Avuncular American

R.I.P. Algeria's Idir: Two Shores, One Dream

Woke up to the news this morning that Algeria's famous Kabyle folk singer Idir had passed away.  Allah yirhamu.  Below is a post I wrote while still under the spell of his concert in Lyon in July 2008.  And for those who don't know the music of Idir, here's his trademark song A Vava Inouva, sung in tandem with Scottish vocalist Karen Matheson, whose haunting voice is the centerpiece of the Celtic folk group Capercaillie.  This beautifully illustrated video by Ismail Abdelfattah has the added advantage of providing the transcription of the original Kabyle Berber along with a French translation.

 

July 2008:  I’m still catching up after weeks in the mountains and on the road, so I’m only now writing about a concert we attended in Lyon on July 6, on our way back from Italy.  Our son treated us to tickets to “Nuit de l’Algérie,” a double bill concert at the city’s open air Roman theater.  And what a treat it was: legendary (it’s overused, but a term that suits) Kabyle (Berber) musician Idir (check out his website - he looks like an Avuncular Algerian), followed by the 40-member chaabi orchestra El Gusto.

The world has just finished paying brief attention to the Mediterranean and its peoples thanks to President Sarkozy’s weekend summit meeting in Paris, but the multicultural crowd in Lyon a week earlier personified a Mediterranean unified with a passion that politicians can only dream of.  On stage and in the audience, Muslim, Jew, Christian, whether Algerian, French, or a stray American – the atmosphere was joyous (El Gusto = “joy,” reflecting the Spanish/Sephardic element in Algeria’s melting pot).

Idir set the stage, and his following is intensely loyal.  Several showed up wrapped in Kabyle and Algerian flags, and it didn’t take long until they were dancing (mostly solo, in the demure folk style of North Africa that has vulgar belly dancing beat by a mile) in the Roman stone aisles.  Idir, who has been a Kabyle Algerian institution for more than thirty years, is a voice for moderation, for inter-religious fraternity, and respect for women.  Indeed, it appeared to us that of the largely Maghrebi-origin audience, women accounted for a hefty majority of Idir’s fans - though very few head scarves were in evidence.

Following the rousing folk-rock-fusion Idir group intro, it was a little odd to shift to the suited and decidedly graying “El Gusto,” which some European writers have nicknamed “the Algerian Buena Vista Social Club.”  Last year Robin Denselow of The Guardian attended an El Gusto concert in Marseille:

Behind the rabbi and the imam was a 42-piece orchestra, composed of Algerian Muslim and Jewish musicians. Some of them had lived together in the country before 1962 - the year of Algerian independence - when some 130,000 Algerian Jews, the vast majority of the community, fled for France, fearing for their future in what was now a Muslim state. It was the end of an era in which Muslim, Jewish, and European musicians had lived and played together in the narrow streets of the Casbah in Algiers, developing a rousing, wildly varied hybrid style - chaabi [literally, "popular"] - that the El Gusto project set out to rediscover.

No rabbi or imam on stage in Lyon, but otherwise an excellent resume of the band’s origins.  Just how "popular" is chaabi?  The concert flyer and website has a picture of three of the musicians practicing in what looks like an Algiers barber shop.

As in “Buena Vista” the Ry Cooder of El Gusto, responsible for bringing these respectable gents together, is a young Irish-Algerian film-maker, Safinez Bousbia.  According to Denselow, Bousbia

was determined to track down surviving musicians from the heyday of chaabi, the 1940s and 50s. Chaabi is a mix of Arabic and north African berber styles, blended with modern French chanson, American boogie and Latin American styles, brought by the American troops stationed in Algeria during the second world war. It's a lively, versatile music suitable for weddings, bars and concert halls alike, and played exclusively by men.

