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47 albums · 1958–2021

The oud, from Baghdad, Cairo and Istanbul to Tunis, Beirut and jazz

· 1 min read · by 1001 Albums

Anouar Brahem playing the oud on a dark stage, a microphone at the soundhole
Three men seated on a stage with ouds before a purple curtainOuds hanging in the doorway of a shop of old instruments and radios
Anouar Brahem with his oud at Lantaren Venster, Rotterdam, March 2014. Photo: Dirk Neven, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. · Le Trio Joubran, Adnan, Wissam and Samir Joubran, at the Treibhaus in Innsbruck, 2008. Photo: Svickova, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. · Ouds in the doorway of a shop in Damascus, 2008. Photo: Vyacheslav Argenberg, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The oud is the short-necked lute of the music from Morocco to Iraq, and of Turkey and Armenia: a deep pear-shaped body, a neck without frets and five or six courses of strings plucked with a long plectrum. Without frets the player can stop a string anywhere, which gives it the intervals of the maqam. Its Arabic name, al-ʿūd, went into Europe as the lute.

In Baghdad Munir Bashir made it a solo concert instrument, and Naseer Shamma and Rahim AlHaj followed. In Cairo Riyad Al Sunbati and Farid al-Atrash played it; from Lebanon and Palestine come Marcel Khalife, Rabih Abou-Khalil, Simon Shaheen and Le Trio Joubran, and from Tunisia Anouar Brahem and Dhafer Youssef. In Istanbul there are Udi Hrant and Necati Çelik, and Ahmed Abdul-Malik put the oud into jazz in 1958.

The list has 47 records from 1958 to 2021; the oldest recordings come as later collections, dated by the years the catalogues give them. Singers who play the oud as they sing, among them Mohammed Abdel Wahab, are left out, since the voice leads those records. About 44 hours of music, 5 days of a few records each.

What it sounds like

From Hobb Eih, the song Baligh Hamdi wrote for Umm KulthumHoussem Bettaibi, oud

Recording: Houssem Bettaibi, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

By genre

World 28%Jazz 9%Classical 1%Other 62%
  • World 28%
  • Jazz 9%
  • Classical 1%
  • Other 62%

The genres named most: oud, world, jazz, iraqi, maqam, ottoman.

The colours of the covers

A stripe for each cover, in the colour Tidal picks from it, sorted by hue; the greys at the end.

Where the music comes from

Music from 13 countries: Iraq 9, Egypt 7, Palestine 5, Turkey 5, United States 5 and 8 more. The deeper the colour, the more albums: one, two to four, five to nine, ten and more.

The 1950s

The 1960s

The 1970s

The 1980s

  • NafasRabih Abou-Khalil · 1988

The 1990s

The 2000s

The 2010s

The 2020s

More lists

Lists of Instruments first, then others; all of them on the blog. The blog.

29 albums · 1976–2024

The kora of Mali, the harp-lute of the jeli

· 1 min read

The kora is the harp-lute of the jeli, the griots of Mali, Guinea, Senegal and the Gambia: 21 strings over a large calabash covered in cowhide, played with the thumbs and forefingers of both hands.

World 89%Blues 3%Classical 3%Other 5%
  • World 89%
  • Blues 3%
  • Classical 3%
  • Other 5%

Read and see the list