My First Oud

 

My Aunt Suzie and my mother are at my aunt’s house in Reno.  The were going through and organizing old photos.  She sent me copies of a few photos she thought I would appreciate.  Appreciate them?  That is an understatement.  I love them.

There are two photos.  The first is of my grandmother, my mother, and me opening a crate from Lebanon.  Inside the crate was an oud, our cousin, who lived in Beirut, bought, packed, and shipped.  He had visited us in Detroit a few months earlier and unbeknownst to me, my grandmother, our Grannie, gave him some money to send me an oud.

This must have been 1968-69, at the latest maybe the summer of 1970.   My grandmother, who always seemed old to me, was only in her early sixties in this photo.  I am older as I write this than she was in this photo.  To my current self, she looked pretty young in that photo.

Truth be told?  Until I got this photo, I did not remember this day.  How did I, could I, have forgotten?  Who knows?  Selective memory?  The natural passage of time? Shallowness? Other memories squeezing this one, and probably many others, to the periphery.  It doesn’t matter, thanks to my aunt and the photos she texted me, the memory is delightfully restored. 

I love that three generations of Frankians, using Grannie’s maiden name, were opening the crate.  I love it that we took the second photo with me holding the oud.  I can’t remember if the instrument was even tuned when we took the photo.  I am sure it was in short order.

The oud?

It was an ornate Arab style oud.  The front was adorned with mother of pearl inlay.  They look pretty cool, but all the inlay, as I have been told, dampens the resonance of the faceboard.  The oud was big, bigger than the Armenian and Turkish ouds I now mostly play.  But, it was my first oud and I played it often.  I slapped a DeArmand pickup on it used it for two years on my twenty gigs or so. 

Another Frankian cousin, Boghos, who was a good musician himself, sent me another oud from Haleb (Aleppo).  It was another Arab oud but, as Boghos was a musician and knew the better makers and shops in Haleb, it was a very nice instrument.  I still have this one.  I learned a few years ago that the maker of this instrument is Jamil Burghaki Qandalaft who is according to Wanees Zarour’s research “… has a reputation and may have made ouds for Farid al Atrache.” 

Tonight, I am playing in the Arab concert of the University of Chicago Middle Eastern Music Ensemble.  This concert will wrap-up the 25^th Anniversary Season of the Ensemble.  We are playing music mostly from Lebanon (think Fairuz) and Egypt selected by our gifted maestro, the aforementioned Wanees Zarour.  I will be playing an oud tonight, the first one I actually bought myself.  It is a 1996 oud made the late master maker Peter Kyvelos.

I wonder what that first oud would have sounded like in tonight’s concert?

 

 

Peter Kyvelos