American boogie... that explains the banjos.  I can testify to the influence of American GIs, who landed in Vichy-held Algeria in November 1942: our plumber in Oran, an impressionable boy at the time, years later still remembered chewing bubble gum and repeating '40s pickup lines like “What’s cookin’ chicken?” for the soldiers’ amusement.  For francophone readers, it’s worth watching the video excerpt of Bousbia explaining her first contacts with the elderly musicians, whom she feared tiring out with the first hour and a half long session.  Not to worry: the music went on for close to four hours!  For anglophones, Quidam Productions has a wonderful series of clips from Bousbia's documentary film "El Gusto: The Good Mood."

Actually, we pooped out before the end of the Lyon concert, since the next day was a working day for our son and his girlfriend.  As we climbed down and left the amphitheater, the music followed us as we walked towards the car.  That night in Lyon was a gift, for us of course, but mainly for the young “beur” (French slang for the sons and daughters of Algerian, and also Moroccan and Tunisian, immigrants) fans celebrating these ambassadors of normality from the oft troubled country of their parents or grandparents.  I suspect that the audience, like some of the chaabi old timers, included a certain number of pieds noirs and their descendants, from the community of Europeans who left Algeria in 1962.  Algeria has a way of going to your head, and staying there, as Alistair Horne noted in his everlasting work on the Algerian war of independence, A Savage War of Peace - "l’Algérie, ça monte à la tête."

“Deux Rives, Un Rêve” (Two Shores, One Dream) is the title of Idir’s album that we picked up before the concert.  That’s exactly what was happening last week in Lyon.

Morocco's Music: Archives to Archnet

His Majesty King Mohammed VI

Paul Bowles Library of Congress

Moroccan Music Collection

Tangier American Legation

Institute for Moroccan Studies

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It was the only way I could think of to get the opus of Morocco's traditional music, recorded in 1959 by Paul Bowles and digitized by TALIM in 2010, into the hands of King Mohammed VI: have a leather presentation case made, embossed with the TALIM logo and dedicated to His Majesty.

US Ambassador to Morocco Dwight Bush now has it, and will present it at an appropriate occasion.  Morocco's musical heritage will have been repatriated after more than fifty years in the vaults of the Library of Congress.

We hope that this will spur the Moroccan Ministry of Culture to action, so that this music - 250 selections from all across Morocco, what Paul Bowles called "as diversified a body of music as one could find in any land west of India" - can get into the hands of Moroccans who treasure their musical heritage.

In the meantime, another avenue for the dissemination of the Bowles Moroccan music collection is being prepared by the Aga Khan Documentation Center in the MIT Libraries, which will make the files available in Archnet

a globally-accessible, scholarly resource focused on architecture, urbanism, environmental and landscape design, visual culture, and conservation issues in Muslim societies.

Archnet is an initiative of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture and the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT..  While there are still certain technical details to be ironed out before the Bowles collection is online accessible, we are thrilled that soon scholars and traditional music enthusiasts worldwide will be able to listen to the entire 72 hours of music.

Archnet already has a Legation page, and we are also working with them to make another rich archive accessible, once it's fully digitized: the TALIM glass negative collection from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, about which we have written on TALIMblog and part of which is now displayed in our museum.

So, researchers eager to see the pictures or listen to the music: hold your horses, please be patient, and we'll be sure to let you know when you can access the collections online.  In the meantime, do check out what Archnet already has in its extensive collections.

Gerald Loftus

The First Farewell

Drawing by Lawrence Mynott, graphic design by Anthea Pender

The eagle - hats off to artist Lawrence Mynott and his American eagle balloon on our invitation cards - has taken off, or almost.  Actually, we're still here for a couple more weeks, so last night's farewell was the biggest but not the last farewell.

Thanks to the generosity of Madison Cox, we were sent off with full flying colors by our Tangier friends, a cross section of this multidimensional city, with donors, staff members, artists, artisans, academics... everyone who has helped us make this place a livelier, more open venue for our wide range of activities.

