oudtube

August 31, 2007 7:17 PM

Qaraami music is from Somalia. In qaraami style you sing and play an embellished melody on the oud, and maybe with some drums. The Somali diaspora have taken it everywhere. I just heard it for the first time in Shafeq's taxi in Wellington. With luck, it will flourish in its home again.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen (8 comments total)

I said, what is this song about? And he said, it's all about love, brother, it's all about love.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 7:17 PM on August 31, 2007

Cool post - are you familiar with Anouar Brahem from Tunisia? I recommend him highly.

kashf
posted by vronsky at 9:47 PM on August 31, 2007 [1 favorite]

There is just something so lovely about the tone of an oud. Hypnotic.
posted by vronsky at 10:42 PM on August 31, 2007

Thanks joe, thanks vronsky.
posted by Mblue at 10:43 PM on August 31, 2007

You're welcome, Mblue, and thanks Vronsky - I'm listening now. Brahem's music sounds more clearly Arabic and less African to my ears, though I can't really put my finger on why.

I only had my hands on an oud the once, and it was pretty damned tricky. The one I tried had paired strings, and the scale length seemed awfully short considering the pitch it was tuned to, so those strings felt thick and flabby compared to, say, a modern acoustic guitar.

What blows me away is how the oud playing mirrors the tune they're singing but is far more decorated. First up, I just can't do that; and second, it's a totally different style of accompaniment to the chord-strumming style of modern Western music. I loves me that oud-picking, and now I'm thinking about how that might be incorporated into other styles of music with other plucked instruments. And the qaraami style definitely sounds African to me. I might have to dig out some ethnomusicology books to understand what's going on there.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 11:23 PM on August 31, 2007

Mate. Last time I took Shafeq's cab, I was asking him what the music was actually about, lyrically speaking. Time and again, it was just some guy singing about some girl.

Flash forward a couple of months and I'm sitting in Brighton after a hard night out on the tiles, listening to the music of Afganistan. Turns out, it's just some guy singing about some girl.

The moral of this story is: When it's just some guy singing about some girl - it becomes infinitely funnier at 3:00am if you provide translation for the vocals in your best deadpan BBC voice to be a lament about how your favourite goat fell off a cliff. This holds true in every conceivable case..

Regards to the Shaf.
posted by Sparx at 11:46 PM on August 31, 2007

(and I also found this - which gives some background on Qaraami's identity for the rest of us culturally ignorant folk who had not yet heard of the oud)
posted by Sparx at 11:57 PM on August 31, 2007

some westerners definitely learn their own way to play the oud. I dig anouar brahem because he's really focused and authentic . But I like Titi Robin too, who is from France and has learnt to play some eastern string instruments and has written music for them.
posted by nicolin at 11:08 AM on September 1, 2007