The Jazz Guitar Chord Dictionary
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  1. #26

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    Quote Originally Posted by whitebeard
    anyway, beautiful record. Hats off to JazzPadd for hippin' us to this stuff. thank you thank you thank you
    And hats off to whitebeard for the Yemeni CD info, and also for noting the similarities to Balkan odd time grooves. Great stuff all around. Thanks!

    BTW, although the CD liner notes refer to the der booga as a double clay drum, on first glance I thought it could be a regional pronunciation for a darbuka, the goblet shaped ceramic (sometimes metal) drum more or less pervasive in Middle Eastern musics. And, I have an old Ocora LP of Iraqi music that mentions some connections to pan-Persian Gulf musics, the common link being a double clay drum known as naqqareh, which resembles bongos. One thing for sure is that these drummings, coupled with oud (and in Hadaramut, so I'm told, harmonium!), grooves on real high.

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  3. #27

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    Quote Originally Posted by JazzPadd
    BTW, although the CD liner notes refer to the der booga as a double clay drum, on first glance I thought it could be a regional pronunciation for a darbuka, the goblet shaped ceramic (sometimes metal) drum more or less pervasive in Middle Eastern musics. And, I have an old Ocora LP of Iraqi music that mentions some connections to pan-Persian Gulf musics, the common link being a double clay drum known as naqqareh, which resembles bongos. One thing for sure is that these drummings, coupled with oud (and in Hadaramut, so I'm told, harmonium!), grooves on real high.
    yeah, darbuka finally popped into my head in the middle of the night. Somewhere between the field recording and the printing of the liner notes things got a bit garbled. The reason one hears a doumbek is because, well, there's a doumbek, the drum with more names than you could shake several sticks at.

    have to admit, though -- at first glance, my reaction was "Der Booga? I have a vewwy deaw fwend in Wome whose name is....Der Booga. Do you find that...wisible?"

    Naqqareh, aha! That's it then, all the pieces come together. Too bad there's not a liner notes wiki somewhere

  4. #28

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    Accumulating Yemeni related CDs as they arrive in the mail, wow, a whole world I knew nothing about.

    hey JazzPadd ---That first clip you posted IS in fact 3-2-2. It's been bugging me in the dark recesses of my frontal lobe that I've found no other instance of 2-2-3 in the stuff that's piling up here.

    So I downloaded the clip and listened on the stereo system. Important life lesson: things sound really different when you can hear all the parts clearly. Hopefully no one was seriously injured.

    Anyway, thought this one might interest you. "Le Chant de Sanaa", recorded march '98 at the Institut Du Monde Arabe. Hasan al-Ajami (qanbus, vocal) and Ahmed Ushaysh (sahn mimiyeh, vocal).

    Traditional instruments and presentation, distinctly Arabic intonation, ornamentation. The striking thing about this disc is the polar contrast to everything else Yemeni I've heard so far. Not much other than the songs seems to have survived the transition to modern oud/percussion and performance practice.

    Odd oud style, very busy, qanbus player seems to play a lot of drone tremolo with the right hand while hammering on melodic notes with the left. I think the liner notes corroborate this -- they're translated from French and a bit poetic but this seems to be what they describe. Interesting, but, how to say, I was not left thirsting for more.

    Percussion is played on "sahn mimiyeh", liner notes call it a "copper tray", happily there's a good pic on the cover. It's a shallow, flat bottomed bronze-ish bowl held horizontally, supported on the thumbs and played frame-drum style with the fingers.

    The effect is sort of a one-man gamelan. Currently high on my list of coolest things ever, ya just gotta hear it.

  5. #29

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    Good find, thanks! Can hear where Ahmed Fathi is coming from, and how, if this vocal based CD is the tradition in Sanaa, he is certainly de-centering the voice in favor of the oud. Thinking about this, I can recall back when I was studying Yemeni music that I made a kind of time graph of some traditional Sanaa songs and some of Fathi's takes on them, and found that the former were around 90% percent singing, while Fathi's recordings were around 50%.

    The 3-2-2 makes good sense for drive, especially if the accent is on the 1 of the 3 beats, with the 1-2s as echoes.

    And I seem to recall hearing a copper tray, and a story about women originally using it for accompanying singing.

    On the point of revising tradition, I can recommend two fascinating documentaries about Yemeni architecture:




    Somewhat off topic, but worth a look. Enjoy!

  6. #30

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    wow, year and a half. well, I needed a nap.

    hey Jazzpadd, if you're still around -- sorry didn't mean to disappear mid-conversation. Had a little surprise medical adventure, sidelined me for a while. (lyme spirochetes partying in your gray matter isn't nearly as much fun as it sounds. Kids, just say No!)

    Anyway, seems I survived, despite the doctors best efforts (insert rimshot here).

    OK, some stuff I'd meant to post earlier -- a few books for anyone curious about this stuff:

    School Of Oud by Mavrothi Kontanis (Mel Bay) -- concise, practical introduction to the makam tetrachord/pentachord system, several etudes each on three makam with typical modulations, audio clips of everything. All playable on guitar, leaving aside intonation differences. The rhythm audio clips might have been expanded a bit, both the printed notation and audio only demonstrate the basic patterns, while in practice riq/darbuka/kanun/oud etc fill these out into grooves. But that's a minor quibble, it's a great book. And it sits flat on a music stand, a rare luxury these days.