Four years seems like a brief snippet of time to many who have made Tangier their home, but we wanted to inject as much activity and innovation into those 48 months as possible, and then leave on a high note.

Speaking of notes, we were also graced by the presence of Gospel ensemble the Campbell Brothers, who joined us prior to their open air concert on the Grand Socco, Tangier's lively square which is the transition between medina and modern city.

"Amazing Grace," sung a capella to a hushed audience, was the perfect preview for what was a rousing performance post-party organized by the US Embassy and the American Language Center.

This is not "the last post," so stay tuned for a few more under this byline in the next couple of weeks.  And heartfelt thanks to Madison Cox for putting on a great party, and helping us celebrate this great institution and our brief moment helping more people get to know it.

Gerald Loftus

Ten Years of "Performing Tangier"

Several other intervening events prevented me from properly congratulating Dr. Khalid Amine and his circle in the International Center for Performance Studies on the tenth edition of "Performing Tangier."

Anyone who has put on one academic conference knows the preparation that goes into it.  Now think of that done on an international, multilingual scale, ten years in a row, and with publications to boot, all in Tangier.

The Legation's role in this for 2014 was limited to providing a venue for the launch party, and as you can see from the photo above, the participants got into the swing of things, even though the oud player was properly sedate.

Previous editions of "Performing Tangier" also featured a Legation role, our high point being in 2012 when we did a "site-specific" performance of daughter playing mother at the Legation during wartime Tangier.

And thanks to Khalid Amine and George Roberson for crediting the Legation in the latest edition of their "Performing Tangier" series.  But all congratulations go to them for persevering over the last decade, putting Tangier on the map for drama studies scholars and practitioners from Europe, North America, and Australia.  Happy Tenth, and may there be many more to come!

Gerald Loftus

Tangier Songbooks: Nahón & Cohen, Pomeroy & Paloma

Music image from the Yearbook of the International Folk Music Council

This is how we announced last Friday's event:

A handwritten songbook by Alia Isaac Cohen from 1934 Tangier and a recording from 1929 of two women from Tangier singing traditional ballads and speaking in Haketía will be at the core of the discussion between Dr. Hilary Pomeroy (University College London) and Vanessa Paloma Elbaz (INALCO – Sorbonne Paris Cité).

Eighty years ago Alia Isaac Cohen dated her songbook filled with Romances (Ballads) from the oral tradition. Dr. Pomeroy published an edition and commentary of her songbook in 2005, where she explores the connections that this Moroccan Tangerine matriarch had with the literary tradition from medieval and renaissance Europe.

In 1929, Zarita Nahón recorded Simi Nahón de Toledano in New York while a student of Franz Boas. This recording has been archived at Indiana University’s Archive of Traditional Music. Vanessa Paloma Elbaz (who finished her graduate work in Indiana in 1996) discovered during her research of the Romances of Northern Morocco that her alma mater housed this historic archive and secured a copy to bring back to Morocco to form part of KHOYA: Sound Archive of Jewish Morocco. This recording has never been heard publicly in Morocco and is a rare glimpse into the musical sound of Jewish women from the early twentieth century.

These two scholars will present the written and recorded traces of the Ballads from Tangier and discuss their similarities and differences.

For an eclectic group of scholars and the culturally curious, Hilary Pomeroy on Alia Isaac Cohen and Vanessa Paloma on Zarita Nahón took us through this world of Jews uprooted from Christian Spain, finding refuge in Muslim Morocco, and handing down traditional songs that still evoke the ancient Sephardic homeland of Toledo and Granada.

Thanks to schools like the Alliance Israelite in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, literate women like Cohen and Nahón took to transcribing the ballads or romances.  Even though many were Christian in origin, they told great stories: war, betrayal, adultery, and the accompanying human emotions.  Some were even sung as lullabies; the cadence was the thing, not the lyrics about adulterous, murderous women!

