A wild and wonderful week featuring newly issued The Miles Davis Quintet (Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, Tony Williams), a stupendous concert recording from Charles Lloyd featuring Greek vocalist Maria Farantouri, and rounded out by Amerigo Gazaway’s mash up of Fela Kuti and De La Soul. Ah, the music, the music!
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Charles Lloyd has long been known for his investigations of alternative modes of spiritual concentration, specifically transcendental meditation, but he achieves nirvana with this concert that features Greek vocalist Maria Farantouri and guest musicans Socratis Sinopoulos on lyra (a traditional string instrument that sounds like a violin) and Takis Farazis on piano/arranger, in addition to Lloyd’s regular bandmates Jason Moran on piano, Reuben Rogers on acoustic bass, and Eric Harland on drums. This is sacred music celebrating life itself, celebrating the strength and courage required to survive and overcome whatever would attempt to exploit and/or deaden life.
We often acknowledge western culture as Greco-Roman-based and make all kinds of philosophical and mythic connections between Greek antiquity and contemporary American existence. Throw the pseudo-philosophical simplicities out the window. This is music that is based in the struggles of two different cultures to overcome oppression.
Jazz was founded in the quest for freedom. And the Greek music chosen for this concert, even when based on centuries old folk music, is ultimately a reflection of contemporary Greek struggles against tyranny and economic exploitation. Built into both the Greek and the African American cultures are the use of lamentations as an expression of resistance, and a belief in the power of music to enable survival of otherwise unbearable hardships.
Moreover, not only is Maria Farantouri celebrated as a curator of Greek song who went into exile during the period of the Greek military takeover, she also returned to her homeland after the political departure of the military and in 1989 was elected to the Greek Parliament as Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) MP. The sociological and political concordances between these two seemingly separate cultures are real and deep.
You hear a mutual emphasis on freedom and beauty throughout this interlocking suite of songs that are deeply felt by Greek audiences and simultaneously sound very familiar to jazz audiences (even though in truth most of us are hearing this music for the first time and don’t have a clue to the literal meaning of the lyrics). The beauty of the Athens Concert is that the cultural constraints and our own limitations melt away as we grasp the illumination at the core of the music: real life is about celebrating existence and sharing love.
—kalamu ya salaam