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Inside Rick's, I met a couple of jazz musicians from Perpignan, in the south of France. They had taken a leave of absence from their wives and kids to find work in Marrakech and Casablanca. Their rapid-fire, chain-smoking conversations brought me back to my days in Paris.

Incredibly, we knew someone in common. There was a bass player I had met in Paris named Alfred, who turned out to be one of their best friends, and also lived in Perpignan. Even more incredibly, Alfred was coming through Casabanca to visit. I got to see him the next day - it was totally crazy to see a good friend from a long time ago in a far-off place like Casablanca.

The French guys also told me about a cool club called Le Batignole and I managed to drag Soshi out with me one night. The bouncers wouldn't let us in because it was a "private" club, so I asked where else we could go to see some "Music Orientale", as Moroccans call music with a strong Arabic influence. They looked at each other and said in French, "Well, there's one spot... but you don't want to go there". "Yes, we do", I answered cheerfully.
We arrived at a small, dingy nightclub with the menu posted on the outside in neon. Inside, there was a large, sweaty man singing into a microphone with too much reverb. He had an electrified 'oud, and there was a band including a violinist, a keyboardist employing the very loud drum-machine built into his Triton, and a percussionist no one could hear. A few new singers rotated in - first a tall man, then a heavily-painted woman. The songs were the top hits of Egyptian music from the 70's.

On my second or third day in Casablanca I met Karim Kadiri. He was a friend of Hakim, the club owner. Born in Casablanca, he moved to Philadelphia at age 20 and wound up becoming the best salesman of all time for Volvo cars - they even flew him out to Sweden and honored him in the Volvo museum in Gothenburg. But he was also a keen musician, and taught himself to play the 'oud, a teardrop-shaped lute, the ancestor of the modern guitar (in fact, the word "lute", another of the guitar's ancestors and the technical term for any chordophone with a neck, comes from the Arabic al-'oud).. He got into the music scene, produced a few records, and met pianist Chick Corea along the way. He formed a group called M'Oud-swing, a fusion between jazz and Arab classical music. He lived happily with his American wife for a while, but after they divorced he moved back to Casablanca. He had been back about three months before we met.

Karim's dual cultural identity made him a very good person to approach with cultural questions. He told me about
Rick's Cafe Americain, a nightclub modeled after the cafe in the film, "Casablanca". I went there one night and heard some pretty good jazz.
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Karim was really into spiritual music - Sufi, Arab, late John Coltrane - or whatever. When he talked about music he loved, he would say how much it "destroyed" him - he saw music as a way to rise above the pain of everyday existence.

On two occasions, I stopped by his place to listen to some music. The first time he played me the work of Mohamed Abdel-Wahab, the "Gershwin of Arabic Music" - the one to elevate "Old-style" music to the level of high art, employing innovations in orchestration, incorporating new rhythms, and acknowledging other traditions such as tango and western classical music. The second time we hung out, he played me some Oum Kalthoum, who is perhaps the most revered Arab performer of all time. She is sort of the Ella Fitzgerald of Arab classical (although Karim likes to say she is a little bit of Sarah Vaughn, too). He also hipped me to Jaques Brel and Michel Legrand.

But the biggest treat was sitting in on a rehearsal with Karim on the 'oud and a young man named Marwane singing Arabic love songs. They let me capture a few takes. Take a listen!
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