Surviving over the centuries thanks also to their use in specific religious ceremonies or festivals (though some rabbis tried to keep the more racy ballads out of the synagogue), transmission to the modern age was helped enormously by women like Cohen and Nahón.  Zarita Nahón, a Tangier native who studied philology at Columbia, had direct links to the Jewish intelligentsia of the city, whose education and knowledge of foreign languages had made them the ideal dragoman or interpreter/go-between for generations of diplomats in Morocco's diplomatic capital.

Using the metal tube recording technology of the time, Nahón's work resides at Indiana University.  The audience heard several examples.

Vanessa Paloma continues the work of safeguarding this oral tradition, citing her work with elderly women whose faulty memories are suddenly brought into clear focus on hearing Vanessa break into song.  Hilary Pomeroy cited another who recalled "there was always singing; we sang from dawn to dusk."

Making the link with our own lead soldier display from the Malcolm Forbes collection, Hilary Pomeroy spoke of the ballad by Moroccan Jews rejoicing at the death of Don Sebastian, King of Portugal in Morocco's Battle of the Three Kings.  His defeat and death meant that the Jews and Muslims in Morocco would not be forced to convert to Christianity.

Gerald Loftus, text; Mohammed Jadidi, photo

All Ears for Bowles' Moroccan Music

No, TALIMblog has not become "BOWLESblog," but it may seem so, with a recent spate of activity in a surprising number of venues on the man's work recording for posterity the musical heritage of Morocco in 1959.  And anyway, there's already the authoritative Paul Bowles website.

Today, we're featuring a number of very exciting moves, including the upcoming 2 April Marrakesh performance and presentation of a research project related to the Bowles collection of traditional Moroccan music.  Here is sound artist Gilles Aubry's account of his "Ears Preservation" project:

Following the 2010 repatriation of the Bowles Moroccan music collection to Morocco via TALIM, artists Zouheir Atbane and Gilles Aubry have started a collaborative research in order to re-examine discourses and practices related to cultural preservation and audio recording.

Their project, "A Moroccan Anthology of Ears Preservation," involves returning some of the Bowles recordings to their original recording location in order to discuss them with local musicians.

Various questions are addressed in the process, including how to make sense of 50 year old music recordings from a local perspective? Which cultural elements have been preserved? Which ones are missing? What should be done with this collection today?

After the presentation of their installation and "Who Sees the Mystery" at the recent Marrakech Biennale of contemporary art, Aubry & Atbane are now on a residency at the French Institute in Marrakech, further developing their project together with guests Natasha Pradhan, NYU's Anna Reidy and Robert Millis. The results will be presented to the public on 2 April at the Riad Denise Masson in Marrakech.

We are particularly pleased that American scholars Pradhan and Reidy and Swiss researcher Aubry have been among the handful of students of Morocco's music who have taken advantage of our digitized collection of the Bowles Library of Congress recordings.

Meanwhile, back in the United States, we're seeing encouraging efforts to get that digitized collection online, and even to release a four-CD album of excerpts from the collection, updating the two-LP album which was released in the Seventies.  And in Europe, where interest in Bowles' work has always been high in musical and cultural circles, we hope to pursue projects that will further disseminate the music of Morocco that he was instrumental in preserving.

Now, if the Moroccan authorities would just honor their commitment - from 2010, year of the Bowles Centenary - to do something (radio programs? museum of Moroccan music? cultural programs throughout the country?) with the digitized the collection repatriated to Morocco...

Reminds me of what Paul Bowles wrote over a half century ago, "there is no fast way of listening to Berber music."

Text Gerald Loftus; photos Gilles Aubry

Paul Bowles: Saving Morocco's Music

Lynnsay Maynard (photo, left), former public radio producer/host at MPBN, now manuscript reader with Electric Literature (Brooklyn, NY), reflects on the work of Paul Bowles in recording and preserving Morocco's traditional music and the role of the American Legation in continuing his work.  Lynnsay's guest post originally appeared on The View From Fez, probably Morocco's best English-language blog of the cultural scene.  We are happy to "cross-post" with them.

