Melbourne - 9-29-2015 at 04:55 AM
Good evening Oudis....
Some of you here may have seen my thread a few weeks back on Khaled al Halabi, the young luthier currently making oud and buzuq in Beirut. Anyway...
he told me a story about an oud his grandfather built for Oum Kalthoum as a gift, with a bowl made from bamboo. I was very interested in more details
on this instrument that Khaled did not have readily on hand at the time.
So after some extended facebooking, and image searching; I managed to find out this oud is alive and well 
Located at the Oum Kalthoum museum in Cairo, with a very odd looking bowl, of bamboo. it forms the perimeter purfling on the face also, which to me
doesn't appear so flash. But also interesting is the raqma - also of bamboo in the shape of the eagle on Egypt's national flag - and similarly on the
Syrian coat of arms, a symbol of the short lived United Arab Republic of 1958.
Minor correction - the now legendary quote within the Halabi family is carved on the finger board and not the back of the neck as initially thought
–la yu3raf al mara’a fi 3asruh – man shall not be known in his lifetime. Or something like that.
It would be interesting to find out why the soundholes take such a not so shabby appearance - surely there's some meaning.
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Melbourne - 9-29-2015 at 04:56 AM
those frames 
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Brian Prunka - 9-29-2015 at 05:43 AM
That appears like it might not be bamboo, but the same reed that nays are made from? Either way, very interesting though I wish the museum would
restore it.
Melbourne - 9-29-2015 at 06:11 AM
Perhaps you're right Brian. A translation blooper on my behalf 
قصب (kasab) is the Arabic - so reed is correct.
A restoration would be great - pity it's in such state of despair ...
Regards;
Sam
Jody Stecher - 9-29-2015 at 06:41 AM
The story of the bamboo oud elicited an old memory. I hope it's not too much Off Topic.
The first oud I ever saw was in a small shop in the Arabic neighborhood around Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn in the mid 1950s. I was maybe 10 years old.
The shopkeeper's name was Maliha and he built ouds. He was friendly and some years later I visited him a few times as a teenager, always stopping at
the Damascus Bakery for some outstanding bread. He liked to talk about musical instruments and the virtues of the oud. Then his shop closed and Maliha
vanished. Then in the early 1970s I was visiting my parents in Brooklyn and was wandering around my old neighborhood (some distance from Atlantic
Avenue) and on Coney Island Avenue, near Ditmas, I found a tiny second hand shop with some odd looking instruments amongst the bric-a-brac. The
shopkeeper was Maliha and one of the instruments he had for sale was a violin he had made out of bamboo. "Bamboo" was the word he used. This was well
over 40 years ago so I can't recall if the material seemed more like another reed than bamboo. The violin was very lightweight.