As well as being floored by one of the most beguiling records I have ever heard, I managed to learn a few new words in the course of falling its charms.
Xenitia is the Greek ex-pat experience in one word. It incorporates every painful nook and cranny of the dark contours of longing, missing and yearning. It's all the toughest parts of living life through an absence, condensed.
It has all the ingredients of heartbreak and working parts of unrequited love for a place. Strong stuff.
The life story of Alexis Zoumbas and his extraordinary music is impossible to explain without some grasp of the term. He died alone in xenitia in a bleak 1940s Detroit, several worlds away from the balmy heat and music of his childhood.
He grew up in the hinterlands of Epirus, Greece in the last decade of the 19th century. The captivating sound he elicits from his violin is descended directly from the ancient music the shepherds played for their flocks on their wooden flutes.
The sound seems to occupy its own space. I've never heard anything like it. It'll take another couple of new words to explain. Two forms comprise the tradition. The skaros is a contemplative improvisation and is commonly meant to lull or pacify listeners be they sheep or people. The myrologi is a lament.
This isn’t music for dancing. Zoumbas had been more than a decade in New York by the time they were made. A rumour had it that he fled Greece having murdered his landlord, but this has since been disproven. What’s certain is that he was quite a character. He was an artist and an explorer and an audacious musical adventurer.
So what we get here is one of those rare collisions of tradition and modernity. It’s lit with the bright lights of New York but shaded by the ominous darkness of the hills of Epirus. There’s an unfathomable mystery at its core. Life is stalked by death. The sadness of time passing is the uncomfortable strangeness in all our stories. It’s devastatingly beautiful.
