The Actual Don Shirley (1927 - 2013)

Much abbreviated, the following brief memoir ran as an op-ed in the L.A. Times on February 3, 2019. I was remarkably prescient. Soon after, the actor who played "Don Shirley" in "Green Book" won Best Supporting Actor, and the film somehow won Best Picture of the Year. Briefly, Donald's music was again seemingly everywhere. 


The African-American pianist Don Shirley wouldn’t be surprised that the country he loved was prepared to embrace a screen version of his prickly persona rather than grapple with the societal questions raised by his music. 

Decades ago, before I moved overseas, for several years we were very good friends.  I met Donald (“I’m not a Don. That’s a stage name.”) in 1980.  I’d just graduated from Yale, and made my way to Manhattan to seek my fortune as an artist.  I was a classical as well as a jazz guitarist; the combination was much rarer then.  I’d been a music major at Yale and was still studying composition. In those days, the famous were more accessible than now.  I looked up Shirley in the phone book—he was unlisted—then called the Musicians’ Union.

I’d discovered his music by accident, haunting a used-record shop near my college apartment.  That solo 1955 LP was one of his best: his improvised sonata on the myth of Orpheus in the Underworld.  I was attracted to the formality of his approach as well as the kudos of the notoriously hard-to-please Igor Stravinsky (“His virtuosity is worthy of gods.”).  The music, by turns dreamily lavish or austerely rational, thrilled me. 

I was particularly taken by how this fellow Shirley suggested the Underworld from the very get-go, restating his opening theme in the parallel minor tonality, then using that idea throughout the sonata.  This organic architecture appealed enormously.

Donald asked me to drop by for a chat.  He lived in a “studio” above Carnegie Hall.  (After nearly fifty years, he moved out just before his death.)  The high-ceilinged place was vast, ornate, a silk-and-antique extravaganza, hung with billowy drapes and festooned with candles and bric-a-brac.  It seemed a temple consecrated to the Steinway grand.  Donald was big, shaven-headed, with a misleadingly sinister mustache.  He spoke regally and softly, an erudite professor or high-pitched priest.  He tolerated only believers, gesturing with agile fingers.  Three doctorates, eight languages.  He rarely stopped moving.  He never stopped talking.  It was exhausting. 

He was then fifty-three.  Difficult to imagine the younger and skinnier man of 1962, on tour in the Deep South with a tough Brooklyn chauffeur, as portrayed by the movie.  Donald never spoke of this to me.  He often spoke of the frustrations of being black.  When I’d call him up and ask what he had to do, he’d invariably answer, “There are only two things I have to do.  Stay black, and die.” 

Race was never far from his mind.  In 1961 Donald wrote, “It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story... Americans who evade, so far as possible, all genuine experiences, have therefore no way of assessing the experiences of others and no way of establishing themselves in relation to any way of life which is not their own.  Thus the idea of my music can be presented without fear of contradiction, since no American has the knowledge or authority to contest it and no Negro has the voice.”

I am white, brought up in Georgia; that last clause broke my heart. 

Shirley’s music has worn well.  Though it can be precious or bombastic, most of the time it remains fresh and audacious.  Donald was right: the tradition of American song is richer than one might suppose.

He grew up a prodigy, son of comfortable Jamaican parents in Pensacola, Florida (his father was an Episcopal minister; his mother, a teacher, died when he was nine; his three brothers became doctors), then attended Catholic University in D.C.  He declared his presence at eighteen with the Tchaikowsky Concerto and the Boston Pops.  Mid-century America wasn’t ready for a black concert pianist, even represented by Sol Hurok.  He was told to go into jazz or pop. 

At the height of his career, the mid-fifties to mid-sixties, he played three hundred concerts a year.  When I knew him, he was down to a handful. 

“Nightclubs are toilets,” he liked to say.  He avoided them.  Many of his versions of standards show a tendency to merge the classics, which Donald had grown up in, with more customary idioms.  He called his versions “transcriptions,” but they’re more like sympathetic re-compositions.  Thus his I Cover the Waterfront contains passages from Ravel’s “Une Barque sur l'Ocean,” and his I Understand is constructed upon a Schubert impromptu.  Today this seems a party trick, an attempt to avoid handling this material as jazz.  But it’s much, much deeper than that.

Donald had an uneasy relationship with jazz.  He often did a comic imitation at the keyboard of the latest hotshot.  He admired Art Tatum, and was pallbearer for both Billie Holiday and Bill Evans; we went one evening to hear the master pianist Ellis Larkins, who was flummoxed to see him.  Donald’s trio consisted of piano, bass, and cello; each player’s part was written; there was no improvisation.  (Indeed, Donald argued there was no true improvisation in jazz, since everybody agreed beforehand on the harmonies.)  Though Donald felt the concert stage was too stuffy, he had a horror of the informality of the jazz club.  “I don’t want someone to slap me on the back and say, ‘Hey, baby!’”

After a career as a jazz musician, I can say with confidence that he was partly wrong.  Though it’s recognized more in practice than in theory, jazz does involve improvised variations on a theme. (See Gunther Schuller’s 1958 analysis of Sonny Rollins’ Blue Seven.)  Donald often aptly decried jazz musicians’ lazy ignorance of classical music.  He recounted with glee having played a recent Stravinsky prelude for Miles Davis, who committed the unpardonable sin of not recognizing it.

Donald had nothing against improvisation; “I improvise very well,” he’d say.  And he did: I once brought him a fugue subject, and watched him improvise a four-voice fugue after subtly improving the original theme.  (I wondered whether to ask him to explain what he’d done.)  He was at heart an organist, with one foot in the Baroque; his Lullaby of Birdland treats the melody as a fugue.  He conceived of the piano as a stringed instrument and of his trio as one enormous stringed instrument.  He was writing chamber music.  This is evident in his trio setting of I Can’t Get Started by Vernon Duke (real name: Vladimir Dukelsky), which sounds like missing pages from a Rachmaninoff piano trio.

I never found out the source of his prodigious bravura technique; he never discussed his teachers, though he’d done a long seminar with “Mr. Rachmaninoff.”  Perhaps, like all virtuosi, he simply bought it from his body with hard work.  He did recommend a wonderful, neglected book, Music At Your Fingertips, by the piano teacher Ruth Slenzynka.  It’s full of solid advice for any instrumentalist.

Donald used to slip from his studio into the back seats of Carnegie Hall so he could listen with disdain.  “Audiences must like watching bad pianists move their fingers.”  One afternoon he showed me a knotty passage from a Beethoven sonata that he was practicing; most of his colleagues cheated on the passage.  Gulda and Entremont were notable exceptions.  He spoke with derision of André Watts, who enjoyed the career that Donald was denied thirty years earlier.  A tragedy of his career is that so few classical recordings exist.