    Makam: Modal Practice in Turkish Art Music by Karl Signell. Comprehensive reference, theory, historical overview. Not exactly light reading but handy to have. Apparently an earlier CD-rom edition included audio clips, these seem to be lost, but the source material was the Rounder "Masters Of Turkish Music" series of three CDs. Also has a pronunciation guide which is great because while the notation is adapted from standard Western notation, the terminology is all Turkish, hard to keep track of unless you have some sense of how to say it.

    And -- Turkish Music Makam Guide by Murat Aydemir. Similar approach to the Kontanis book but covering sixty makams, one composition and one taksim (improv) on each, with audio played on unaccompanied tanbur. Several rhythm patterns (usul) not in the Kontanis book, but no audio. Structure and characteristics of the makams is also covered in the Signell book, but the presentation here is a little easier to grasp.

    All these are on the Ottoman tradition, so nothing specific to Arabic or Persian practice (or Yemeni, which seems to be its own thing outside of the maqam orbit).

    and...I still don't have an oud, still very much in recovering chops after a debilitating illness mode, it's going ok.. Lots of Sor etudes I'd never learned, some really beautiful stuff even in the "easy" etudes. I'm just happy to be practicing again.

  7. #31

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    Hey whitebeard, good to see you and thanks for keeping the oud flame burning! Sorry to hear of your health issues but glad to know you're back in action.

    I remember reading Signell when I was a student, and he is one of the ethnomusicologists who really furthered our knowledge of Turkish music and maqam in general.

    The method books look valuable indeed, thanks for suggesting them. I seem to recall coming across them long ago but haven't seen them lately. When I have time I dip into the Mukhtar method books, which are based on the Iraqi tradition.

    My Turkish oud is unplayable, the top is badly cracked so it's now just a wall ornament. But I do have the much less temperamental Godin multi-oud to fiddle with. Not as authentic, I suppose, but has a good feel, is easy to tune, and generally gets the job done when the mood hits.

  8. #32

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    Good to see you're still kicking too! The multi-oud looks great, I've had more than enough finicky authenticity. Mukhtar books look good too, hadn't discovered them.

    yeah, we owe a great debt to Signell. The other books I mentioned are great but much more narrowly focused, Signell may still be the best general reference in English.

    Under the circumstances learning oud seems, well, sort of comically implausible. OTOH I have transcribed a lot of this stuff and played it on guitar over the years, so maybe not completely ridiculous. If guitar practice goes well over the next few months I'll have to try the multi-oud, it'd be great to play this stuff with the right inflections and intonation.

    Just curious, but how did you discover this music? I'm not sure how I did, but I'm pretty sure it's somehow connected to the cut-out bin at Woolworth's when I was a kid. Cutout LPs were 3 for a dollar, that's where I found Charlie Parker, Charlie Christian, Lightnin' Hopkins, Ravi Shankar, Roger Sessions, Webern, Bartok, John Lee Hooker. That bin was a real education. this was late '60s I guess. Different world.

  9. #33

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    Quote Originally Posted by whitebeard
    Just curious, but how did you discover this music? I'm not sure how I did, but I'm pretty sure it's somehow connected to the cut-out bin at Woolworth's when I was a kid. Cutout LPs were 3 for a dollar, that's where I found Charlie Parker, Charlie Christian, Lightnin' Hopkins, Ravi Shankar, Roger Sessions, Webern, Bartok, John Lee Hooker. That bin was a real education. this was late '60s I guess. Different world.
    Woolworth's, a blast from the past!

    About discovering the oud, as I recall it was through Hamza El Din's Eclipse, the album produced in the late 70s by Mickey Hart of Grateful Dead fame. I believe Hart had been studying frame drum with El Din and I think he also jammed with the Dead a few times, so he had a bit of visibility in the US by then. El Din later did some solo concerts in New York City, where I'd lived around that time.

    In fact, I think this is the song that did it for me, The Visitors, my gateway to Middle Eastern music:


  10. #34

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    yeah, Woolworth's -- not sure if they still appended the "5 and 10" then, but they did have a dancing chicken. Always felt sorry for the chicken. Actually, I still do.

    And what became of the dancing chicken trainers? Now there's an occupation in decline. Ever pass a homeless guy with a sign "will dance for food" ? oh, the humanity..

    that's pretty cool finding the Hamza thing! Flipped through LPs a while, couldn't pin mine down -- sold off records en masse so many times, that thread is probably lost.

  11. #35

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    Medieval lute similarly was played with a pick. Crawford Young, a member of Project Ars Nova and the Ferrara Ensemble specializes in late Medieval music, particularly the polyrhythmic and contrapuntally complex Ars Subtilior




  12. #36

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    Amazing Persian player


  13. #37

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    Quote Originally Posted by BWV
    Amazing Persian player


    wow, yeah. Any idea what "Shedayi & Dashetani" means? I was thinking these must be traditional folk tunes given a classical interpretation, but then there seem to be composer credits at the end.


    Couple of Hamza El Din tracks --