January 6, 1949 – April 13, 2024
The Sheltering
by Brian Cullman
Bertolucci was making a movie of Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky, and it’d been a long time coming (Joseph Losey had tried to make it in the 1960’s, and a few other directors tried to get it made, but no luck). Ryu Sakamoto signed on to do music after composing music for The Last Emperor, but it turned out he had no affinity for desert music, for Arabic scales and needed someone to tag team with him.
”You want the music of two camels fucking, you need some camels.” Paul Bowles advised. “You want the music of the sands, the solitude, the infinite night? An oud or a ney? Silence? And the sisters of silence? Maybe talk to Richard Horowitz.”
“Horowitz?” Bertolucci asked.
“Horowitz,“ Paul affirmed.
* * *
The film was done. Sakamoto & Richard didn’t really work together side by side, but their different takes on the music fit well together, Sakamoto’s simple, haunting piano figures and elegiac strings with their sweep and circumstance, Richard’s lonely ney, the insistent Gnawa clapping, the moody Arabic orchestra drawing you close and leaving you out on an emotional limb.
But there was a scene that wasn’t given to Sakamoto or to Richard to score. A short but pivotal scene in a train compartment, Campbell Scott and Debra Winger alone on the train, the desert going by, night closing in, Campbell Scott drawing closer, a touch of a hand on her knee, their faces almost touching and then touching, the romance of the journey, strangers in a distant land where the rules no longer apply. Sex or the promise of sex filling the air. Fade to black.
Someone, maybe the music supervisor, had found elegantly mysterious music to accompany the scene, quiet slightly rhythmic Arabic music, an oud or a saz and the tap of a small frame drum and a low urgent voice with barely heard words, singing or whispering in your ear to come closer, closer. Then the sound of the train. And then silence.
The film was done, locked & loaded, whatever the terms are, copies about to be made and shipped around the world to movie palaces everywhere, they were printing the posters, agents calling other agents, the smell of money, and then someone from Jordan or Lebanon in a screening room somewhere saw the scene on the train and yelled WAIT!, STOP!, NO! and for a moment the world stops turning and the switchboards from here to Hollywood are all lit up.
No one noticed, no one thought to look, to check, but the low Arabic murmurs in the train scene, the soft melodic chanting was from the Koran, holy words from a holy book, and those words next to that scene, the coupling of the words of the prophet with the sins of the flesh would be reason enough to ban the film, to burn the filmmakers and all who sail with them, their families and friends, talk to Salman Rushdie if you can find him, the old men with the long white beards and the long grey robes are everywhere looking for sin or blasphemy, and once looked for, it’s easily found.
STOP THE PRESSES!
Richard & I had been having coffee at the Petit Fer Au Cheval near the Rue des Archives, and when we stopped back at his place in the 11th, the phone was ringing and ringing. And there were 12, 13, 14 messages on the machine, Bertolucci calling, someone named Jeremy from the production office, someone not named Jeremy from the production office, all quietly hysterical, all hysterically quiet, all asking, pleading, hoping for some sort of something to be recorded today, right now, 65, maybe 70 seconds, something moody and quiet and not Koranic, nothing from the prophet.
The night before, we’d been at a little cafe near Republique, a dark quiet place. The owner was Kurdish, he lived upstairs and he’d invite musicians to stay right above the cafe and play downstairs in the evening, no sound system, just a guitar, an oud or a tambour player from Turkey or thereabouts sitting on a low wooden chair with their back to the wall and picking out single note melodies, music you might hear in a tea house, in a room filled with smoke & memories. We’d gone to hear Talip Ozkan, who played long necked stringed instruments of every description, humming and chanting and accenting his playing with low moans and murmurings that sounded like incantations, maybe not summoning the devil, but reaching out to the ghosts of Christmas past, to loves that were lost or never found in the first place. When he sang, when he played, you felt he was reading the lines on the hands of time, he was finding regrets you’d left under the couch, that had fallen out of your pocket years ago and holding those moments up to the light to see how they’d shine, how the shadows fell against the wall in time to the music, and how the music seemed to come from everywhere at once, filling the corners of the room.
When we got to the cafe, Talip was finishing breakfast. Coffee and the last bits of a baguette and a bowl of what might once have been porridge but was now an ashtray. He nodded, but continued to study his coffee. Richard sat down next to him and took his hand.
“Maestro,” he said. Talip nodded. Flattery was not, all in all, a bad approach.
“Maestro,” Richard continued. Talip winced a little, and Richard recalibrated.
In a mixture of French and broken Arabic, so broken even I could understand, Richard explained the dilemma. A man with an emancipated moustache brought small cups of thick Turkish coffee to us, making a point of never looking us in the eye. Called as a witness, he’d never be able to identify us.
Richard pointed to his watch. It was going on 10 o’clock.
Now.
Talip rubbed his fingers together. Money?
Richard shrugged.
I looked out the window. Two buses went by.
Richard was wearing a beautiful oversized scarf, maybe an ikat. Indonesian. Patterns of deep reds and royal blues criss-crossing each other. Part of a signature look for him, though Richard had a way of turning any new bit of clothing into a signature look. But the scarf was his companion, and in the last few weeks, I’d rarely seen him without it. As if performing an age-old ritual of respect and supplication, Richard slowly, decorously unwound the scarf from around his neck and from under his jacket, unspooled it, then quietly placed it around Talip’s neck.
Talip rubbed the material between his thumb and forefinger, he held it up to his face, then he threw an end of it over his shoulder and nodded.
We had a deal.
A car appeared outside the door, and we drove to the outskirts of Montreuil to a four track studio there.
The engineer had never recorded a saz before, the length of the neck and the thickness of the strings had him worried.
“I’ll angle it down, near the sound-hole, so I don’t pick up the sound of his fingers on the fretboard.”
“No,” Richard told him,“we want that clicking, that’ll be our percussion, our rhythm.”
Talip moved right into a slow, rolling piece, meditative but with a steady, insistent groove, and he started to quietly sing in a deep, husky voice.
“That’s not a prayer, is it?” Richard asked.
“It’s an old folk song, something about a chipmunk that gets lost in the woods and can’t find his way home.”
“Does he pray?”
“No. I think he gets eaten by a bear, but that’s in a later verse. I didn’t sing that one.”
“Oh well, that’s alright then.”
By one o’clock the piece was recorded. By two o’clock, it was mixed and edited. Phone calls were made. Tapes were picked up and sent to the powers that be. By eight the next morning it was cut into the film, and the film itself was locked. Ten days later it was in theaters.
“It worked,” Richard sighed.
“But I miss that scarf….”
* * *
from The Sheltering Sky – Fever Ride
from The Sheltering Sky – Marnia’s Tent
from The Sheltering Sky – Richard Horowitz & Ryu Sakamoto
from the Sheltering Sky – End Scene w/Paul Bowles
Talip Ozkan – Uskudar
* * *