Mike's Oud Forums

Qanbus by Bara Gnouma (Burkina Faso)?

MatthewVanitas - 7-10-2016 at 10:19 AM

I've always been interested in qanbus, the narrow early Yemeni oud that spread around the Indian Ocean circle, since I have a weak-spot for off variants of more popular instruments. Plus I've been meaning for a while to add a fretless nylon-strung instrument to my collection.

I stumbled across an amazing series of writeups about the qanbus (same author has others for African lute instruments), and amongst the pages found a modern experimental qanbus built for Patrice Cronier in Burkina Faso, by a workshop called Bara Gnouma that has a really slick modern website and reasonable prices for a number of instruments: https://www.baragnouma.com/en/

Here's the booklet of writeups, note this one is just one of a series he's written and posted online: http://inthegapbetween.free.fr/pierre/GAMBUS_PROJECT/01_PORTFOLIO.p... (note that this specific instruments starts around page 49)

The qanbus was a custom job, not a standard offering, but I'm considering writing the workshop to ask if it's something they'd do again. Has anyone worked with Patrice, gotten a chance to try his qanbus out? I don't have a plan for formal oud study, so if I get one I'd probably just learn some really basic maqams off online stuff, and otherwise just improvise and also so some microtonal experimental stuff, but the piece shown in the booklet is just gorgeous!


EDIT: I've sent the shop an email asking if they are interested in making more qanbus. If so, I'll post here in case anyone else is interested, depending on price, and perhaps if more than one of us wants one we can get a better price for having a small run of them made?

Jono Oud N.Z - 7-11-2016 at 12:59 PM

Very interesting.
Thanks!


MatthewVanitas - 7-14-2016 at 07:35 AM

Got a message back from the shop, he says that although it's not really a specialty of theirs, they can make more like they made Patrice for €250 plus shipping. This is reeeeeally tempting:
Quote:

Merci pour votre message et pour l’intérêt que vous portez à nos instruments.

Oui, nous pouvons refaire des qanbus similaires à ceux que nous avions fait pour Patrice Cronier.
Ceci dit, la confection de qanbus n'est pas notre spécialité.

Pour le prix je pense à 250 euros. Le montant des frais de port sera calculé par rapport au choix du transporteur et au pays de destination.

Je reste à votre disposition pour tout renseignement complémentaire.
Cordialement.
Fabrice.

Jono Oud N.Z - 7-15-2016 at 03:42 PM

Excellent!:)

These are two good albums featuring the qanbus:

http://www.rootsworld.com/reviews/yemen2.shtml