Little wonder that the music is imbued with subsuming sadness and longing. In Greek mythology, the newly dead must traverse the river before entering Hades – the underworld. The music originates in the mountains of Epirus and in the riverbeds of Acheron, the river of woe. It is easy to understand why King finds the outpourings of this otherworldly music transformative. He was buried in a paupers’ cemetery in Detroit where King hopes to erect a plaque at Zoumbas’ grave with his name, dates of birth and death, the picture of a violin, and the words: “Shine on for as long as you live.” The book also recounts the story of the Sarakatsiana and the Roma people who pioneered Epirotic folk music and their descendants who continue the tradition today. Zoumbas had emigrated to the US at the end of the Balkans Wars to escape a murder rap and died poor after playing violin to Greek diaspora communities in America. King released a number of breath-taking compilations of this music, including Five Days Married and Why The Mountains Are Black, and collections by violinist Alexis Zoumbas and clarinettist Kitsos Harisiadis, both virtuosos he tries to track down in his compelling book Lament from Epirus. So, my natural curiosity was to seek out not only all the demotic music from Epirus but also from the Peloponnese, Thrace, Macedonia, Crete, Thessaly. But I was deeply curious- of what the meaning and purpose of this music was. When I arrived home back in Virginia and played these discs, I immediately became entranced. “Conveying an emotion through music is one of the most profoundly mysterious techniques to learn but the old musicians know how: you must be able to transmit, graft an emotion onto a sound and they carry that sound through the instrument into the ears of the listeners.” For King, infatuated with the music of the past and condemned to hear it only in scratchy recordings, Epirus was a place where he could touch it in the present – at the panigria and glendi where the intoxicating blend of violin and clarinet music stretched over 3 days of festive abandon, catapulting revellers into Dionysian passion and entrancing solemnity. He recounts his discovery of Epiriot music as being ‘so transformative’ that it set him on a 12-year inquiry into the musical genre’s history.
#Greek season 1 music archive
King, who won a Grammy for his sound engineering on the album Screamin ‘ and Hollerin the Blues : The Worlds of Charley Patton, describes himself as an “obsessed” collector of 78 rpm phonograph records, counting among his treasures American folk music from the ‘20s and what is arguably, the most comprehensive archive of Greek demotic music.
#Greek season 1 music movie
Christopher King looks like he could have stepped out of a movie set in the ’50s – in tweeds, round glasses, moustache and suspenders.
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