Due to the length of the article, this is a "split post" - just click on the highlighted line midway through the article to continue reading.

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In early March of 1959, the first performances of Tennessee Williams’ play “Sweet Bird of Youth” opened at Martin Beck Theatre in New York City starring Paul Newman and Geraldine Page. Directed by Greek-American Broadway and Hollywood legend Elia Kazan, most famous for conceptualizing ‘method acting’, the production of the Hollywood-lustful gigolo Chance Wayne would go on to garner four Tony Award nominations and enjoy over 350 performances in its initial run. Hidden amongst the dazzling list of cast and crew was the production’s composer: Paul Bowles, an American composer and author known preeminently for his 1949 novel “The Sheltering Sky” and his notoriously colorful expatriate lifestyle in his adopted home base of Tangier, Morocco.

 

Bowles was busy in 1959. A collection of his short stories, “The Hours after Noon”, was published. From Tangier, he was caring for his wife, writer Jane Bowles, who had suffered a debilitating stroke two years prior. A lifelong friend and collaborator of Williams, “Sweet Bird of Youth” marked the third production to which Bowles penned the music. And in the spring, Bowles was awarded a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation totaling $6,800 to fund an expansive project in conjunction with the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress (LOC): travel across Morocco and record as much folk, tribal and modern music as possible.

 

After a weeks’ training on Ampex reel-to-reel recording equipment at the LOC in Washington D.C., Bowles returned to Tangier. In early August, Bowles set out in a Volkswagen Beetle stocked with equipment, bedding and pots and pans accompanied by Christopher Wanklyn, a subdued American associate of Bowles’, and Mohammed Larbi Jilali, a kif-dependent native Moroccan who knew the local officials and the terrain.

 

My stint, in attempting to record the music of Morocco, was to capture in the space of the six months which the Rockefeller Foundation allotted me for the project, examples of every major musical genre to be found within the boundaries of the country... By [December 1959]... I already had more than two hundred and fifty selections... as diversified a body of music as one could find in any land west of India.

 

Paul Bowles, Their Heads Are Green ("The Rif, To Music")

During four, five-week trips separated by days of respite in Tangier, the trio zipped across Morocco visiting 23 cities and towns along the Rif and Atlas Mountains, northern Sahara and southeastern and northern corners operating from a map of Bowles’ design.  In his essay, “The Rif, To Music”, Bowles details portions of the trip including terse negotiations over performance costs, audible gunfire from Oujda, a town 5km west of Algeria which was in the throes of its revolution against French forces and the unbridled joy of a hot shower after days of traversing unpaved back roads.

Blue Mountain, Old Mountain: Bowles by Herrmann

Photo courtesy Irene Herrmann

As I type this, I'm listening to one of Paul Bowles' compositions from Blue Mountain Ballads, his 1946 musical rendition of poetry by his friend Tennessee Williams, inspired by southern American music.  You can listen to selections on Song of America.

But in Tangier last Friday, we had some of those same Bowles ballads live, or as close as we could get to "live" some 15 years after his death.  For the overflow audience at the Legation concert - featuring the inauguration of our new (used-but-tuned) piano - Bowles was almost with us again, thanks to his friend and musical heir Irene Herrmann.  And it wasn't just Irene on piano; we also had her daughter Kaethe Hostetter playing the violin and Latifa Azmy, soprano of Tangier.  What an evening.

Right to left: Irene Herrmann, Kaethe Hostetter, and Latifa Azmy

We have our partners the American Language Center in Tangier and the US Embassy Rabat Cultural Affairs Office to thank for their support.  Here's the ALC's abbreviated YouTube video (approx 20 minutes); other photos in this post courtesy Rachid El Mziryahi, ALC.

Natasha Pradhan of ALC - herself a student of Moroccan traditional music - recorded the concert and has made us a podcast - click here.