Beyond his talent for embodying the African-American experience in music (try his trio’s Water Boy), Donald’s genius lay in an ability to find the hidden personality of musical material.  (Try his solo LP of spirituals.)  He extended this sympathy to standards: his Blue Skies evokes the Russian heritage of its composer, Irving Berlin.  He was especially insightful about the works of George Gershwin.  When I knew him, Donald was working on a way to play both the piano part to Rhapsody In Blue—which he performed many times—along with a compressed version of the orchestral part.  At the keyboard, he was afraid of nothing. 

One overlooked treasure from his extensive discography is a 1962 LP with the forgotten soprano Martha Flowers—“the alternate, not the understudy, for Leontyne Price.”  It’s a convincing foray of an opera singer into popular material.  The disc also features the finest trio performance of the Porgy and Bess Medley.

Much can be gleaned from examining his two recordings of The Man I Love, done about a decade apart.  In the latter, the melody is played, with arpeggio accompaniment, by left hand alone.  (In performance he’d drop his right hand to his side.)  I believe Donald was influenced by James Joyce, whom he admired greatly; the core of both versions seems to mimic the “Oxen of the Sun” passage from Ulysses, in which Joyce systematically exploits all the styles of English prose in chronological order.  Donald does the same for his variations, from Baroque to classical to romantic to modern.  It’s up to you to follow the stylistic shifts, since he makes it all sound logical and natural. 

Donald taught me—and one lesson of “Green Book” is—we must constantly open ourselves to the diversity of expression offered by artists.  There ought to be room in the society for everybody.  We mustn’t congratulate ourselves that today a Shirley would be encouraged, even welcomed, upon the classical stage.  Often the rarest butterflies go extinct.  But had Donald been allowed to be a concert pianist, we would not have the world of unique music he left us.  As the expression goes, “You can’t have it both ways.  The butter, and the money for the butter.”  This country is very hard on its originals. 

Rey de la Torre (1917–1994)

Written in 2005 as the booklet essay for the Bridge disc Works for Guitar

José Rey de la Torre (Dec. 9, 1917-July 21, 1994) was one of the greatest classical guitarists of the 20th century. This is the first CD issue of any of his thirteen LPs which, recorded from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s, are treasured by connoisseurs but long out of print. It also includes a previously undiscovered live track.

Born in Gibara, Cuba, like many virtuosi Rey got off to a fast start as a child prodigy (“El Nino”). When the family moved to Havana, he took up the guitar at age ten under the guidance of Severino Lopez ((1907-1978), a “young and shy” former pupil of the Catalan Miguel Llobet (1878-1938), who was the foremost guitarist of the era. Rey made fast progress: his first solo recital in Havana, at age twelve, included Sor’s variations on a theme of Mozart, “Granada” by Albeniz, Tárrega’s “Capricho Arabe” and “Recuerdos de la Alhambra.”

In 1932, at fourteen, his family sent him to Barcelona to study with Llobet. Rey wrote a detailed portrait of the master and a tender account of those two and a half years in Guitar Review (Winter 1985). What he left out was his own success there just before returning to Cuba, when Llobet presented him in concert—his programme included a work still at the outer limits of guitar technique, Alfonso Broqua’s “Ritmos Camperos.”

Rey received raves from the tough Barcelona critics, who compared him not only to Llobet but to Casals; composer Jaime Pahissa declared Rey the most complete guitarist he’d ever heard, with “a sweet but powerful tone and an extraordinary technical perfection that permits him to play the most difficult passages with ease.”

The composer and pianist Joaquin Nin-Culmell (1908-2004) recalled meeting Rey back in Havana just after his return. “As a young performer he was astounding. His playing was aristocratic and exact, quite different from the romantic, improvisational school of Segovia. He had a truly purist mind; this purism went into his concept of technique, which he got from Llobet but which he took much, much further. He was one of the very few guitarists with a respect for the musical text. And I’ve met very few musicians as well read as Rey, a man of extraordinary culture and interests. Even when he was twenty, he had a tremendous literary, cultural, philosophical, and political point of view.”

When Rey began his career, the present worldwide popularity of the classical guitar, so easy to take for granted, was still many years away. The guitar was, as Rey wrote, “practically unknown to musical audiences and. . . largely ignored by the classical performers.” Beginning with his Barcelona debut in 1934 at sixteen, for over four decades Rey concertized across North America, Europe, and parts of Central America, the Caribbean, and the Middle East, and did much to bring the instrument the worldwide respect it enjoys today. His New York recitals (mostly Town Hall, but also Carnegie Hall, Alice Tully, and the Metropolitan Museum) became annual milestones. He made countless radio and TV appearances.

For the historical record, Rey gave world premieres of Joaquin Nin-Culmell’s “Six Variations on a Theme by Milán” in (Town Hall, N.Y.C., Nov. 10, 1947); of José Ardevol’s “Sonata” (Woodstock, N.Y., Sept. 3, 1950); of Julián Orbón’s “Preludio y Danza” (originally “Preludio y Toccata,” in 1953); and of Carlos Chavez’s “Three Pieces for Guitar” (Alice Tully, N.Y.C., Nov. 14, 1969; written back in 1923). He also performed in the premiere of Villa-Lobos’ “Introduction to the Chôros” (N.Y.C., August 1962). And I believe but cannot confirm that he was the first guitarist to perform in its totality the seven-movement suite, “Evocaciones Criollas,” of Alfonso Broqua.

Rey made the first recordings of works by Sor, Giuliani, Tárrega, Cervantes, Falla, Grau, Torroba, Rodrigo, Ponce, Lee, as well as the Boccherini, Nin-Culmell, and Orbón pieces included here. He may also have been the first guitarist to record duets by performing both parts himself.

As Michael Lorimer says, “When the guitar world had few great performers, Rey gave a standard of excellence to which to aspire. As the outstanding student of Miguel Llobet, who was the most distinguished performer in the school of Tárrega, Rey directly linked us to that fountainhead of guitaristic tradition. At the same time, Rey’s collaborations with composers provided the literature beautiful new vistas.”

When the two recordings presented herein were made, Rey had built a busy concert career in the USA over the years since his 1938 New York debut. He’d also made five prior LPs which, for various reasons, were unsatisfying to him. However, once he met the two Shulman brothers, his recording luck changed. Though their Philharmonia proved a short-lived label, Rey accounted for two of Philharmonia’s dozen releases, and under several titles the solo LP thrived for many years as a Nonesuch LP and cassette.

