Why the Mountains are Black: Primeval Greek Village Music 1907-1960

In early 1980s Epirus (Greece), I learned of a University of Washington musicologist engaged in fieldwork for a PhD on live Greek festival music. After a summer spent enduring rock instrumentation, fuse-melting amplification and generally tasteless interpretation, she abandoned the project.

She was two decades too late for the last of the musicians featured on these 28 tracks – all admirably remastered from vintage 78s belonging to collector and field-researcher Christopher King, previously responsible for the excellent Takimi of Epirus double set. This more specialist outing is certainly ‘primal,’ though perhaps not quite so unhinged as Third Man's press release promises. It's best approached having prior familiarity with Greek traditional sounds; there are no familiar names here besides Macedonian master fiddler Demetrios Semsis, Nikos Karakostas (from Tríkala province) on clarinet and the great vocalist Dalgas (aka Andonios Diamandidis). Danceable virtuoso instrumentals predominate over vocals.

The selections comprise the usual pairing of zournás (folk shawm) and deep-toned or frame drum; sinuous clarinet improvisations; duelling violins, gaïdes (mainland bagpipes) or tsaboúnes (island pipes); Cretan lyra (lap fiddle); and the classic mainland acoustic koumpanía (as shown on Robert Crumb's cover painting) of violin, clarinet, percussion and plucked strings. Special treats include Dalgas on rural folk material rather than his usual art singing, ornately inventive fiddler Alexis Zoumbas, Athanasios Lavidas’ sinuous clarinet, plus Semsis’ jaunty ‘Syrtos Politikos’.

King's liner notes intelligently place music and players (some anonymous) in their social context, and explain why so much was recorded in the US.