Under the Rose Tree

As a disciple of Ross Daly and a player of the lyra (bowed lute) Sokratis Sinopoulos was always going to have both a superb mastery of his instrument and an outward-looking approach to the traditional material he engages with. This is never more evident than on his current disc. Joined by Kyriakis Tapakis on oud, Yann Keerim on piano and Dimitris Emmanouil on drums, he arranges songs and dances from across the Greek-speaking world to place them in a new environment while keeping their origins clearly in the foreground. Particularly welcome here is the inclusion of tunes from a number of different islands that sometimes tend to be ignored. Generally, the tracks where the underlying dance rhythms push the music forward are more successful than those where space is given for more discursive improvisation, though there is some particularly beautiful playing on one such piece, ‘Bagpipe Tune’. It is, however, on tunes such as ‘Mantilátos’ (which is a dance from Thrace), ‘Éri & Soústa’ (from the Dodecanese) and ‘Hasápiko’ (which is a famous dance rhythm, in this case from Istanbul) that the tracks really come to life and you can feel the ensemble gel with a drive that really pulls you along with the music.