It remains one of the essential guitar recordings, with all the glories of Rey’s poetic, precise playing evident a half-century on—his rich and nuanced tone, his exquisite phrasing and sense of line, his bravura technique and profound musicality. (Let those who insist that today’s players have surpassed those of yesteryear consider the fact that this recording was made without any edits.)

The Boccherini Quintet in D—of which this is the first recording—was done just three days before Rey’s 33rd birthday. He had recently received his first of two superb guitars from Hermann Hauser I, arguably the preeminent luthier of the era, and this instrument would prove his beloved “workhorse” for the rest of his career. (Prior to the Hauser, Rey faithfully performed and recorded on a 1931 Simplicio chosen for him in Barcelona by Llobet.)

The Stuyvesant Quartet was one of the finest mid-century chamber groups in the U.S., with a repertoire of remarkable breadth. The quartet’s founders, Alan and Sylvan Shulman, had started Philharmonia, and this disc was the label’s second release. (Side Two was Gian Francesco Malipiero’s “Rispetti e Strambotti,” already reissued on CD.) Apart from its historical importance, the Boccherini performance is notable for a warmth and dynamism that remain unsurpassed. One reviewer pointed out that “the guitarist. . . fits into the quintet group as though he had been a regular member of long standing.”

Here the famous ‘castanets’ passage in the closing Fandango—usually handled by the cellist, tapping the instrument’s body—was played by Rey with his fingernails on the side of his new Hauser, while cellist Alan Shulman took over the pedal figure from the guitar part. (According to Rey, this was Alan’s idea; he was trying to protect the finish on his cello, made by Joseph Dalaglio in Mantua, circa 1800.)

The solo LP, which Rey remembered as “a work of love,” was made over the course of a couple of days in July, 1952. As legendary engineer Norman Pickering recalled, fifty-two years later, “Rey and I had a short but intense relationship. He was a wonderful man, and a wonderfully sensitive musician. I liked him enormously; to this day I’ve never heard another guitarist like him. He was so smart, so easy to work with. He didn’t have any problems, he was totally non-temperamental about recording. He would play things over and over with no objections so I could get the right sound. Complete takes, with no splices—this was how I always worked. Both discs were recorded in the same church. It’s large, of rough stone, with a long reverberation time. I used a single microphone recording him solo, and for the quintet too, placed carefully: a Neumann U-47.”

Rey’s abiding memory of the session was carpets hung in the church to help the sound, and a touch of whiskey being drunk by those listening, not working.

We have included Rey’s original liner notes, which appeared in part on the Philharmonia version of the LP (and an Elektra reissue) and in full on the Nonesuch version. It would be difficult to praise this recording too highly. Though Rey’s later five Epic LPs are superb, revered within the guitar world and awaiting CD reissues of their own, they were made under trying circumstances, far removed from the ease and camaraderie of working with Pickering and the Shulmans. The present two LPs were an Eden in Rey’s recording life, and he looked back on them with pleasure and pride.

It’s worth noting that the pieces in whose development he had a hand have some aspect which is entirely new on the instrument (like the “false harmonics” in the final crescendo of the Orbón). Because of his deep friendships with Nin-Culmell and Orbón, as well as Llobet’s urging, Rey always thought of the guitar in orchestral terms. His attention to dynamics, muting, and registration, his devotion to finding ways to give a score maximum life on the guitar, came from constantly thinking orchestrally.

The Villa-Lobos Etude #11 shows how electrifying a live performer Rey was. Having already recorded the piece for Epic, his interpretation reflects a longstanding friendship with the composer (who praised Rey for playing his work “like a great guitarist and like a true Brazilian.”). This track was only recently unearthed.

As his career flourished, Rey began to have increasing trouble with his right (plucking) hand, a problem unrelated to the later rheumatoid arthritis which would end his concertizing. During the late 1950s and 1960s he found his middle finger weaker and less responsive, with a tendency to under-reach; having never had any problems with technique, he was forced to compensate via complex re-fingerings.

The solution came through Marianne Eppens, a Swiss physical therapist whom he met socially. She realized the problem was due to Rey pampering his right hand to avoid injury or breaking a nail; the delicate mechanism of muscles had become imbalanced from unnatural under-use. She encouraged Rey to put his hand back to active everyday use, and in months he was cured. In 1969 he and Marianne married and left New York for California. Except for two years on Staten Island in the mid-70s, Rey spent the rest of his life in the San Francisco area.

In 1975 Rey was diagnosed with the rheumatoid arthritis which soon twisted his hands and left him crippled. His final concerts, in ’75 and ’76, were played while heavily dosed on anti-inflammatory drugs. The last twenty years of his life were spent in severe pain, and his courage in the face of major setbacks (both knees replaced, a quadruple bypass) was heroic. His marriage to Marianne was profoundly happy and her devotion was, as he put it, “saintly.”

He continued to teach until even that became too arduous. It was inexpressibly poignant to see him during this time—a giant who had once played the most difficult pieces with grace and ease, now unable, as he said, “to play even first-year positions.” Still, even as illness ended his performing at its zenith, it made him a better teacher. Childless, he was loved by students as a surrogate father. Rather than clinging to the faded splendor of what his playing had been, he tried to pass on all he knew, sharing his knowledge (as he wrote of Llobet) as one shares one’s daily bread with a friend. He could explain anything.

It is unfortunate that we have had to wait so long for these discs to see the light of day again. Sometimes it is difficult to grasp how very quickly the vagaries of time can erase a performer’s legacy; the familiar name becomes an unfamiliar ghost. Now, at least, the classical guitar audience will have one of the instrument’s great poets, at his magnificent best, before them again, more than a half-century later. May he never be forgotten.

Luiz Bonfá

Written in 2004 as the booklet essay for the Folkways disc Solo in Rio

This is the historic first release on CD of one of Luiz Bonfá’s masterpieces, complete at last. Because the Smithsonian possesses the original master tapes (part of the generous legacy of the innovative recording engineer Emory Cook), the disc comprises all seventeen tracks from the 1959 Cook LP (#1134),O Violão de Luiz Bonfá, plus nearly another half hour of never-released material. This includes not just alternate takes but pieces which Bonfá never recorded elsewhere.

Even within Bonfá’s enormous output, the Cook recording remains very special. Every guitar aficionado will enjoy hearing Luiz thrive in that most challenging situation, of playing solo. His warmth, intimacy, and dynamism suffuse every track; he plays the most treacherous passages with characteristic effortlessness, and sounds absolutely free and relaxed on this unforgiving instrument. The number of tracks apparently improvised on the spot only adds to the virtuosic allure. It is simply how the man played, on one of his best days before a microphone.

