THE WIND CRIED

Paul Hecht is a flamenco bum and draws the reader into the circle of cabals and cantaors in an involving closed session. As Pablo ""El Americano."" Hecht settled in Andalusia, traveled elsewhere to Spain to meet singers. Such as Diego who brought ""music out of the center of his seventy-four years""; Manolo--""Spain with all its peculiar paradoxes""; La Fornanda whose cante is a ""pure pilgrimage"" etc. It was the human immediacy of flamenco expression that reached Hecht but he also touches on its origins, relates it to the culture. Hecht returned to New York with a sense of displacement, returned to Spain to write about the music which he cannot sing. He does communicate its lure.