LIVING & TRAVEL "HUNTING THE WORLD BEAT" by steven mirkin

With a mobile recording studio and his wife and daughter in tow, David Parsons circles the globe documenting some of the world's most compelling music. Paul Bowles wrote that music "is the single most important element in Moroccan culture." Unfortunately, Bowles, who was also a composer of some repute, turned out to be a lousy field producer. After a month spent attempting to capture the music of the Moroccan Rif, he ended up with only two songs. David Parsons, who runs a label called Celestial Harmonies, may never match Bowles' fame in the literary or compositional arenas, but as a record producer, he has been altogether more successful, singlehandedly orchestrating the production of albums documenting the music of Cambodia, Vietnam, Yemen, Tibet, Bali, India, Armenia, Egypt -- and Morocco. Like Bowles before him, Parsons was a composer before becoming a chronicler of the world's indigenous music. Parsons, a student of classical Indian music, traveled with his wife to a Tibetan monastery to study the "throat singing" of the resident monks, a vocal technique that's unique to Tibet and allows the singer to simultaneously produce two distinct tones. Parsons loved the haunting sounds and, as a way to repay the monks for accommodating and instructing him, he offered to record them. "They took some convincing," he says, laughing. "They said, 'No one wants to listen to this, we do this every day'." But it was a new sound to the west, and the resulting two volumes of "Sacred Ceremonies" were successful enough to jumpstart Parsons' newfound career. With his mobile recording gear in tow, Parson has visited some of the world's most dangerous regions. He's had to cross through United Nations humanitarian zones, gotten a flat tire after curfew in Ankor Wat, Cambodia, and passed through a war zone with "bullet holes and ruined tanks all around us." During his stay in the Armenian capital of Yerevan, considered one of the more dangerous places in the former Soviet Union, the street lights were out due to an energy crisis, turning the city into what Parsons termed a "mugger's paradise." Despite the risk involved in traversing such far-flung locales, and the fact that recording sessions are difficult to arrange in advance because, as Parsons says, "contact with these countries is very hard," he has never left a country empty-handed. This is partly because Parsons makes a point of always paying the musicians. But as far as he's concerned, his perfect success rate has more to do with his custom of bringing his wife, Kay, and his three-year-old daughter, Ann, with him wherever he goes. "It's great public relations," he says, "people are not as suspicious of you, especially in the Middle East and Asia, which are very family oriented." In Cambodia, his daughter became the main attraction of the village. "They loved Ann and would just walk in and take her," Parsons recalls. "We'd wake up find our baby missing, walk around and find her down the street sitting on someone's bed, with everyone standing around and giving her toys." Not that the all of the sessions have been so warm and fuzzy. Parsons is, after all, working with artistes, even if they are mostly amateurs and are unaware of the petulance of the likes of Eddie Vedder. He is usually limited to only one take. "The musicians are not used to being told, 'That didn't sound right;' or, 'I didn't get that, can we do it again'." The second take, Parsons says, is "always a very poor performance because they were so much more enthusiastic at first." On another occasion, a Balinese Gamelan orchestra he was recording wanted to keep playing even though they were outdoors and a surprise cloudburst had all but drenched the session. And just imagine trying to get the proper balance while recording a Bedouin tribe in the desert, with a crowd of people singing, clapping, dancing and kicking up dust all at the same time. It's no wonder Bowles decided that writing about Morocco was easier than recording it.