The Brooklyn Rail

As the central instrument of choice in Western popular music, the guitar has had a good run. Over the last ninety years, the electric model in particular has moved front and center, starting with Les Paul’s technical advances and Charlie Christian establishing his place as a soloist. The advent of rock and roll solidified the guitar’s position, and even the growth of every other kind of electronic instrumentation hasn’t dislodged it from the prime spot.

But compared to the oud, the guitar is something of a newcomer. Some version of this pear-shaped, fretless instrument has been central to the music of Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) for thousands of years. Countries across that span, from Armenia and Turkey to Lebanon and Syria, have developed their own distinctive traditions on the oud. If the electric guitar blazes and gently weeps, the oud haunts, with its warm sound and percussive attack carving out plaintive melodies. On its usual eleven strings, including five double sets that add richness to the sound, a vast range of traditions finds its voice. The root of the word oud comes from the Arabic term meaning “to hear,” and the instrument’s ability to cut through an ensemble makes its voice both sharply etched and intimate.

Brian Prunka and Kane Mathis, co-founders of the New York Oud Festival, each found their own routes to the instrument. Prunka started as a jazz guitarist, living and playing in New Orleans for a decade before gravitating to the oud. He credits the 1958 album Jazz Sahara by Ahmed Abdul-Malik (once the bassist for Thelonious Monk) with awakening his interest in the oud, and for bringing it to a wider audience in general. “After that, I started looking everywhere for examples of oud playing, from YouTube to records from other countries,” he says. “I just followed that trail of breadcrumbs. And even if I wasn’t always getting exposed to the best stuff, I did find myself increasingly curious about the instrument.”

Mathis, on the other hand, was a student of classical guitar when he first heard an album by the Turkish oud player Münir Nurettin Beken. This led him to move to Istanbul and deepen his study of the instrument. “I was able to participate in this culture that had such a high level of musicianship,” he says. “Just as important was hearing it performed in the kinds of rooms where the tradition originated, the sorts of places where, in Europe, chamber music was performed.” There the oud was also sometimes related to Sufi religious practices, the emotion the music linked to the longing for spiritual union. And it is connected to its origins in other ways, said Mathis. “The oud is a product that fully reflects its environment, from the kinds of wood that are used in making it to the pace and sound of the culture where it developed.”

Both Prunka and Mathis wound up living in Brooklyn, drawn to its heterogenous culture and openness to musical experimentation. They set out to start an oud festival here, drawing together some of the disparate traditions it encompasses in an effort to reach old and new audiences. It began as a one-day gathering of oud players at Barbès in 2015, then expanded in subsequent years into many more venues. This year, the New York Oud Festival will present shows at Joe’s Pub, Jalopy Theatre, Sisters, and other locations, as well as a centerpiece concert at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on May 23. Selected performers include Gabe Lavin, an ethnomusicologist and performer who has done extensive research into the history of the instrument, and Farah Zahra, who also has had academic roles alongside her playing experience, having helped catalogue a major collection of Arab music records at Harvard, where she earned a master’s degree.

In developing the New York Oud Festival, both of the founders were aware of the different audiences they might find, as well as the varying expectations those listeners might bring to a performance. “For one group, this is the kind of music they would expect to hear at a wedding or other celebration,” says Prunka. “We want to preserve and honor that tradition, but we don’t necessarily want to be bound by it.” Both agree that the music benefits by being heard in different contexts. “It’s good to ask something of an audience,” says Mathis. “We want people to experience a whole value system through the language of music.”

Beyond this particular festival, other notable oud players are performing in New York this spring. Perhaps the best known of these is Simon Shaheen, a kind of ambassador for the instrument, who will present an evening at Roulette Intermedium on May 21 along with the Iranian musician Mehrnam Rastegari, who plays a related four-string instrument called the kamancheh. Shaheen explores the oud music of the Palestinian tradition in which he was raised. He is the founder of the Near Eastern Music Ensemble, and has been a leading exemplar of his instrument for decades. Of more recent vintage is Baklava Express, a Brooklyn-based group led by oud player Josh Kaye that brings sounds from around the Mediterranean to bear. Their spirited playing manages to draw from different traditions without watering down the result. They will play a show on May 7 at Drom, a venue that has long specialized in presenting different incarnations of world music, and another at a Greek Jewish festival on the Lower East Side on May 17.

The New York Oud Festival and its offshoots are further evidence of a burgeoning SWANA cultural scene in New York City. They also reinforce the distance between the more-is-more dynamic of the city and the official us-versus-them approach of the current presidential administration. Trump spends billions on a war with Iran that threatens the stability of the whole region, after rejecting diplomacy and calling the leadership of the country “lunatics.” He rages at longtime allies for not assisting with his ill-advised and barely explained plans, having never shown them an ounce of consideration or respect. The Secretary of Defense threatens “death and destruction from above,” then asks that Americans pray for victory “in the name of Jesus Christ.” Trump characterizes the assassination attempt on his life by trumpeting, “I was saved by God to make America great again.”

What in the name of all deities is going on here? The separation of church and state is decimated. Exceptionalism is replaced by divine right. “America first” becomes “America alone.” Yet as with the war on Iraq earlier this century, the United States shows no understanding of the country it is helping to destroy. There is no room for listening to the other side, no appreciation for its history, its people, or what it values, as well as our underlying unity. In the words of the poet Rumi, from more than nine hundred years ago:

All religions, all this singing
one song.
The differences are just illusion and vanity.
The sun’s light looks a little different on this wall
than it does on that wall,
and a lot different
on this other one,
but it’s still one light.