Though Bonfá was technically superb — to my mind, one of the great guitarists of the 20th century — he always puts his prodigious abilities at the service of the music. It is never virtuosity for its own sake, or to impress; his innovations always arise with some specific musical effect in mind. As Cook wrote in his original liner notes: “The ten Bonfá fingers, presumably in a fairly marital state at birth, are now collectively and separately divorced, each from the others to such an extent that it has been facetiously suggested that he should carry at least five paid-up union cards.”


Luiz Floriano Bonfá (October 17, 1922—January 12, 2001) was born in what he called the “jungle village” of Santa Cruz, Brazil, the son of an Italian immigrant. He took up the guitar at age 11 — it was a birthday present — and, serious from the beginning, quickly absorbed all the local teacher had to offer. With the apparent luck that seems to follows people of unusual destiny, a short time later the boy was at a party in Rio and met the Uruguayan classical guitar master Isaias Savio, a resident of the city, who asked him to play and then immediately offered to teach him.

By that time — the mid-1930s — Savio (1902-77) was one of the finest and most widely knowledgeable guitarists in South America. He had studied with the great Miguel Llobet (a Catalan, the most eminent disciple of the 19th century Spanish master Francisco Tarrega), and was thus able to pass on to the young Bonfá a demanding, systematic approach that would also encourage an original and flexible style to develop freely. Three years of these weekly lessons, which meant a 2½ hour train trip each way, gave Luiz a thorough knowledge of 18th and 19th century repertoire and of the most highly developed “school” of the classical guitar — which remains a notoriously individualized instrument in terms of technique compared to, say, the violin or the piano.

“Savio was extraordinary to study with,” Bonfá remembered years later. “Unlike many teachers, he was the friend of his students. We were like one big family of pupils with a spectacular father.” Bonfá would eventually reply in kind by sending a promising boy named Carlos Barbosa-Lima, now one of today’s best-known classical guitarists, to Savio.

Though Savio had declared that Bonfá could become one of the world’s top classical soloists, Luiz was increasingly drawn to the idea of dedicating himself to Brazil’s popular music. (The ever open-minded Savio supported this decision.) By his late teens Luiz was expanding his formal training to the work of making a living playing in Rio’s nightclubs, hotels, and casinos.

This was a tremendously creative era in Brazil’s popular music culture, due partly to a hunger for live music on the radio stations. Traditional forms like chôro, serenata, and samba were being invigorated and reinvented; others, like waltzes and boleros, were being given an ever more Brazilian intonation as their own local roots deepened. The influence of jazz from the U.S.A. was penetrating as well. Bonfá ended up performing and recording as both guitarist and singer with a successful vocal group, the Quitandinha Serenaders; when he left them, his stand-in was briefly the young João Gilberto. Luiz eventually wrote several songs that became hits for other singers, like “Ranchinho de Palha,” “Sem esse Céu,” “Cançao do Vaqueiro,” and most notably “De Cigarro em Cigarro” (‘From Cigarette to Cigarette’).

Many of Bonfá’s most dramatic instrumentals(“Sambolero,” “Uma Prece,” “Batucada,” “Dança India”) similarly date from his early twenties. His compositional style on the guitar was already mature — a sense of exuberant virtuosity allied to a mood of tender joy, amid a still-audacious ability to imitate several percussion instruments at once. What would come later was an equally daring, liberated harmonic sensibility which sprang from his deep love of impressionism and of Debussy in particular.

Around 1946 Bonfá met his other main mentor, who was less a teacher and more a musical elder brother: the guitarist Anibal Augusto Sardinha (1915-55).“Garoto” was a rare original who managed to combine a range of disparate classical and folk influences into an impressionistic, fervently Brazilian style that was passionate, technically brilliant, and harmonically idiosyncratic. Though only seven years older than Bonfá, Garoto had become extremely well-known through many radio performances, and was able to help Luiz in the early stages of his career.

Bonfá called Garoto “my dear friend by whom I was greatly influenced, a musical genius far ahead of his time . . . it was he who got me my first job with Radio Nacional. In spite of his great ability he was a truly humble man. We used to get together at his place in Copacabana and jam for hours, just the two of us.” Garoto’s stepdaughter Maria Alice de Medeiros Rosa — Luiz was later best man at her wedding in New York — remembers that Luiz and his guitar were constant visitors in the Rio household, along with other luminaries of Brazilian music. As she put it, “In terms of the guitar, Garoto always spoke of Bonfá as the best. And of course Luiz always spoke of Garoto as the best.”

Luiz first recorded as a leader in 1945, and by the time of the present disc (1959) he’d released under his own name about fifteen 78 rpms, mostly for Continental, and about a dozen LPs, mostly for Odeon — and played on plenty of other artists’ discs. [This is all detailed on the Bonfá Discography Website, the labor of love of two collectors, Koichi and Motoko Yasuoka, who have tirelessly put together the world’s most extensive Bonfá archive. [Http://kanji.zinbun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/%7Eyasuoka/Bonfa]


Brazilian popular music was changing rapidly, as the old forms acquired a languid, contemporary cool that was eventually labeled bossa nova (“the new knack,” “the new thing,” or “the new swing”). Bonfá was an architect of this sound, along with Antonio Carlos Jobim, João Gilberto, Baden Powell, and others, but the movement’s popularity sprang from an authentic feeling that was now simply in the air, and seemed to reside in every melody.

Bonfá was both partly responsible for it and partly absent from it. In 1957 he’d gone to New York, knowing little English, and found that “no one knew me or anything about Brazilian music.” Once again a chance invitation to a cocktail party brought him luck, for Mary Martin — an enormously successful singing star, Broadway’s Peter Pan — heard him play that night for fellow guests, and straightaway offered him a feature spot on a 60-city tour. Subsequent tours with her, and frequent TV appearances, helped him establish a Brazilian beachhead with U.S. audiences and record labels. For the next fifteen years Luiz lived in both countries, with a steady emphasis on the U.S.A.

The year before, 1956, Luiz had been the guitarist in a Rio musical theater piece with a marvelous ensemble; he’d added one number to the score, which was by his friend Jobim, with a libretto by the prominent poet Vinicius de Moraes. Orfeu da Conceição set the Orpheus legend in Rio, and got enough notice to attract the French director Marcel Camus, who in 1958 went down to Brazil to film the story within the setting of carnaval.

By this time Luiz was busy in the States, but he returned to Rio during a month off from the Mary Martin tour. When director Camus heard that Luiz was in the city, he asked him to write a melody for the main character. With a mere week to go before his flight back to the U.S., Luiz came up with a theme overnight that was liked by everyone involved except Camus, who asked him to try again. He did so, but when the new theme was approved by the director, Luiz insisted that the prior song was better, and argued until Camus relented.

