GEORGE MGRDICHIAN
The Independent – United Kingdom; May 26, 2006
Ken Hunt
The oud or’ud entered European languages with borrowings such as lute,
luth, laud and Laute. The instrument itself took longer to enter the
musical vocabulary. During the early to late 1960s, the oud travelled
further than it had ever done in terms of public awareness in Europe
and North America. Arguably, two musicians were the great torchbearers
for the instrument. One was the Nubian oud maestro Hamza El Din. The
other was George Mgrdichian, a Philadelphia-raised American of
Christian-Armenian stock.
Oud had been an instrument of expatriate communities with disparate
roots in the Near East, Middle East and Transcaucasus. Mgrdichian had
taken up oud, self-taught, as a result of initially playing on the
Armenian wedding, party and dance circuit as a clarinettist. When the
band’s oud player got called up to do military service, Mgrdichian was
volunteered to take over. It became his main instrument and he
developed a singular fluidity of touch, a modern mixture of the purist
and the pragmatist.
Mgrdichian went to New York in the 1960s to study clarinet, and there
fell into a circle of folk andjazz musicians. In the jazz realm,
Mgrdichian went on to work with the bandleader Dave Brubeck, the
saxophonist Phil Woods and the fringe musician and composer David
Amram. He also played with the Metropolitan Opera, the New York City
Opera, the Philadelphia Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic.
During the 1970s he played oud on a number of albums in a style that
was popularly or jocularly known as belly dance. The likes of Let’s
Belly Dance (1973), Chimera – a fantasy in jazz/ rock/mid-east sounds
(1974) and Belly Dance Navel Academy Vol2 (1977) prove that one
generation’s bad taste becomes another generation’s collectibles.
Fortunately, Mgrdichian’s career flourished in other areas. He was an
innovator on the instrument, adapting traditional playing techniques
while remaining within traditional playing styles. He was innovative
in his left-hand fingering style on the oud in a way that, say,
L. Subramaniam has been in playing the Karnatic violin, through using
all four fingers of the left hand.
Aside from working on sessions for other people for ABC, CBS
Master-works, RCA Victor, Sefarad and Vanguard, Mgrdichian led a
separate recording life as a soloist or leader of his own George
Mgrdichian Ensemble. These recordings concentrated on an Armenian or
Anatolian improvised repertoire and took what the pioneering Armenian
musicologist Komitas Vardapet would have called “la musique rustique
armenienne” beyond the Armenian diaspora into the wider world.
>From the 1980s onwards, Mgrdichian’s recordings appeared on a variety
of labels, with titles such as The Oud (1985),
InstrumentalArmenianFolkDances (1988) and One Man’s Passion (1997).
Ken Hunt
George Mgrdichian, oud player: born Philadelphia 28January 1935′ died
New York 30 April 2006.