Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Joujouka: The Only Solo Album from a Stone, and a Field-Recording Time Capsule

Brian Jones recorded the Master Musicians of Joujouka in a Moroccan village in 1968, just months before his death. The tapes sat until 1971, when Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham assembled them into a posthumous album. It’s a raw, hypnotic document of Sufi trance music played on oboe-like ghaitas and frame drums – no overdubs, no Western polish, just a half-hour of what Jones called “the oldest living music on Earth.”

The project was pure Brian Jones: restless, curious, and way ahead of his time. While his bandmates were diving into blues and R&B, Jones was hauling a portable tape recorder to North Africa, chasing sounds that didn’t fit any rock framework. He’d already pushed the Stones toward sitar on “Paint It Black” and dulcimer on “Lady Jane,” but Pipes of Pan showed he wanted to document, not just sample. The album flopped commercially but became a cult touchstone for world music enthusiasts and inspired later collaborations between Western and North African musicians – the Rolling Stones even returned to Joujouka in 1989 to sample the same group for “Continental Drift.”

As a solo legacy, it’s strange and singular. Jones never made another record –