When Orfeu Negro (‘Black Orpheus’) went on to win the ’59 Palme d’Or at Cannes (and the Oscar for Best Foreign Film), Bonfá’s “Manhã de Carnaval” became the #1 hit in Europe and one of the most recorded songs in history. The entire soundtrack, which included Jobim’s “A Felicadade,” helped coalesce the coming awareness of bossa nova. (Over the years, Bonfá wrote or participated in quite a few soundtracks; his “The Gentle Rain,” from a lackluster 1966 film, has become a jazz mainstay.)

In the late sixties and early seventies Luiz rode out the bossa nova wave and, by spending more and more time in the U.S., became far better known here than in Brazil. Despite his uneven records during this time — which often feel as if it wasn’t he making the paramount decisions — Bonfá remained as innovative as ever, ready to experiment with a subtle compositional use of electronic effects like echo and delay on his classical guitar sound.

In 1971, apparently mid-career, he left the States and moved back to Rio. Afterward he explained that, “An artist has to look out or all the pressure will destroy him. Brazil is a slow, relaxed country, and I have many things aside from music that I enjoy doing.” These included collecting vintage cars and raising exotic birds and plants. On a visit to New York he told an old friend, “You’ve seen what it’s like in Rio — which would you choose?”

Bonfá’s later career seems a gradual happy withdrawal from the rat race of the music business. Always peripatetic, he still did concert tours to Europe and Australia and the occasional U.S. concert with the likes of Dave Brubeck. Regrettably, he rarely recorded solo after the superb 1972 LP Introspection, though with customary amiability he continued to record, often with lesser musicians. Still, it is impossible to know his magnificent early solo work, like the present disc, and not dream about the later introspections we never got to have.

In the 1980s and early 1990s Luiz returned to New York for several club dates and made a couple of compact discs. All the old gentleness of touch was still there, but soon afterward Alzheimer’s set in, and eventually left him unable to play and ever more remote from the person he’d been. He died in his beloved Rio from prostate cancer at 78.


It is a sad truth of the music profession that though a performer may sustain a long and fruitful career, his recordings usually telescope into a much shorter period with the kind of public attention that supports record contracts. Yet Bonfá’s recording career ran from 1945 until 1996 and spans over fifty discs; indeed, he was one of those rare performers whose first recordings were issued on 78s and whose last appeared as CDs.

Bonfá’s golden era is the decade that began in the early 1950s, when he and Jobim and Gilberto and a few others were inventing a fresh sound. Everyone knows about the popular boom of the bossa nova — so often degraded across a half-century by overuse in the wrong hands, yet in retrospect so remarkably invulnerable, for those original recordings still glow with the luminous poetry of a new magic entering the world.

One can debate the relative strength of its different roots — strains of jazz, the rich tradition of Brazilian popular music of earlier eras, plus elements of a South American classical tradition particularly as incarnated by Villa-Lobos — but at the heart of bossa nova were a dozen extraordinary young musicians who all listened to each other, and together heard life differently than anyone before.

This decade is the gravitational center of Bonfá’s most fascinating work. Sadly, very few guitarists nowadays, of any genre, are aware of Luiz’s mastery. Like the general public, they remember him not as a guitarist but only as the composer of three standards: “The Gentle Rain,” “Samba de Orfeu,” and “Manhã de Carnaval” (the latter variously referred to as ‘A Day in the Life of a Fool,’ ‘Morning of the Carnival,’ and ‘Black Orpheus’).

It seems surprising in the face of fifty-odd records, but until very recently it took determination to hunt down any discs of Bonfá’s serious work; even now many of his best LPs have not yet been re-released on CD. One danger of living in an age of cultural achaeology is that it’s easy to assume the treasures of yesteryear have all been unearthed and re-issued. The collectors know different.


Emory Cook (1913-2002) was once referred to as “the best ear in the U.S.A.” In an era when most classical guitar LPs can seem as if they were made in the same tiny bathroom, the sound Cook achieved here is detailed, unadorned, spacious, and uncolored by the usual mushy reverb. His widow Martha Cook has pointed out that Cook “liked the guitar in general, and played classical guitar quite well himself. When he began to court me, this is the record he brought to my house and played over and over.”

His trademark was an ability to make vital recordings on the spot, with no need of a studio. “He’d take his microphones and his Nagra — a portable tape machine — and go travel for months at a time. He specialized in field recordings; he had started off by recording the sounds of the sea and the sky. He always worked relentlessly at placing his microphones. He just wouldn’t give up until he got perfection.”

On this particular odyssey he also recorded in Mexico, Ecuador, and the Caribbean; Martha believes that Luiz was the only artist Cook recorded in Brazil. Unfortunately, the Cook archives contain no information on where the LP was made, or over how many days. The cover merely states, “... popular, serious, samba and a few songs / all recorded on Nagra in Rio de Janeiro.”

1959 was a busy year for Luiz. He toured with Mary Martin as a featured soloist until the spring. At some point he did a first-rate recording in the U.S. for Atlantic Records (Amor!) then returned to Rio, where he made this recording, using (according to the original liner notes) a “Model HS Series E Do Souto.” It sounds — and looks — like the same guitar Bonfá used on many LPs he made at about this time: a spruce top with Brazilian rosewood back and sides, judging by the cover photo.

In delving into the work of a popular instrumentalist like Bonfá, we’re appreciating someone who is creating music not for the larger world of many other interpreters (as a composer usually intends), but primarily to play himself. As a result we sometimes end up judging him on the collective strengths of his artistic personality, the sum of all the work, rather than on the quality of an individual piece. His style, not any particular composition, in effect becomes the opus.

The 31 extremely diverse cuts on this disc fall into three categories: original compositions (19), which Bonfá played somewhat differently each time; probable outright improvisations (9), done on that day’s spur-of-the-moment; and his semi-improvised versions of other’s compositions (3).

Thus, except for three cuts, the music on this disc is entirely by Luiz. This alone made him a rarity within the guitar world of the 1950s, no matter what style. Even rarer was that so much of this particular LP was improvised.

One crucial aspect of Bonfá’s artistic personality is that he was happy to make up the music literally while he played it. The guitarist, musicologist, and composer Brian Hodel has recounted a puzzling Rio afternoon spent trying to extract an ideal performance of “The Gentle Rain” from Luiz to transcribe, and watching him play it totally differently a few times before it dawned on Hodel that Luiz was not only improvising, but instinctively disinclined to repeat himself. Each version was unique, and valid.

The implicit question — How much is improvised? — tends to be knotty for any genre that involves musicians making up substantial parts of a performance as they play. Every jazz musician improvising on “Summertime” assumes his colleagues know the song’s structure and have sufficiently acute ears to follow any harmonic substitution and melodic byway that strike at a moment’s whim. (Ditto a flamenco guitarist, a blues saxophonist, an Indian vina player.)

