Lament from Epirus

January 22, 2018
An obscure European musical tradition rebukes the sterility of modern culture according to this bombastic appreciation-cum-jeremiad. King, a musicologist and record collector, travels to Epirus, a region straddling northwestern Greece and southern Albania, to savor its unique folk music, which combines droning backgrounds with almost atonal violin and clarinet noodlings, in a style that aficionados concede can feel like “ear torture” to the unaccustomed. The music’s nonconformity is a virtue, King contends, making it a paragon of localism and authenticity comparable only to Mississippi Delta blues for its rootedness in its terroir and defiance of bland commercial aesthetics. King soaks up the Epirotic folkways, dancing at sometimes-raunchy village festivals and quaffing anise-flavored moonshine. He relates stories of Ottoman atrocities and legends of the area’s musicians, meanwhile arguing that folk music performs a crucial social “healing” function. King’s evocations of Epirus and Epirotic music—its haunting forlornness, “the heavy despair of the clarinet and the sad avian mimicry of the violin”—are vivid and engaging. Unfortunately, his sour attacks on all other music—from classical (“lofty but groundless”) to big band (“vacuous, mediocre and sucking”) to pop (“vacuous tripe” shading to “sinister noise”)—can make his praise of folk culture feel like snobbery. Nevertheless, folk music historians and enthusiasts will find much of interest in this well-researched book. Photos.

March 1, 2018
Emotionally wrenching music from northwestern Greece evokes questions about the meaning of music itself.King, a Grammy-winning producer, describes himself as an "obsessed" collector of 78 rpm phonograph records, counting among his treasures American folk music and Delta blues recorded in the 1920s and '30s. In his exuberant literary debut, he recounts his discovery of music far different from any that he had heard before, music so intense and transformative that it set him on a quest to find its cultural roots and to decipher "a larger enigma: why we make music." In 2009, the author was vacationing in Istanbul when he noticed a dusty collection of records on a shop shelf. Buying a few, he carefully transported the fragile discs home and, with great anticipation, played them. The sound, he writes, was startling: "a dissonant instrumental played with an uncontrolled abandon"; a clarinet "sounded as if it were in the throes of death--bent, contorted, and skirting along the margins of control." The music came from Epirus, a remote region in northwestern Greece that had "steadfastly resisted assimilation" for thousands of years. After acquiring hundreds more records, King made several trips to the mountain villages of Epirus to investigate the "musical biosphere" from which the viscerally shattering sounds emerged. He locates one origin of the music in "laments and funeral dirges," which evolved from metrical poetry into instrumental pieces: "a calculated wailing through an instrument such as the clarinet or the violin" that represented "collective remembrance" rather than the commemoration of one individual. In Epirus' sheepherding villages, the shepherd's flute, he believes, was the foundation of all the music that ensued. Participating in festivals, learning traditional dances, drinking the "psychotropic grape distillate" tsipouro, interviewing musicians, collectors, and scholars, King concludes that the "preeminent purpose" of music in Epirus was "therapeutic and curative to the individual and the village." Music, he writes, "was a tool for survival."A fascinating journey led by a passionate guide.

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April 1, 2018

Several years ago, this reviewer listened to the compilation Why the Mountains Are Black (Third Man Records), assembled by King, a musicologist, producer, and 78 record collector. While a CD spinning in an external drive is no 78 on an antique turntable in Istanbul--the circumstances under which King heard this music for the first time--the arresting experience of the music is undeniable. King, known for his assemblages of blues and folk music from the dawn of recording, here weaves a potent tale of discovery and loss in the isolated mountain villages of northwestern Greece. Part memoir, part history, part extended musicological essay, the narrative winds its way through centuries-old folk practices, analytical musings on musical modes, and millennia of cultural and religious history. Here--though possibly not for much longer--music remains embedded in its social context. If appropriation is, at least in part, an act of decontextualization, this title articulates what is lost thereby: the meaning that generations of players and listeners have made of it. VERDICT A singularly fascinating musical odyssey. For folk music fans of all stripes, particularly those with a penchant for hunting down old 78s.--Genevieve Williams, Pacific Lutheran Univ. Lib., Tacoma

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from April 1, 2018
Obsession makes for good books. As a 78 rpm record collector, King was already a fanatic, especially about the earliest blues and country music. Then he discovered the village music of Epirus, the northwestern region of Greece, recorded in America by immigrants in the 1920s. He was as dumbstruck by what he heard as by the country blues he venerated. He had to find more 78s of the stuff, of course, and as much as he could about the musicians, their cultures, and what Epirote music was like now. I was being swept away and I didn't?couldn't?resist. His rapture propels and frequently erupts into the prose of his report on his multifaceted quest. He found the 78s; living relatives and friends of the recorded musicians; the villages in which their talents had been prized; the food and drink and celebrations that fueled and inspired them; and, most important and surprising, that their music and traditions persist, adapted to modernity but not as something preserved and custodially revived. King, who's compiled several CD anthologies of Epirote music, remains ardent to the point of mania throughout, so infusing us with his passion that even passages on music theory and the crafting of ancient instruments enthrall. This is a trip never to be forgotten.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)