Paul Bowles far right, Mohammed Larbi Djilali next to him facing the camera, and Christopher Wanklyn seated next to him, the two others unknown, Marrakech July 1961, snapped by Allen. He and Paul had come to Marrakech for a week to visit with Wanklyn, with whom Paul had spent the previous two years travelling Morocco making field recordings for the Library of Congress.
As Amanda Petrusich puts it in her 2016 New Yorker review of its reissue: Bowles took four recording trips around Morocco between 1959 and 1961. He was accompanied each time by his Ampex 601 reel-to-reel tape machine and two men: Mohammed Larbi Djilali, a fixer of sorts, and Christopher Wanklyn, a member of Tangier’s expat community, who was rather pithily summarized, by Bowles, as “a level-headed Canadian with a Volkswagen and all the time in the world.” The trio spent a lot of time smoking greasy, green hash—kif—pinched from Larbi’s bottomless pouch, and drinking either small cups of rosé or bottles of “piping hot Pepsi-Cola.”
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