Jazz scholars sometimes argue the point of honor of how much so-and-so is making up on the spot — as if a wholly-improvised performance is more “honest,” whatever that means — without admitting that a large percentage of a piece is necessarily agreed-on in advance. In effect, what is occurring in all these genres is improvised variations on pre-existing material.

This is far from the Western classical tradition of improvising that has, save among master organists, largely died out. In Bach’s day, for instance, any keyboardist worth his job could create a four-voice fugue from scratch, and there are many accounts of Mozart’s and Beethoven’s improvisational abilities, only hinted at by the piano Fantasy, op.77.

The chief drawback of improvisation is that it’s difficult to invent a compelling structure off-the-cuff; hence the long tendency of musicians to turn to the ready-made one, be it a fugue or a 32-bar song. For the musician giving it life, the structure is liberating by being understood from the start, a skeleton waiting to be fleshed out. But even with no structure at all, there’s often considerable beauty in an improvisation intended solely to express the mood of a moment, the free-flowing river of an acute musical imagination and its fingers. That fleeting sense of pure fantasia, of expressing the tidal currents of a dreaming mind even as an idea quickens to life and then vanishes, is one of music’s unique capabilities. At this, Luiz Bonfá was a master.

In practicing the rigorous art of improvising an entire piece from scratch, Luiz is a virtual anomaly within the world of Brazilian guitar, at least as preserved on record. There are plenty of accounts of major Brazilian guitarists as adept improvisers — say, Garoto (1915-55), Bola Sete (1928-87), Paulinho Nogueira (1929-2003), and Baden Powell (1937-2000), among others — but precious few recordings as examples. Yet for cut after cut, Emory Cook allows us to hear Luiz doing it in front of the microphones. [I suspect that part of the LP Introspection was also improvised.]

Naturally, we as listeners are inevitably always up against our own expectations. We approach a Schoenberg sonata differently than a Bach mass, an Indian raga, a tango, or a Broadway song; this is as it should be. In a wide world where all are far more easily available than a decade ago, it is important to try to hear what each is trying to say, to learn to listen in as many different ways as possible — both to appreciate what each is, and not expect any to be what they are not. (As the artist and poet Dolber B. Spalding aptly wrote in a 1977 essay for Chelys, a music quarterly, “One thousand mice do not equal a horse.”)

What I’m getting at is that even though this disc contains magnificent performances of several melodies that will still be played long after we are all dead, it also contains a number of slighter Bonfá pieces, made up on the spot, that are only passing remarks and fancies — albeit of a singular musical personality. They would sound quite different played by any another guitarist, no matter how good, and probably come across wrong in those other hands. Their purpose is merely to express a brief human moment, not to construct a cathedral. They are best approached as part of a visit with Luiz Bonfá, which is the overriding mood of this record. As a guitarist he could do no wrong; no one has spoken more deeply, intimately, and exuberantly on six nylon strings that — until just a decade before this recording — had always been spun from animal’s guts.


Having now lived with this recording over many months in preparing these notes, I’ve been reminded countless times of the sense of wonder and mystery with which, as a young guitarist, I first encountered it over twenty-five years ago. Now I know — most of the time — what Luiz is actually doing; and yet it is no less wondrous. I have played my original scratchy copy for many friends across the decades, and whether or not they were musicians, they were all aware of being in the presence of true human magic, and that almost tactile thrill which comes from hearing a performer on one of his best days. Luiz Bonfá was one of nature’s musicians: a man who could transmit beauty easily and intimately, and who was afraid of nothing on the guitar. I am happy to be able to say, after all these years, that he remains as great an inspiration and a joy as when I first heard the sounds of that unique poetic spirit.


Selected Luiz Bonfá discography:

Luiz Bonfá (Continental, 1955)
Orfeu da Conceição (Odeon, 1956)
Alta Versatilidade (Odeon, 1957); issued as Brazilian Guitar (Capitol Records)
Violão Boêmio (Odeon, 1957)
Bonfafá (Odeon, 1958)
Meu Querido Violão (Odeon, 1958)
Amor! (Atlantic, 1959)
A Voz e o Violão (Odeon, 1960)
Pery Ribeiro e Seu Mundo de Canções Românticas (Odeon, 1962)
Luiz Bonfá Plays and Sings Bossa Nova (Verve, 1962)
Violão Boêmio vol. 2 (Odeon, 1963)
Jazz Samba Encore! (Verve, 1963, with Stan Getz, Antonio Carlos Jobim, and Maria Toledo)
Introspection (RCA, 1972)
Bonfá Burrows Brazil (Cherry Pie, 1978)
Non-Stop to Brazil (Chesky, 1989)

Selected reading:

Scores

Brian Hodel, “The Brazilian Guitar,” (Dennis McMillan Publishing,1983; out-of-print; contains 5 transcriptions)
Luiz Bonfá, “The Music of Luiz Bonfá: Four Pieces” (ed. Carlos Barbosa-Lima, Guitar Solo Publications, 1987)

Musicology

Brian Hodel, “Luiz Bonfá, Ambassador of Brazilian Swing” Guitar Player, May 1983
Brian Hodel, “Spotlight on Luiz Bonfá,” Guitar Review, Winter 1984
Brian Hodel, “The Brazilian Guitar,” Guitar Review, Winter 1991

Selected filmography:

Black Orpheus (Orfeu Negro), dir. Marcel Camus, 1959

Tommy Crook

Written in 2002 as the booklet essay for the duo-guitar disc 110° in the Shade

One perennial truth of this country is that it contains an immense well of unknown artistic talent, hidden far from the loud hype of cities, yet every bit as skillful and profound as the big names building more flamboyant careers. The history of the arts in America has rarely given enough credit, outside folk genres, to the special talent who simply wants to make his own quiet way near home—the genius in his back yard.

Even the most ardent guitar aficionado would’ve had to pay very close attention over the last decades to run across the name of Tommy Crook (born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, February 16, 1944). Apart from a few mentions in Guitar Player, and consistent championing from Chet Atkins, Ray Benson, and former student Tuck Andress, Crook has flourished in national obscurity since his beginnings as a child prodigy. Tuck has called Tommy “magnificent, one of the most amazing solo guitarists on the planet . . . a personal and musical hero of mine” and joked that watching Tommy play in a nightclub was “as if Godzilla had walked into the room, swishing his tail.”

Tommy has specialized in solo guitar for thirty-five years, but since he rarely leaves Tulsa, and rarely records, he is largely unknown, one of those whispered myths of American music—the jazz and country virtuoso whom few have heard of, and fewer outside Oklahoma have actually heard. Along with his astonishing fingerboard facility, and an ability to sound like two fine guitarists playing with a better-than-average bass player, he also has a mind-boggling overdrive gear, with a thousand textures at his command.

