The Wandering Oud

Over the last few months I’ve been involved in a few house concerts. The trio I play in gets fed and has an attentive audience for the evening. Recently we’ve integrated the oud into the trio which means I play mostly bass guitar but swap to the oud for a few songs.

At this recent gig, something interesting happened. One of the oud songs involves me playing a repeated phrase. When this was written and recorded I was more than happy to do this, as it provided a base for the guitar to move around. However, being human, I’ve got a little tired of playing the same phrase, over and over again and thought it would be a good idea to gently improvise on the pattern without messing the tune up.

What actually happened was I began the song and found I’d forgotten the last few notes of the riff. Every time the phrase came around I added or subtracted a note, trying to get back to the original. This became a satisfying way to play it, as I wasn’t exactly repeating myself and wasn’t doing anything to throw the guitarist off. Except, after a minute of this, the guitarist got lost anyway, probably because of my wanderings, or maybe because by this time we were playing in the dark. So now we had him playing something new, and me playing something new and both of us trying to maintain the integrity of the tune.

From that point on we gradually wrestled the music towards and end and then breathed sighs of relief while the audience applauded.

After the gig, several people who had heard us play this before, commented on has much better it sounded tonight.

As we didn’t record the evening, and as it was all in the moment, we have no way to re-create this version. But maybe that’s the point.