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DUOUD
One oud good, two ouds better. Jamie Renton meets a fine new duo.

As their name suggests, DuOud are a duo of oud players. Tunisian born Jean-Pierre Smadja (a.k.a. Smadj) and Algerian Mehdi Haddab are the North African lute pluckers in question. Smadj (who should be familiar to regular readers from the feature in fR215), also lays down beats and pieces of electronica on his trusty laptop. Their debut CD, Wild Serenade (Label Bleu), is a wickedly addictive piece of work and so I was eager to catch up with the DuOud dudes when they came over to perform as part of the Naming The Golem night at the ICA in September.

"Racine d’Ennéade" courtesy Harmonia Mundi & Label Bleu

Smadj and Mehdi are neighbours, living in the same suburb of Paris. They first met up four years ago through mutual film-maker friends. "I had been playing oud for a long time and had started to experiment with electronics," explains Mehdi, after a hard day's rehearsal at the ICA. "Whereas with Smadj, the opposite was true. He had been making electronic music for many years, but only playing oud for a shorter period of time. So we complimented each other." They were just friends at first, Smadj was busy doing his own stuff (he released a pair of impressive albums on MELT 2000), while Mehdi had his main gig as part of Parisian multiculturalists Ekova. Pretty soon though they were jamming together. "We started playing together just for fun and for friends," says Smadj, taking up the story. "Then one day Mehdi said 'that's enough of just improvising with the oud' and we started to try to play real pieces together and afterwards we began to compose our own material. We needed rhythms to support our improvisations and so we decided to put electronic beats behind our rehearsals, and with time we just got involved in compositions with electronics."

The duo made their live debut a year ago at the Kemia Bar in London and have been polishing up their live act with regular gigs in small Parisian clubs ever since. "We try to use the electronic side of the project when we play live," explains Smadj. "So I bring my laptop and we play the themes and then afterwards, during the improvisations, I play the computer during Mehdi's solos and I try to make it organic, to make it really live, as a percussionist would do. Last year when we played our first gig in France, we recorded it onto minidisc. Afterwards I went to Womex and took the DuOud minidisc with me. I gave this little demo to everybody there and we had two responses. One from World Music Network in England and one from Label Bleu." In spite of their respect for WMN, they plumped for Label Bleu. "It is French like us and it's a good label, so I think we will be able to do a lot of things in France because of that."

There are already a number of projects mixing North African tradition with modern electronica and yet somehow DuOud stands out from the pack. For Smadj, the secret is in the duo's sense of interaction. "We put our improvisations on the oud on top of live electronic manipulation. We play together and we try to play with rhythms, but we want these rhythms to move inside the playing. So when Mehdi is going to improvise, I just naturally take the computer and also improvise with it, and it makes for a special sound because it's not just a loop playing behind."

"It is a question of generation," adds Mehdi. "We are not of the generation of musicians who learnt production and music only in the traditional way. We grew up with music from all over the world. I grew up in Algeria, but I used to listen to rock music, metal music, reggae music, funk, soul, jazz, everything. So if we were to play only traditional music, I think we would have to act, as it wouldn't be true to who we are and our backgrounds. I mean I didn't want to play oud when I was younger, I wanted to play electric guitar and only later, when I was 16, did I start to play oud. Now I play electric oud, combining the two."

The name DuOud refers both to the number of people involved and the duality of the music that they make (East-West, acoustic-electronic). "When you play acoustic oud over the top of electronic things it works so good," marvels Smadj. "There's no fight between these two parts." "It is easier in the studio than on the stage," chips in Mehdi. So for the moment at least, they just play live with electric ouds, although they plan to develop a set-up where they can play the acoustic instruments in a live setting. What they can do now is make use of electric effects on the oud. "I don't know anybody else who is doing this," notes Smadj. "No other oud players are using distortion or phasing or any of these kind of effects. Every oud player that we know uses an acoustic instrument with an acoustic accompaniment percussion, horns maybe, but not the electric sound of the oud."

Naming The Golem is a multimedia club night organised by YaD Arts, celebrating the connections between Jewish culture and those that it has come into contact with. The night on which DuOud are appearing (both as a duo and in collaboration with members of fRoots favourites Fantazia), is an exploration of Jewish, French and North African culture. "I'm Jewish and he's Berber," Smadj tells me. "Our ancestors have a common background. We are both from North Africa. Both of our parents taught us about the same kind of music. We listened to Umm Kalthoum, we listened to Farid El-Atrache. We listened to Turkish music, klezmer music, Andalous music." "In the Maghreb," says Mehdi, "all these musics are not close, they are the same! It doesn't matter if the person making the music is Jewish, Muslim, Christian, whatever"

Smadj "So for us it is so natural to play this kind of music together. We have a common language from North Africa, there is no identity problem. Music is a language where we can easily share things and not be involved in political distortion. We didn't come together to make a point, we came together because of our friendship. But in playing together we show that it is natural for people to come together regardless of nationality or religion. Now it has become our fight, our cause."

Article is copright 2002 Southern Rag/fROOTS, and is used by permission
No reproduction is allowed wiothout the specific permission of the publishers.

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