Le Comptoir Marocain de Distribution de Disques (Part One)

In the centre of downtown Casablanca, and to be more precise, at 26 Avenue Lalla Yacout, you will find one of the greatest treasures of the musical variety in the whole of Morocco. For this is the amazing shop entitled “Le Comptoir Marocain de Distribution de Disques” (CMDD). For anyone interested in music history, especially from north Africa and the Middle East, then this emporium must be visited.

Walk through the glass doors and in front of you will be racks and racks of crisp original vinyl records. Not just any records but a veritable history of local and international music from this part of the world. Flicking through the hundreds of titles available you will quickly realise that you are in a living museum. Vinyl records are not bought at all by local people and haven’t been for a long time. Moroccans don’t own record players and most don’t even care about the actual format that the music arrives in. More often than not you will find crappy quality MP3 files on peoples’ computers and cheap cassettes still blasting out of car speakers.

But it wasn’t always so. Back in the 1970s vinyl was the medium of choice, especially for those who could afford it. International companies like Polydor and Philips had footholds in the Maghreb and released quite a lot of records, often pressing them abroad. Cassettes didn’t take off until the mid 1970s so the only choices back then were to buy records or listen to music on the radio.

CMDD is literally bursting with fascinating artefacts. There are original pressings of the great Arab artists of the 20th century like Oum Kalthoum, Abdel Halim Hafez and Fairouz. But the most interesting titles are those on 7” format and are a veritable smorgasbord of classic Moroccan music. I bought some original pressings of classic sides by Nas El Ghiwane and a previously unknown to me group called Nouas. Alongside them were 45s from Jil Jilala and an astonishing amount of Berber music, gnaoua and various other indigenous Moroccan musical styles. I had a wonderful time admiring the beautiful picture sleeves (almost every record was in one) and savouring this golden age in the music. Each 45 cost just 15 dirhams (a little over 1 GBP) so owning a few pieces of this musical history was a real bargain.

The shop is a friendly place and I had an informative chat with the proprietor Said. Two other staff were working there but unfortunately on the two occasions that I visited, I was the sole customer. Said told me that some foreigners come in from time to time and buy up quite a bit of vinyl but Moroccan customers are pretty much non-existent. The shop does sell a few CDs and cassettes though (their own productions – more about that in the next blog) so there is some trade at least. However, I was told that the shop will likely close down in the next few years as it only has just enough business to keep it running.

It will be sad day if the shop does indeed close but for now it is one of the most interesting places to visit in the whole of Morocco, let alone Casablanca. If you want to experience some real Moroccan musical history then you have to visit CMDD and why not buy a few tunes at the same time?

Here are some photos I took at the shop. The next instalment will feature the famous studio and home of the famous Tichkaphone label.