Irene Herrmann doesn't just apply herself to the keyboard when she evokes Paul Bowles.  Selections from his oeuvre (spanning seven decades) are interspersed with readings from his and Jane Bowles' letters and published works, and anecdotes - some never heard before in Tangier, where Bowles spent most of his long and productive life.  Her "Paul Bowles, Composer" is a very concise summary of this Renaissance man's musical side, which Bowles, writing in the shadow of Tangier's "Old Mountain," continued even after he became much better known as a writer.

Before Irene Herrmann first met Paul Bowles in Tangier, she had made a pilgrimage to the Henry Ransom Center archives at UT in Austin, finding a wealth of material by Bowles, including unpublished musical scores.  When she met Bowles later in Tangier and played some of these for him, he playfully made her repeat the recital until he admitted that he recognized his own work - but only when she played a false note on the third go.

It was this kind of "insider" relationship - without the slightest shade of name-dropping - that makes Irene such a pleasure, and a treasure.  Though she only knew Bowles in the last decade of his life, her commitment to music - his music - led Paul Bowles to name Irene Herrmann as his musical inheritor.  Irene takes her responsibility very seriously, and is the indispensible reference for work involving not only Bowles' numerous compositions, but also his work to record Morocco's traditional music, a project in which TALIM is very active.

Maybe it's because we have Bowles' music - his compositions, his Moroccan recordings, plus his narration of selected writings - playing at the Legation's Bowles Wing on our iPod continuous loop, but I can hear his melodies echoing in my ear.  Now relatively little known, his music is precise, like the man apparently was (it's evident in his writing, too).  Precise, but melodious, though sometimes the words can strike a jarring note - Irene Herrmann read us some of Jane Bowles' writing set to music, and the poignant frailty of Jane comes through with painful clarity.

Irene Herrmann last saw Bowles in 1999, "shrinking away in bed, yet still precise in his answers."  Herrmann modestly puts herself in the category of mere "performer," and says that Bowles "listened differently; he had a composer's ear."

Those of us who listened to Irene last weekend know that she too has an eye and an ear for detail, and her musical portrait of the man whom some of us never met was a precise as anything that Bowles might have written.  A Bowles evening, with Irene Herrmann.

Gerald Loftus

Paul Bowles and His Synthesizer

"I did a score on synthesizer, but I don’t consider that composing. There’s no compositional technique involved. I suppose it is composing, though, in a different way."

Paul Bowles interview in New Music Box with Frank Oteri and Ken Smith, January 1998.

By the time Bowles self-deprecatingly admitted that he had indeed used a synthesizer, he had already composed incidental music for three plays put on by the Dramatic Society of the American School of Tangier ("music by Paul Bowles, costumes by Yves St. Laurent" - that's the kind of place Tangier was in those days, where even high school plays turned into international talent shows of Tangier's literary and artistic crowd).

Now, thanks to the efforts of Thomas Gunther, Karim Benzakour, and Oliver Orion, the synthesizer which used to sit in Paul Bowles' apartment in Tangier is safely on display in the Legation's Paul Bowles Wing, where it joins a wealth of other material - books, musical scores, paintings, photos - on this Renaissance man of the 20th century.  Thanks to AST - the American School of Tangier - for sharing this piece of history with the museum-going public.

Bowles originally visited Tangier with Aaron Copland, reflecting Bowles' initial vocation, that of composer of modern American music.  His last instrument, acquired in 1992, was a synthesizer.

Joseph McPhillips, then Headmaster of the American School of Tangier (AST), had persuaded his friend Patricia Robinson to finance the purchase of the synthesizer.  Patricia's son Adam Adams brought it to Tangier and taught Bowles the first steps.  Bowles' initial project was to compose the music for the school's production of the Euripides tragedy Hippolytus.

