Arcs & Rivers
Joel Lyssarides & Georgios Prokopiou
ACT Music
Four stars
By Robert Vale
This duet album brings together Swedish pianist/composer Lyssarides and Greek bouzouki player Prokopiou. The pairing of a pianist with the player of an instrument from the plucked lute family has been a most successful formula in recent years. The late Chick Corea’s partnership with banjo player Bela Fleck in 2007 and that of Stefano Bollani with mandolinist Hamilton de Holanda in 2013 particularly come to mind.
The genesis of Arcs & Rivers can be traced to the 1940s when Lyssarides’ Greek Cypriot grandparents emigrated to Sweden. Eighty years later, during the Covid lockdown, Lyssarides, curious about his ethnicity, purchased a bouzouki and set about exploring its musical possibilities. This led to him meeting Prokopiou, who, he discovered, had also emigrated to Sweden only a few years earlier. Together they engaged in sessions on improvising and composing and subsequently recording this album.
Lyssarides’ past recordings have usually been of his original compositions played in a jazz trio format but with pronounced classical elements. Prokopiou’s bouzouki can be either a six- or eight-stringed instrument often found in Greek folk and popular music and associated with Mikis Theordarakis, the prolific composer of much 20th-century popular Greek music. Lyssarides and Prokopiou often bring these diverse elements together, playing separate melodic lines in counterpoint.
All pieces but one were composed by either Lyssarides or Prokopiou or by both jointly.