Bruce Spiegel's last documentary film Time Rememberd unravels the life and music of Bill Evans. It was named after the homonymous album of Evans, released twenty years after its first recordings in different stages and parts. Some months ago, Spiegel tweeted the live performance of Time Remembered by a Greek jazz duet, filmed at their first live appearence at ZitaP.87, a space for cultural expression in Athens. The duet consists of Michalis Katachanas playing viola and Dimitris Mikelis playing piano. If someone considers how many performances of Time Remembered appear on youtube, featuring this specific one has a lot to denote beyond the director's choice. It is not only the arrangement and interpretation of the specific music piece, but if you followed over a year now these two musicians in their live sessions in different spaces, you would find yourself in an endelessly evolving music dialogue between two mature and intriguing performers.
With a common starting point the Music High School of Palini -the first ever established Music High School in the country-, they meet again after years connecting two quite interesting individual courses in music. Both found themselves studing in the States (Michalis was at New England Conservatory and Dimitris at Berklee College of Music and William Paterson). They also both left Greece after having established a performative background with Dimitris as part of world jazz ensembles and playing with well-known artists of the Greek music scenery and Michalis as a member of rembetiko, among others, ensembles and graduating from the Department of Music Studies in Corfu, under the supervision of Dimos Dimitriadis who is strongly connected with the jazz music genre in higher education in Greece. One of their first performance meetings was as part of an extended ensemble, based on the Frog String Quartet which hosted the addition of Dimitris in oud and Angelos Polychronou in percussion for the presentation of a version of Dimitri's composition A year after already staged at the Athens Festival in 2016 with Najem Project, before the release (2018) of its recording in Palestine as part of the Oudopia album. Every version I've heard is special and I am fond of a quite older one with Dimitris as part of the Mitz Jazz Quartet and the intriguing role of the flute and the straight soprano saxophone.
You cannot easily pass by the double identity of a musician as a pianist and oud player. You cannot also pass by the appearence of viola as a jazz instrument. The first is more secretive, meaning you cannot exactly imagine that the jazz pianist in front of you is also an oud player and with such a crystal clear sound on it. The second is just in front of your eyes but quite uncommon, especially for jazz. I first encountered Michalis' performance on jazz viola at the second Aqua Jazz Festival which took place in Athens in 2018 and it was quite unexpected and mind blowing. What struck me most is summed up in another viola player's statement, Kim Kashkasian's: The viola is still in a state of flux, of experimentation... It is an absoluterly flexible tool that can respond to the player's imagination perhaps more than any other. Along with the instrument's beautiful haunting tone, its flexibility unravelled through Michalis' virtuosity, transforms it to something unusual for the music scenes of the city. The audiences attending his performances, even if mucians are quite an important part of them, take as a given the management of the melodic lines of the viola, the weighing of the bow and so on. But from transcriptions and arrangements till different weighs of the bow and the string, how easy or difficult a vibrato is and how various kinds of sounds are produced, it's a long way and, in fact, an unknown and underrated one to the majority of the audiences at the music scenes Michalis performs. Amazing sounds come to life and I will further discuss in the future these worlds of sounds in other performing groups I attended, like the one with the Samebito project (A.Dante el.guitar, D.Klonis drums, K.Christodoulou piano, M.Katachanas viola). Getting back to the duet, performance of such a string instrument is not the easiest part and, in a way, to fully free the instrument's abilities, an expressive body language is required. And it is so relieving to experience a string player finally free his body while playing, adding himself to a wave of solo players and members of even classical music ensembles like the ones performing at the Saronic Chamber Music Festival, who have broken the static body positions.
The body language of the two musicians is complementary. Mikelis is quite pieceful, but his performative nature does not live him behind in expressivity. While watching him play, even if he was making a small improvised passage or an extended one, I was reminded of the phrase "calm force" we use here, in Greece. And it is a little unusual to listen to him playing piano, since oud has taken an important part of his public performance appearances, like the oud festival he formerly organized at 14, another space for music performances. Quite often we see the double identity of musicians having piano as their first instrument and moving on or combining it with another one. But to combine a western instrument with an eastern one -both on a professional level- is hard, given the requirements of the different music worlds. An elongated discussion highlights Greece as the cauldron of East and West and the multiple performative identities of these musicians prove it. It is not only the genre of jazz music I am talking about, but many different genres of music as layers of the performative identities of these musicians, like rembetiko, traditional and classical, markedly manifested in their own compositions. All this is familiar for us researchers studying musics. The borders of music genres are always under construction.
I treasure jazz duets performing in Athens. From duets with an enduring background, like the one of Yotis Samaras (guitar) with Kostas Konstantinou (double bass), to the fresh new ones, they reflect a meeting of musicians who long for something deeper and more dialogical in their performances. Given the everyday life of professional musicians in the city, time for such projects and rehearsals is limited due to studying, teaching, rehearsing, gigs etc. So the preparation and appearence of such duets is tough to achieve. This duet's project is targeted, as they also state at their event promotions, to create a special kind of chamber music with standards, like the ones of Porter and Evans, along with their own compositions. And it successfully becomes a novel subgenre of chamber music.
In the documentary Universal Mind, while Bill Evans discusses with his brother Harry, he confesses: Yet, I can remember when coming to New York to make a break in jazz and saying to myself "Now, how should I attack this practical problem of becoming a jazz musician as making a living and so? And I ultimately came to the conclusion: All I have to do is "take care of the music" even if I had to do it in a closet, you see. And if I really do that, someone is going to come and open the door of the closet. Be sure, any time you have the chance to attend the duet, you will open the closet's door.
p.s: during this pandemic, the profession of musicians is hardly struck... I am just longing for the moment we will meet again at performances and festivals. Without music life would be a mistake (F. Nietsche)
April 2020