After Adam’s departure, Karim Benzakour of AST (photo at right with Bowles, from the ARTE TV documentary "Der Titan von Tanger") took over as Paul Bowles' synthesizer mentor (click on this link for a YouTube excerpt).  This arrangement continued for several years, until Bowles died in November 1999.  The keyboard came back to the American School of Tangier, until it was given to the American Legation museum in February 2014 for this exhibit.

According to Bowles' musical heir Irene Herrmann, Bowles' last three scores for AST school plays "were created directly on synthesizer."  Our display includes the "floppy discs" for individual "instruments" that got slotted into the synsthesizer, plus other floppies anotated by Bowles "Hippolytes" and "Salomé."

Thanks to Oliver Orion, former music teacher at AST, who first suggested saving the venerable relic from oblivion - see his note painted on the base of the synthesizer at left:

"This machine was used by Mr. P. Bowles to compose music for such AST productions as Salome and Hippolytus.  Since all of its technological wonders can now fit on a mobile phone, perhaps it belongs in a museum, if not in an elec. music class."

Oliver, your advice has been followed!

To Thomas Gunther, an American in Paris and friend of the Legation, whose idea it was to display Bowles' synthesizer as part of our exhibit.

And to Karim Benzakour of AST, who not only taught Mr. Bowles a bit about using the machine, but who has lovingly safeguarded this part of Tangier's past.

Gerald Loftus, text and photos

Tangier to Tinseltown: Sanaa Hamri

Tipped off by proud Mom (Blanca Hamri), I watched her daughter Sanaa on CNN, and then sent the following flash message ("Must-See: Tanjawia-American on CNN") last Sunday morning to the more than 400 people on the TALIM mailing list:

 

I'll be brief: Moroccan - American film director Sanaa Hamri, daughter of Blanca Hamri (formerly of the American School of Tangier) and artist Mohammed Hamri, has made a successful career in New York and Hollywood as a director of music videos, TV programs, and films.

She's profiled on CNN's weekly "African Voices," which is shown at the following times.  If you miss seeing it today Sunday or tomorrow Monday, you can probably watch the episode on the program's website.  The program is shown at the following times (deleted, as it's now online).

 

Check this out, no kidding.  It's a full 30 minutes of Tangier & a great Moroccan-American.  Sanaa is highly intelligent, successful-but-not-a-braggart, an example of what this rich multicultural city and a pair of spunky and talented parents can produce.

I then sent the announcement with this addendum to the members of the American School of Tangier (AST) board of trustees (of which I am a member):

 

"African Voices" appears to be only be broadcast on CNN International, therefore only outside the US.  But if you wait a couple of days, you will be able to see it on the CNN website at this link; look for "Watch Previous Shows."

 

Sanaa (and Blanca) provide some great lines, including "AST was the ticket... education was a great gift..."

What's most impressive is Hamri's evolution.  Starting out as a receptionist at a NY studio, she not only "answers the phones well," as she puts it, but also teaches herself how to use the editing equipment.  Music videos (her clients include the biggest names in pop) come next, which evolve into TV sitcom episodes, which then morph into film directing.

 

But not just any old MTV spot or film.  Sanaa Hamri says that she turns down proposals "if they lack meaning," or sometimes because of their lyrical content: "They're saying nothing."  This woman knows where she's heading.

 

Okay, "local girl does well in Hollywood" - the Tinseltown story has been told before in places like Peoria, and maybe in Tallahassee, but not in Tangier.  Sanaa is a Big Deal, and is obviously a young woman who thinks big, too.  With a map of Morocco and Tangier spotlighted on the TV screen, she tells us that she hopes to establish a film studio in her home town, to rival the majors in Hollywood.

 

With someone of her level of determination - mother Blanca recalls that Sanaa's favorite cartoon character as a little girl was "Mighty Mouse" - who can doubt that she'll give it a shot?

 

Photo: cover story of Urbain Magazine (Tangier, Morocco)

 

Gerald Loftus