Athens Concert (ECM)
Charles Lloyd/Maria Farantouri
Released August 26, 2011
AllMusic Favorite Jazz Albums 2011
JazzTimes Top 10 Albums of 2011
YouTube:
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=61FahkHzq3I&list=OLAK5uy_n-wkFnHQaPXPfMmqdWhSu1p9ql615aIK8
Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/album/1vrg5DtPuBHlFp037J3d7A?si=YsnmM_zvSl6Dsdk7oxvQXA&dl_branch=1
About:
“Maria and I built upon this dream of creating a musical bridge between our two worlds. This dream became manifest in the Athens concert.”
Charles Lloyd
Recorded at the foot of the Acropolis, at the open air Odeon of Herodes Atticus, on a summer night last year, “Athens Concert” is an entrancing collaboration between Charles Lloyd, uniquely expressive US saxophonist, and Maria Farantouri, venerable Greece vocalist – the soul of Greece for many listeners. With Lloyd’s exceptional band in impassioned support, the project raises the bar for ‘trans-cultural’ music-making. The music sweeps the listener along in its swirling river of sound. This is music of many moods and currents – celebratory, yearning, melancholic – embracing suites of traditional Greek music, songs of Theodorakis and Eleni Karaindrou, and Lloyd originals. The Lloyd band and Farantouri perform with a commitment that underscores the essential compatibility of the idioms. The great Greek themes of love, exile, nostalgia, and departure find their correspondences, after all, in the history of jazz. And if Farantouri is not a jazz singer per se, she embodies an emotional power comparable with the greatest vocalists of any genre. Lloyd writes in his liner notes: “From her first notes I felt such a power and depth of humanity; she is a modern wonder rising up from the ruins of civilization. She is Alethea, Athena, Aphrodite, Demeter, Gaia, Phemonoe – Mother of the Universe. The resonance of her voice stirred the memory of my love for Lady Day.”
“Athens Concert” is the first recorded documentation of the alliance between Lloyd and Farantouri, but the concept has been taking shape and gathering momentum over the last decade. The singer and saxophonist met when Charles heard Maria in concert in his home town of Santa Barbara, California, in 2002. Lloyd subsequently invited Farantouri to join him on stage in Greece in 2003. “I felt her voice would be a perfect vehicle for my song ‘Blow Wind’. She, in turn, introduced me to ‘Vlefaro Mou’ by Nikos Kypourgos and several songs by Mikis Theodorakis. Mikis’s composition, ‘I Kept Hold on My Life,’ with haunting lyrics by Nobel laureate poet George Seferis took root in my repertoire…”
Every year since then Lloyd has spent time in Greece learning more of its history, music and landscapes, and passing along knowledge of his own broad genre to Farantouri. “For me,” says the singer, “it was an aesthetic pleasure to work with Charles, becoming a unique experience on stage, as jazz music blended with the musical tradition of Greece, and transformed it into a wholly new sound.” In this they were aided by two further Greek musicians, arranger-pianist Takis Farazis and lyra player Socratis Sinopoulos. The Greek traditional music heard here was arranged for the performance by Takis Farazis. A former student of Hungarian jazz pianist Bela Lacatos, Farazis established his reputation in Greece with the group Iskra and with his compositions for cinema and for presentations of ancient Greek drama. As Lloyd notes, he made “an enormous contribution to the Athens concert by connecting the dots between the structure of Greek tradition and the open borders of improvised music.”
Socratis Sinopoulos began his musical life as classical guitarist, taking up the lyra (the pear-shaped fiddle) and the laouto (Eastern lute) in 1988. For the past twenty years, he has collaborated with composers, musicians and singers from Greece and the wider world in genres from folk music to jazz. Lloyd: “Socratis’s mystical sound on lyra adds an entirely ‘other’ dimension”: archaic, at times hypnotically insistent in the Greek suites, it opens a door upon another time and culture. Sinopoulos has been heard as a soloist on Eleni Karaindrou’s ECM recordings, including “Trojan Women”, “Elegy of the Uprooting” and “The Weeping Meadow”. Farantouri, of course, has a lifelong friendship and artistic association with Karaindrou. They met as students in Athens in the 1960s. In the years of the Junta, they reunited in Paris, where Farantouri sang on Eleni’s first major works.
In the public mind, Maria Farantouri remains best-known as the singer who gave voice to the protest music of Mikis Theodorakis. Only 16 years old when she joined Theodorakis’s ensemble, her rich contralto was heard at numerous political events. She subsequently kept Theodorakis’s music alive during the seven years of the military dictatorship when it was banned in Greece. If universally acknowledged (also by the composer) as the optimum interpreter of Theodorakis, Farantouri has sung many different kinds of music. And we also hear her, in the “Athens Concert”, singing music from the Byzantine sacred tradition, folk songs, Charles Lloyd’s ballads, and Karaindrou’s “Voyage to Cythera”, the theme song for the movie by Theo Angelopoulos.
