Here I sit in a park above an ancient Roman agora in Thessaloniki, waiting the 10 hours for the train north, first to Skopje, then a day or two later to Belgrade & the Guca brass band festival!
I missed the morning train by 20 minutes due to trusting the blasted Lonely Planet, so thanks to the Misinformation-Industrial Complex, I have time to send the very email which you now hold in your grubby little paws. I mean glittering massive inbox.
So yeah I landed in Athens nine days ago and booked it out to the overnight ferry to Crete, whereupon I slept upon the deck under the Mediterranean almost full moon. Well I didn't actually particularly sleep, given the almost full moon and the Mediterranean and the fact that it was too lovely to close my eyes. Anyway on with our story.
Landed at 6am, and in trying to figure out where to catch the bus to Houdetsi (home of the Labyrinth Music Workshop, founded & run by Ross Daly, which presents three or four intensive seminars weekly during the summer in instruments ranging from Afghan rebab, through both the Cretan & Istanbul lyras, making stops at klarino & Arabic violin en route to Malian kora), I saw a young longhair with an oddly shaped instrument case who seemed self-assured that he knew what he was doing. Indeed he did, and I'd hereby made the acquaintance of George #1, the very nice lavta player with very nice hair who spoke very nice English, much to my relief (and his, unknowingly, since he never had to hear my Greek).
So a busload of mostly bohemian Greeks, peppered with an Lebanese-Antillean, an Italian, a trio of very sweet Serbs, and one weary American, boards the bus, chatters mostly incomprehensibly for a half hour, and dismounts in front of the taverna in Houdetsi where we would henceforth pass roughly 7 hours out of every 24, mostly nocturnally, playing, eating, smoking (whether first or second hand), and drinking shall we say excessively.
A half block down and through a wooden door one is greeted by three slightly overzealous but sweet dogs on one's way to the instrument museum (or perhaps petting zoo, as all the cases are unlocked to encourage playing of the worldly collection), where eight of us daily gathered to listen to Alexandros Arkadopoulos demonstrate how easy it is to play what we all wished we could play on the klarino, amidst a flood of evidently very amusing tales. (The one I understood involved a pristine young lady santouri player & a mischievous bouzouki player touring with Dalaras, and a remote controlled electronic whoopee device. I'll leave it to you to imagine how I deciphered that one.)
Anyway, yeah, six hours a day, divided by a siesta, a light meal, a beer or two, and of course the everpresent all-you-can-inhale buffet of the world's favorite carcinogen.
Given the eminently relaxed pace, it's either surprising or not at all that I found very little time to woodshed the influx of notes & inflections. We did, however, rock the house (taverna) pretty much nightly, which hopefully counts for something.
Ok so I've been writing this now for almost two hours, so I'm gonna step on the gas.
Went one night to an incredible concert by Ross Daly, Kelly Thoma, Stelios Petrakis, and, well, a lot of gorgeous musicians, set against the wall of an old fortress on the east end of Crete. Somehow I've now formulated some ideas for Cretan & Pontic style brass band tunes.
My friends Aya (violinist) & her dad Alan (laouto & violin etc) appeared for a couple of days. All the 24 year old Greek guys fell in love with Aya, of course. I was hoping to convince them to stay for the laouto workshop this week, but they've run off to Amorgos, seeking, apparently successfully, great violinists. Might see them again this side of the prime meridian, if I change my return ticket to go to Bulgaria for Rumen's niece's wedding on the 19th!
Spent yesterday in Serres with George #2, a fellow clarinetist from the seminar (who I met mere minutes after the aforementioned George #1, but #1 still is entitled to his birthright), who drove me from Athens, put me up for two nights, and is hatching a plan for a three-clarinet band with Dionysios from Arta & me, called Rom Royale (I did suggest we might actually need at least one Rom member to be merit the name), certain to tour the world next year!
Oh yeah, there was, one afternoon in Houdetsi, a slightly heated (lukewarm?), still unresolved discussion of the etymologies of the words Greece, grease, Ellada (the Greek word for Greece), and el-lado (a possible juxtaposition from the ancient Greek meaning something like "with oil") or perhaps elaiolado ("olive oil"). Could the name of this country, where it's true that I've consumed pounds, yea kilos of the nectar of the hardy Mediterranean fruit (did I actually just write that? Oh, I'm hungry. Just noticed.), actually be related, in both languages at that, to olive oil & the historic bounty of said delight round these parts? I, the minority, am quite skeptical, and have many unjustified yet certainly logical & most likely true arguments against the theory, which I won't spell out here because I wanna go stretch my legs & eat something greecy before the train comes.
Hope everyone's doing well, see you when I see you!
Love p
