus in "Jajouka Between the Mountains"; the elegiac resonance of the horns in "On Horseback." But common to all is an air of ancient dignity and an unshakable belief in the unseen spirits that dance to these tunes. In Bachir Attar's "Memories of My Father," the lead pipes carry the melody with declarative force over the other horns' harmonic glaze and the drums' stuttering rhythm. More than just a bow to a loved one, the performance is an eloquent statement of pride in the music's ageless beauty and its undiminished power over four centuries. Apocalypse Across the Sky is compelling proof that in this Super Nintendo world there is still great mystery among us. (RS 637)

DAVID FRICKE