Brad Spurgeon's Blog

Who will ever be able to trust my rambling accounts of playing music around the world ever again? Yesterday, despondent, having failed after three days of effort to find the elusive “House of Oud,” or “Bait Al Oud,” I wrote a post talking about how great it was to fail! But at the end of my working day at the racetrack I found myself with two and a half hours available before I had to go to the airport for the flight back to Paris. So I decided to make one more attempt to find the mecca of oud.

That would require a half-hour cab ride downtown from the track, followed by eventually another half-hour cab ride from there to the airport. That would leave one and a half hours to find the oud joint and hope that it was open and hope that I could jam, film, talk and sing with whomsoever might be there. What spurred me on to having a little hope at the end of the day was that by changing my search method online to “Bait Al Oud” I discovered a Facebook page for the House of Oud AND a web site talking about the Oud House and on these I actually finally found a photograph of the building – so it was now an identifiable object. (What a saga!)

The Time Out story about the place had said people could just walk in off the street and see the place and ask for a jam. So I took a cab to the same place behind the One-to-One hotel where I had been before, and I asked the cab driver to drive around ALL of the surrounding back-streets. We were almost ready to quit and go directly to the airport when suddenly a seeming mirage appeared before me: The very same majestic image of the House of Oud that I saw online! All was pretty dark, but the front door was slightly ajar. So I asked the cab driver to wait while I explored. Picture a horror film where the victim enters an empty, massive, mansion in the middle of nowhere – “Hello, is there anyone here? Helllooooo? Anyone home????”

I just kept following the lights from within to a back room, and there I met up with a man in Arab clothing and with an oud – a beautiful handmade oud – by his side. On the table next to him was an interesting auto-harp type of thing too, and there was another man as well. The Arab with the oud spoke the best English, and so I explained that I was a musician on a visit to Abu Dhabi and I was about to leave the country but I had been searching for three days for this place, that I had heard there were jam sessions. Could we jam?

Another man came and joined us, and it turned out that they were all about to leave for the day, that the place had closed for the day. But they were curious about me, about my guitar – which was still in the cab – and they invited me to join then, get my guitar, and we would jam. Eureka! It was no longer just a mirage.

I got my instrument and my luggage and asked the cab driver to return an hour and 15 minutes later to take me to the airport. I went back into the House of Oud and proceeded to have the time of my life, jamming with the oud player and the harp player. They also let me play the oud myself, they allowed me to film us and interview them for my film. And they took me on a tour of the workshop where the ouds are made, in a back room of the same building. The third man who had shown up was the luthier who made the ouds, the man in the Arab dress was a student, and the harp player was an oud music teacher. He and the luthier were both from Egypt, which is the greatest land of the oud. I immediately fell in love with the instrument and its beautiful feel and sound, and I regretted upon leaving that I had not tried to see if I could buy one.

The luthier, whose name is Amr Fawzy, builds around 40 of them per year, if I understood correctly. He showed me how they are built, and with what wood. He later inspected my guitar, and liked it. The oud, an ancestor of the guitar, has existed since 2350 BC! It is central to Arabic music, and this Bait Al Oud is a project that was started by a man named Naseer Shamma, who also started one of these institutions in Cairo, and I believe elsewhere as well, as he tries to develop and maintain the oud. In fact, he brought about some changes with the making of the oud to bring it up to more modern standards, without detracting from the traditional instrument. One of these, Amr – who was trained in the Cairo House of Oud and is a master luthier – pointed out to me, was that the tuning head is made entirely from one single piece of wood, which is carved out in the middle.

The House of Oud, which was founded only two years ago, is partly sponsored by the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage, which provides wood, strings, budget, I suppose. And the villa is absolutely breathtakingly beautiful. There are rehearsal spaces, concert spaces, a library, all sorts of rooms. The institution chooses students through a system of try-outs, and they follow a course with the teacher I met – who is also Egyptian – and in turn can go on to teach. Aside from the regular free jams, all the students usually gather on Thursdays to play amongst themselves.

I said yesterday that I was happy with failure as I travel the world and seem only to meet with success on this musical adventure seeking out the music of the world and places to play and jam, and I said that failing to find a place proved just how difficult a task it has been, and how different each place can be. But the feeling I had playing with these musicians, discovering the oud and their institution, and succeeding at the last minute after so many efforts, was far, far, far greater than that feeling of accepting failure! It was also, above all, a window into a real bit of Abu Dhabi and Arab culture – and hospitality – that I had before then had no inkling of. Before the House of Oud, my only experience of the country was the backstreets of the smokey cafes, and above all, the western bars in the western hotels. Soooo glad I made the last effort, so glad the House of Oud was so accomodating.

I made several videos, but the best one is too long, too big, to put up here – and I will put it in my documentary. It contains much more oud playing and me playing the oud and all three of us jamming with me on my guitar, and the other two on the harp and oud. But for the moment I have only these two shorter ones to put up, which have more of the harp than the oud! But the workshop one is fabulous, and I like the moment where the luthier tells me the oud is made of Indian rosewood, and that he had noticed part of my Seagull guitar was made of rosewood too….