Belgium's francophone classical music FM station, Musiq3, has just aired an in-depth (hour and a half) special on Paul Bowles (click for podcast), and has provided us a photo of an interview at TALIM (courtesy producer Camille de Rijck), along with a vignettes of other Tangier cultural landmarks.
We're happy to be included among interviews with literary figures associated with Bowles: Claude Nathalie Thomas, his translator into French; Daniel Rondeau, until last month French ambassador to UNESCO and author of a book on Tangier; Mona Thomas, author of "Tanger 54;" and Simon-Pierre Hamelin, author and manager of Tangier's great bookstore, Librairie des Colonnes.
The interviews are nicely interspersed with Tangier soundscapes and a mix of Bowles compositions, his narration of excerpts from short stories, and selections from the Library of Congress Moroccan traditional music collection. Just like the iPod loop playing in our Paul Bowles wing.
The program gave us a chance to talk about Bowles as a man of music, reflected in the "Music and Other Muses" theme of the broadcast, and very much a part of the Legation museum's approach to Bowles.
Bowles - his music as much as his writing - continues to be a draw for cultural broadcasting. We've reported before on several European (German, British, and Swiss) programs, as well as Radio Tangier's special on Bowles' Moroccan recordings. In Berlin, Swiss sound artist Gilles Aubry is preparing a exhibit on Bowles' work to preserve Morocco's musical heritage, and in the US, Rounder Records is working with the Library of Congress to publish selections from the 1959 recordings that TALIM had digitized during the Paul Bowles Centenary in 2010.
Gerald Loftus