Recorded collaborations with vocalists have been rare in Lloyd’s discography, a handful of pop and rock sessions in the 1970s notwithstanding. Yet through the medium of his saxophone, flute and tarogato, he is himself a singer – able in the course of a few bars to conjure the spirit of the blues, the muezzin’s cry, or an evening raga. His feeling for melody is profound, whether he is finding new meaning in jazz standards, or wringing emotion from spirituals. From the beginning of his career, Lloyd has also proven an insightful leader and his band is, by common critical consensus, one of the finest in jazz today. The line-up has been stable for four years now, since Jason Moran came aboard as pianist in the quartet in early 2007. It is significant that Moran, a celebrated leader in his own right, newly voted Jazz Artist of the Year in the Down Beat Critics Poll and a recent recipient of a MacArthur ‘Genius’ Award continues to make space for commitments with Lloyd in an increasingly crowded schedule – because there are lessons to be learned. “It’s generationally important for Reuben, Eric and me to play with Charles,” Moran recently told Down Beat. “Charles rides what we play and likes how we address his classic songs [“Dream Weaver” in the present instance]. He jumps into it.” The elastic beat shared between Harland and Rogers and Moran is just one of the joys of this ensemble, and their tremendous drive and musicality underpins the wide-ranging action of the Athens Concert.
Track Listing:
Disc 1
1. Kratissa Ti Zoi Mou [I Kept Hold of My Life] (Mikis Theodorakis) 5:59
2. Dream Weaver (Charles Lloyd) 8:10
3. Blow Wind (Charles Lloyd) 5:34
4. Requiem (Agathi Dimitrouka / Charles Lloyd) 5:57
5. Greek Suite, Pt. 1: Hymnos Stin Ayia Triada [Hymn to the Holy Trinity] (Traditional) 4:03
6. Greek Suite, Pt. 1: Epano Sto Xero Homa [In the Dry Soil] (Mikis Theodorakis) 2:52
7. Greek Suite, Pt. 1: Messa Stous Paradissious Kipous [In the Paradise Gardens] (Mikis Theodorakis) 4:49
8. Taxidi Sta Kythera [Voyage to Cythera] (Eleni Karaindrou) 4:35
Disc 2
1. Prayer (Charles Lloyd) 7:58
2. Greek Suite, Pt. 2: Vlefaro Mou [Oh Eyelid] (Nikos Kypourgos / Lina Nikolakopoulou) 3:32
3. Greek Suite, Pt. 2: Margaritarenia (Traditional) 1:29
4. Greek Suite, Pt. 2: Thalassaki Mou [My Little Sea] (Traditional) 2:57
5. Greek Suite, Pt. 3: Epirotiko Meroloi [Lament from Epirus Region] 6:28
6. Greek Suite, Pt. 3: Kægomæ Kæ Sigoliono [I Burn and Slowly Melt] 5:00
7. Greek Suite, Pt. 3: Mori Kontoula Lemonia [Little Lemon Tree] (Traditional) 2:40
8. Greek Suite, Pt. 3: Alismono Kæ Hæromæ [I Forget and I Am Glad] (Traditional) 3:06
9. Greek Suite, Pt. 3: Tou Hel’ To Kastron [The Castle of the Sun] (Traditional) 4:28
10. Yanni Mou [My Yanni] (Traditional) 7:27
Personnel:
Charles Lloyd: tenor saxophone, flute, tarogato
Maria Farantouri: voice
Jason Moran: piano
Reuben Rogers: double-bass
Eric Harland: drums
Sokratis Sinopoulos: lyra
Takis Farazis: piano
Recorded live July 4, 2010, at Herod Atticus Odeon, Athens
Produced by Dorothy Darr and Manfred Eicher
Mixed by Manfred Eicher and Jan Erik Kongshaug
Review:
No one, save for perhaps Charles Lloyd, could have predicted that when he resumed his recording career in 1989 with ECM, he would scale such artistic heights as a player, a mentor, and a bandleader. Lloyd has taken part in many fascinating musical experiments: with the late Billy Higgins in Sangam with drummer Eric Harland and Indian master percussionist Zakir Hussain, as well as on his many quartet recordings. The latest version, with bassist Reuben Rodgers, Harland, and pianist Jason Moran, has been together just over four years. It should come as no surprise then, that The Athens Concert, a double disc with the truly legendary Greek contralto Maria Farantouri, is as full of the exploratory wonder and delight as his other dates for the label. Farantouri is regarded in her own country as Edith Piaf was in France. Lloyd’s band and Farantouri are assisted by Socratis Sinopoulos on lyra. “Kratissa Toi Zoi Mou (I Kept a Hold of My Life),” is a tune by Mikis Theodorakis set to a poem by George Seferis. Versions of Lloyd’s “Dream Weaver” and “Prayer” are the only real instrumental tracks, and his song “Blow Wind” contains lyrics sung in English by Farantouri. The tune “Requiem” is a jazz number with lyrics by the famed writer/lyricist Agathi Dimitrouka. The three-part, 15-song Greek Suite takes up the lion’s share of the performance. It is comprised of tunes that range from a Byzantine-era hymn to traditional songs from various regions of Greece, two more Theodorakis tunes, and one by composer Eleni Karaindrou (also an ECM artist) entitled “Voyage to Cythera.” The suite was arranged by Takis Farazis, who also plays an additional piano on set-closer “Yanni Mou,” and with Sinopoulos, bridges the two traditions. There isn’t anything to really describe this music other than to say it is equally out of historical time and simultaneously concurrent within its stream. The two musical traditions — post-millennial jazz and those of Greece’s various eras and regions — are made seamless, creating an entirely new and singular work that is dramatic, subtle, completely soulful, and full of startling musicianship. Indeed, the quartet plays this music as if it were part of their standard repertoire for a very special occasion. Improvisation, harmonic invention, and Lloyd’s singular sense of leadership don’t demand fine performances from his players; they are given freely. In turn, he offers his finest to Farantouri, who brings the collective bounty to the listening audience. The Athens Concert is truly inspirational and quite a watermark in a career full of them for Lloyd.
Thom Jurek (AllMusic)
