Here & There

Folk guitar virtuoso and music professor Dimitris Mystakidis started playing professionally as a 16-year-old in Thessaloniki, inspired by his mother's love of rebetika. Over a 20-year career, he's written two books about Greek music and helped to revive the forgotten finger-picking style of tsibiti, a technique considered to be the urban music of homesick Greek emigrants to the US at the start of the 20th century, influenced by the early Afro-American bluesmen they encountered there. His 2017 release, Amerika, drew parallels with the plight of his people today, forced to flee Greece's financial woes.

This fourth album still reflects on the distance between people, its title referring to the ‘here’ of the East and ‘there’ of the West, but draws from a wider range of musical styles and focuses less on the sorrow caused by politics, dealing instead with the most destructive force known to humankind: love. Each track describes part of the course of a relationship from initial flirting, through commitment and disappointment, to eventual and inevitable break-up. Let's be clear: this is not happy music — imagine a depressed Greek Leonard Cohen who's also suffering from a comedown and you get the picture. But, like Cohen's music, Here & There is heartrendingly beautiful stuff .