Artist: Melos
Album: Melos – Chants de la
Méditerranée
Year: 2012
Line-up: Keyvan Chermirani – artistic
direction & percussions
Dorsaf Hamdani – vocals
Mohamed Lassoued – violin &
rebab
Mohammed Rochdi Mfarredj – qanun
Drossos Koutsokostas – vocals
Kyriakos Kalaitzidis – oud
Kyriakos Petras – violin
Périklis Papapetropoulos – saz,
bulgari, lavta
Juan Carmona – flamenco guitar
El Kiki – vocals
Sergio Martinez - cajon
Label: Accords Croisés
μελος – 1.
a member (a person in a group); 2. a limb; 3. a song, strain, the
music to which a song is set, an air, melody (Lindell and Scott:
Greek-English Lexicon)
The Mediterranean is truly a
fascinating place in many ways but especially in the field of
cultural history it holds a particular interest. The roots of the
whole Western culture and civilisation are found in the Ancient
Greece which was not summoned out of nothing but rather it was born
in the course of over a thousand years as a result of interaction
between the Mediterranean culture and the Arabic and Islamic
cultures. The Mediterranean is not only a historical and cultural
space of the researchers, historians and intellects but also the
mystical and magical space of writers, musicians and other artists.
All the numerous cultures of the Mediterranean form one singular and
vast continuity where the same phenomena, thoughts and forms appear
over and over again in different geographical locations and in
different time periods. All these elements are rooted deeply in the
space and time and thus one cannot separate one Mediterranean culture
without taking account the greater network of cultural influences of
the whole Mediterranean sea.
Melos is a project created by Saïd
Assadi, the director of the French concert office, production agency
and record label Accords Croisés and realised by the prolific
Iranian percussionist and composer Keyvan Chemirani. Its' aim is to
explore the endless Mediterranean culture and its' power through
music. For this rather ambitious artistic pursuit of bringing
together different musical traditions of the Mediterranean and modern
compositions, Keyvan has not settled on gathering individual
musicians from different Mediterranean cultures but has went even
further by bringing in three whole ensembles forming a group of
eleven people which features musicians from Spain, Morocco, Tunisia
and Greece. The ensembles around the project have varied over the
years around Keyvan but on this particular album we have the plessure
to witness Juan Carmona and his ensemble, Dorsaf Hamdani and her
ensemble and the Greek En Chordais joining forces to create something
tremendous musically.
This record, simply titled Melos
– Mediterranean songs, brings together three rich musical
traditions of the different members of the project: flamenco from
Spain, Greek music and maluf from the Maghreb region (Northwest
Africa, west of Egypt). Additionally, other musical traditions and
their elements are explored here going as far as to Armenia and all
the way to India. Music presented here is an enchanting search of
common musical grounds and counterparts of various music style and
lyrical themes of the Mediterranean; Melos is a fascinating
study of the similar musical modes and their functions and specially
the rhythmic strength and possibilities which are exquisite and
endless in the Mediterranean music traditions. Nevertheless, it is
not only a piece of academic research but most of all an artistic
creation. The one major problem with these kinds of fusion projects
is the difficulty of mixing the two – and in this case various –
different elements in one pot without it sounding contrived. The
strength and the magic of Melos are that Keyvan Chemirani and
all the talented musicians here succeed in making and piecing
together songs which have all these different elements in them, and
yet, they all sound natural. Here we have compositions which all at
the same time have sounds and images of the past and the tradition,
but still sound new and exciting, they might seem somewhat strange
and foreign but are also somehow familiar. It is a piece of the
mythical time which still can be found in certain parts of the
Mediterranean.
Similar to the epic story of Homer's
Odyssey, Melos is
a musical and cultural journey where one sets off traveling the world
and returns home, returns to oneself. The project is a glorious
attempt to caress the whole Mediterranean culture and spellbind its'
listener with its' magic never neglecting the integrity and the
uniqueness of the cultures of its' individual members. Here the one
who seeks might find a brief glimpse of the mythical time, the nature
and the hidden.
Here
is a 10-minute document about the project:
Written
by Παναγιωτιης
