ECM to Release New Sinopoulos Album

The Sokratis Sinopoulos Quartet (photograph by Luciano Rossetti, courtesy of ECM)

I first encountered Sokratis Sinopoulos on the ECM album Athens Concert, a two-CD document of a performance given at the Herod Atticus Odeon in Athens in June of 2010, led jointly by saxophonist Charles Lloyd and vocalist Maria Farantouri. The “side” players combined Lloyd’s rhythm section (Jason Moran on piano, Reuben Rogers on bass, and Eric Harland on drums) with two Greek instrumentalists, Takis Farazis on piano and Sinopoulos playing the lyra, the bowed string instrument used for Cretan folk music. After writing about that album for Examiner.com in October of 2011, I had the good fortune to listen to all of those musicians (except for Farazis) in Herbst Theatre in April of 2012 at a concert organized by SFJAZZ.

As a result of that Athens concert, Sinopoulos decided to take the step of leading his own group. Tomorrow ECM will release Metamodal its second album of the Sokratis Sinopoulos Quartet. The album consists of eight tracks of original compositions by Sinopoulos, three of which amount to the movements of a suite called Metamodal. All of those tracks were recorded on a single day. The following day, the quartet, whose other members are Yann Keerim (piano), Dimitris Tsekouras (bass), and Dimitris Emmanouil (drums), returned to the studio to record a group improvisation for the final track, given the title “Mnemosyne.” As usual, for those who cannot wait, Amazon.com has created a Web page for pre-ordering the album.

Lyra playing reaches back at least as far as the Byzantine era, a time when so-called “modal” scales predated the major and minor scales that now dominate music-making in both theory and practice. That legacy is evident in the title of the album; but, as Sinopoulos observes, the Greek “meta” prefix covers a lot of semantic ground. The online Oxford dictionary gives that prefix three meanings:

1. Denoting a change of position or condition.
2. Denoting position behind, after, or beyond.
3. Denoting something of a higher or second-order kind.

Greek semantics are consistent with these definitions but also include “interior” connotations, such as “among,” “between,” and “in the midst of.” In the advance material for this album, Sinopoulos was quoted as saying:

I’m interested in all the meanings that can be implied by Metamodal.

To be honest, however, I have to say that, having listened to this album several times, the intricacies of semantics are the last thing on my mind. Rather, I am struck by the timelessness of the content, the way in which the quartet can evoke connotations through which Byzantine styles (not to mention folk sources that predate those styles) can intermingle so smoothly with contemporary “jamming” practices. Indeed, that title of that final improvised track is the name of the goddess of memory in Greek mythology; and there is a sense that the improvisation amounts to the “reverberation” of the music-making practices that went into the first eight tracks of the album. Any labels associated with those tracks (or, for that matter, with the idea of a Metamodal “suite” among those tracks), strikes me as afterthoughts in the wake of the recording activities.

This is not to reduce the entire album to an exercise in abstraction. There is an intense expressiveness to the sonorities of Sinopoulos’ lyra, most of which suggest an almost melancholic sense of yearning. As far as my own experiences are concerned, this is music for quiet, solitary listening. Whether or not the sonorities were intended to invoke that “holy city of Byzantium” found in the poem “Sailing to Byzantium” by W. B. Yeats, the music has an other-worldly quality that can absorb the attention without resorting to either denotation or connotation. That is listening experience enough for me!