And beyond the evident virtuosity and power, there are strong country roots, the rich diverse soils he grew out of, for he is an entirely self-taught “ear player.” This vein of Americana runs deep throughout Tommy’s playing and gives it much of its particular flavor—a genuineness of expression, a from-the-earth sincerity that we associate with American folk music and which lends his jazz playing a highly distinctive accent.

Of course, that’s not how he hears himself.

“Everything I do,” Crook says with characteristic modesty, “I’ve stolen from somebody. I don’t think I’ve ever thought of anything original. It may come out different, because I’ve got a little of this and a little of that, all these influences. I’m just trying to keep from having to get a daytime job. I’ve been lucky so far. I practice every day because I know I can play better.”

Tommy’s main guitar is a 1957 Gibson ES-5 Switchmaster whose 5th and 6th strings are tuned a full octave lower than standard (.074 /.080 gauges). The advantages are obvious: you end up with a fourth more range than even a 7-string guitar has (down to low E, an octave below normal pitch), plus the fingering patterns are the same—although as Tommy says, you have to keep in mind that you’re playing “a 4-string guitar and half a bass.”

“I got the idea from a Wichita friend, Bob Wylie—a wonderful guitar player and an electronic wizard, the inventor of the Guitarorgan. Back then [1968] I was working with a trio, but things were tough, so we had to cut it back to me, a drummer, and a trumpet player. I’d seen Bob using bass strings on his guitar, so I tried it. Then we had to let the trumpet go, and worked as a duo for a while. Pretty soon I ended up solo, and I’ve done that ever since.”

Until now there has been little recorded Tommy Crook available. There was a fine ’70s duo LP with a drummer and a superb 1988 solo cassette, few copies of which left Tulsa. In ’91 Tommy made another cassette with fiddle player Shelby Eicher, a frequent colleague. In 1998 he did four tracks for a video anthology, Masters of Fingerstyle Guitar—in whose otherwise accurate liner notes his improvisations are incorrectly called “arrangements.”

Grapeshot Records will be releasing at least two extraordinary solo discs of Tommy in the near future. They will, I can assure you, have been well worth the very long wait. Like this duo recording, they came about on the strength of coincidence and friendship a couple of years ago.

As a jazz and classical guitarist working around New England and New York, I’d become steadily intrigued by the Tulsa mystery. Tuck had spoken to me reverently of Tommy, whom he’d studied with in high school, but I hadn’t had any luck trying to find the legendary cassette via the usual out-of-print sources. Those cuts on the video absolutely stunned me, and made up my mind. In April 2000, en route from Boston to a gig in Flagstaff, I realized I could stop off in Tulsa, so I called up Tommy to suggest having a couple of lessons. I could tell he thought I was some East Coast crackpot, but he agreed, and one hot noon I found myself disembarking from a taxi at the Crooks’ home, watching a tall, gangly man come ambling out to greet me.

Twenty minutes later Tommy and I had hauled a huge Fender amp into his cozy, flowering back yard—his wife Glenda is a virtuoso gardener—set it on a long wooden workbench, plugged into an extension cord from his tool shed, and pulled out both guitars. Five hot minutes later I’d seen and heard it all in person. I didn’t believe it then, and I’m not sure I believe it now.

We ended up playing nonstop for the next three days. I joined him on an art museum gig with a singer, and I didn’t have to eat a single lunch or dinner at my hotel, thanks to a typical generous Crook family welcome. I returned to Boston convinced that Tommy was a national treasure, and determined to find him a record contract. Luckily Grapeshot Records founder Anton Glovsky—who happens to be an experienced engineer—was eager to be involved. Four months later Anton and I flew out to Oklahoma, laden with recording gear.

The goal was to record Tommy solo. This meant capturing him both in performance at a Tulsa club one night and spending four sweltering days using a “portable studio” which Anton set up in the house of Tommy’s late brother-in-law, on a quiet residential street. In a steaming August, it proved ideal: a small, empty room with natural reverb, central air-conditioning, a ceiling fan, and no one to bother us. We could leave all the equipment and guitars there, go have dinner up the street with Glenda and daughter Bonnie (age nine), and just pick up the next morning where we’d left off.

Amid Tommy recording a remarkable seventy-five tunes solo over five days, sometimes with multiple takes, we also gradually made this disc of duets. There were no arrangements or rehearsals. Whenever Tommy got sick of playing by himself, I’d pick up my guitar and we’d simply record what struck our fancy at that moment. We sat about three feet apart, facing each other, both recording directly into the board, and despite headphones we could talk to each other while we played, so it felt very natural and straightforward. Best of all, we could see exactly what the other was doing, which made split-second decisions easier.

For me the greatest appeal of these tracks is to hear how differently Tommy plays when he isn’t carrying the weight of the world by accompanying himself—though the astute listener will realize those very low bass notes even in the midst of his blistering solos are still him, not me. It’s also illuminating to hear what a sensitive, deft accompanist he is, with a lightning anticipation and an incredibly subtle harmonic ear—the strongest ally that anyone could ask for. The embracing warmth and ferocious energy of the man come through constantly, in every note he plays.

We think of these recordings as like an unplanned conversation between two friends who are each ready to follow wherever the other wants to go. They were done in a spirit of improvisation, and should be enjoyed and judged that way. They were also one of the happiest musical experiences of my life.

I hope we get to do it again soon, Tommy.

In Touch: The Letters of Paul Bowles

I wrote this for the Boston Book Review in Fall 1994. Bowles died in 1999; I'd visited him in Tangier in 1986 and 1987. Both times he was lordly and welcoming and made fun of his own reputation. 

IN TOUCH: THE LETTERS OF PAUL BOWLES
Edited by Jeffrey Miller
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
604 pages

This country can be very hard on its originals, and on none does the distrust fall more heavily than the expatriate. Those who flirt with voluntary exile but always come home, like Hemingway, are forgiven;  those like Henry James or Ezra Pound or T.S. Eliot, who choose to stay abroad, remain deeply suspect as Americans even as they are glimpsed overseas growing immeasurably as artists.

At 83, permanently settled in Morocco, Paul Bowles is one of the great originals that our country has produced this century, in part because his deepest influences are so resolutely un-American. The usual simplification of his life runs thus: from being one of the most important American composers of the 30s, 40s, and 50s, he became one of the most important authors of the 60s and 70s. (If today his audience is largely literary, the backward-looking eye of the compact disc may gradually balance the situation.) Still, to many American readers Paul Bowles remains peripheral and semi-known, a “cult author," or worse still, an expatriate—that exotic foreign bloom. Who is he really, our white-haired man in Tangier with a traveller’s ease and a transparent, gentlemanly gaze?

