Dear Mr. Werner, I have not yet received your missive sent directly to Rue Campo de Amor, possibly because the authorities here have changed the names of all streets. None here including taxi drivers know the present names although they have been posted for three years. Whether I can be of any help to you I don’t know, but I shall be here all through January and should be pleased to see you. I have no telephone. Sincerely, Paul Bowles
-letter dated 28 Dec 1991
I had read his travel essays “The Rif, to Music” and “The Route to Tassemist” and did not believe him when he wrote that he had driven 25,000 miles during the last six months of 1959 while recording Moroccan music in all parts of the country. That is the circumference of the Earth, and the country is only 1,125 miles long and 325 miles wide. That would be like driving from Tangier to the oasis of Tah, on what was then the border with Spanish Sahara, back and forth twenty two times.
So I figured that the music must have been pretty good. I wanted to interview him about the music.
We stayed at the Grand Hotel Villa de France even though it was officially closed for a remodel, but the bell boy let us look through Room 35’s window, where Matisse had painted the view in blue over the winter 1911-1912. I had read Bowles’ essays in his collection “Their Heads are Green and Their Hands are Blue.”
I had been instructed to contact Bowles’ American secretary and Tangier neighbor Cherie in order to make the appointment to see him. I was told that no one could see him without going through her, that there had been too many hippie pilgrims just stopping by to say hello after the release of Bertolucci’s The Sheltering Sky. Cherie also had no phone, so David the photographer and I went to her apartment. She asked if we wanted to go upstairs one flight to see Bowles right that minute. We said sure.
Bowles’s door was open so we walked straight in. The front room had a fire lit in the fireplace tended by a Moroccan man with a hot poker busy turning over the burning logs. He was speaking loudly to no one in particular. Bowles was wearing a sweater and sitting on the sofa recovering from a flu and looking frail. Cherie introduced and left us.
I started by asking about his early field recordings, especially of the Berber ahidous and ahouache dances- what he described as “nights with fires and drums”- for the Library of Congress, the subject of my article. I told him I had read his lengthy correspondence with Harold Spivacke, head of the LOC’s music division who had made Bowles’ recordings possible. That warmed him up to me I felt. Most recent interviews had been only about the film. Too much hype he felt.
We talked about his multiple trips with the old reel to reel tape recorder, of how he had talked his way into many private ceremonies in rural and urban Morocco that included music- some religious, some social- in the years just after independence from France, when suspicions of Westerners were still rampant. Especially when they carried recording equipment never seen before.
We talked also about how Western music was infecting the non-West, and how non-Western music was infecting the West. He didn’t like it either way. He had first come to Tangier to study classical music composition with Aaron Copland, having his piano delivered to the house by donkey to work on his Sonata for Oboe and Clarinet. About his first days there, he wrote, “We landed and Morocco took over.”
Did he know then that the oboe is just like a Moroccan ghaita, with the same double reed sound, if played quite a bit wilder? He knew this very well in later years when he championed the Master Musicians of Jajouka. He must have smoked a lot of kif with them too.
There were several knocks on the door while I was there, all from hippie pilgrims hoping to shake his hand or get high. He no longer smoked, he said. Cherie steered the hippies out. David took him into the back room where the sunlight was streaming through the window for a photograph. We left, later wondering if he had recovered from the flu.