Now this huge, incomparable volume of six decades of letters finally allows us a chance to set his work, both writing and music, in perspective against his life as one unbroken flow. Until now, apart from a good book about the expat life in Tangier, we've had only an uneven biography in English, a superb biography in French, and Bowles’ own autobiography, Without Stopping, which William Burroughs called “Without Telling.” But the present huge (600 pp.) book gives us much that the autobiography and the novels cannot: the larger personality of the private Bowles. For those not lucky enough to enjoy a few hours’ conversation with the man himself, they offer a reader the rich incessant sunlight of his company.

Bowles (born in New York December 30, 1910) is that American rarity: an artist who has chosen to live abroad and been able to soak up several distant cultures and turn them to deep creative use, not merely as "local color” but as an original homeland of the imagination. The extra-American influences are as prominent in his music, with its French and Central American intonations, as in his writing. Another similarity is his genius for the small forms.

Bowles’ most famous books—The Sheltering Sky, The Spider’s House, Let It Come Down, and The Delicate Prey—are set mostly in North Africa. The result has been a myth of “Paul Bowles, decadent in Tangier” that has much to do with popular notions of Morocco and a general tendency to confuse the writer and the work.

And indeed, the first impression in following his letters is of someone who had to stay abroad, ever on the move: from earliest travels to Paris as escapee from the U. of Virginia, to sojourns in 30s Morocco (where, sharing a house, he studied harmony with Aaron Copland), to Mexico, where many pieces were written; back to New York with his ex-wife, the writer Jane Bowles, composing for Orson Welles’ theater company and The Glass Menagerie; to an almost permanent move to Tangier, with forays to the small island he once owned on a shoestring in Ceylon. Over the decades he became one of the great North African travellers, with odysseys devoted to collecting an unequalled set of recordings of Moroccan music for the Library of Congress. He has also been a tireless translator, from Sartre's No Exit in 1944 to, currently, the works of Moroccan author Mohammed Mrabet and Rodrigo Rey Rosa, a Guatemalan.

One dominant theme in his writing is the intense sensations, and consequences, of experiencing people and cultures different from one’s own. Thus it is deeply pleasurable, in letter after letter, to encounter the delight such experiences have given Bowles since an early age. By twenty this refined, subtle sensibility seems nearly formed. Here he is meeting Jean Cocteau in Paris in 1931: “He rushed about the room with great speed for two hours and never sat down once… He still smokes opium every day and claims it does him a great deal of good. I daresay it does… the fact that it is considered harmful for most mortals would convince me of its efficaciousness for him." He meets Falla, Pound, and Gide; Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein become invaluable mentors. He meets Desnos, Revueltas, Dali; he meets everyone. “I can't believe you find a similarity between my letters and a seed catalog. Still, why not? Or a telephone directory." In Tangier, in later years, they all (Kerouac, Ginsberg, etc.) come looking for him.

He keeps travelling. In Touggourt, Algeria, he finds “mad people, leprous things like spiders which crawl about eating the grasshoppers others toss them." In Guatemala, "the water was full of brown mud that took a half hour to settle." Back in Tangier after the war, he notes, “I've never yet felt a part of any place I've been, and I never expect to.” His writer’s eye and composers ear are ever alert: in Ceylon the occasional small breeze is "as hot as the breath of a man with fever. And the birds in the shadeless trees around the bungalow don't sing: they cough, choke, gurgle, grunt, hammer, sputter, croak and yell, a welter of ridiculous noises that have no right to come out of the throats of birds. There's one at the moment which sounds exactly like the telegraph in a country station buzzing out its Morse code." In Bangkok the populace "paddles by in sampans to see what the farangs are up to and their neon-flooded hotels where electric organs whine and bump.”

Not surprisingly, Tangier is the return address for many of the letters, and a reader can follow its hold on Bowles across sixty years. “The wind howls and the countryside is the color of a lion." 1948 Tangier, with its international zone, "belongs to nobody" and the entire city “is one large black market." All Morocco's cities are "very beautiful indeed: one feels removed in time rather than in space. Europe before the Middle Ages must have been very much like most of Morocco… you're sometimes invited to lunch in a house built in the 10th or 11th century by the forebears of your host… very little has changed since then… an inexhaustible country."

Expatriates can never take their friends for granted: visits are too infrequent. Bowles, to judge by this book, was a devoted, generous correspondent. (He still has no telephone.) "Although I didn't see Tennessee very often," he notes after the playwright’s death, "I thought of him as one of my closest friends, and of course I still do think of him in that way. Whether people die or remain alive, it's the same: if we were friends, we are friends. Someone always has to die first, and most of my friends have died before me."

Most touching of all, through the letters like a haunting strain that grows more and more prominent, there is the gradual decline of his wife. A marriage like theirs inevitably generates a great deal of gossip, but any dip into this book makes it clear how much Bowles loved and still misses her. (Jane Bowles died in 1973.) He is customarily (and unfairly, I suspect) unforgiving in judging his behavior—seeing himself "a kind of idiot looking on approvingly, even collaborating, while Jane forged ahead with her self-destruction.”

And Bowles keeps working, year after year. To an editor he writes, "I doubt that I have ever been in a ‘relaxed,’ not to say ‘cerebral’ state for more than two minutes, without feeling the ever-present doubt, disbelief and vague angst that has kept me going. Only in action is there a possibility of belief, but what action can a writer engage in save writing—that is, what meaningful action?"

Possibly because of the atmosphere in some of his work, Bowles has a reputation (to this writer, inaccurate) of being cold, aloof. Yet this collection, taken as a whole, is one of the most intimate looks we've had at any great American artist. Those in search of bedroom gossip will not find much here; those seeking what Bowles thought throughout a long, productive, and wholly original life will find it vivid on every page. Here he is in Xauen, Morocco in 1951:

"The streets and walls look as if someone had poured tons of white cake-icing over them—resplendently white, and sometimes light blue, but by moonlight it all looks brilliantly, blindingly white… The main street is merely a long tunnel of green, being completely covered by ancient grapevines whose thick trunks twist up the walls of the little white buildings like great snakes before they become the vault of foliage and fruit that hides the sky. In the ruined Casbah there are palms, oranges and roses, storks and peacocks, and, of course, the inevitable fountains. And the town is drenched in the musky smell of fig trees in summer, and slightly spiced with jasmin. By day the cicadas scream, and at night it is three toads and insects that sound like dry leaves… Two weeks ago I heard the most incredible Berber music I had yet heard—a full evening of it, accompanied by dances of self-immolation and a good deal of blood-letting… One must stay on and on.”