For more than a decade, Christopher King has proven his mettle as a foremost collector, curator, and restorer of vintage American vernacular music. And, for the past several years, he’s been exhibiting a similar adeptness with regard to early commercial recordings of Polish, Ukrainian, Greek, and Albanian traditions. Five Days Married & Other Laments is King’s second volume devoted to the demotika (folk music) of Epirus (Northern Greece and Southern Albania), following 2011′s Don’t Trust Your Neighbors, a staggering compilation of Albanian lyric songs and dance tunes originally released on 78-rpm recordings in the 1920s and ’30s. Five Days moves further south to incorporate material from Roma and Greek musicians, and although the religions and languages change,…
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…the music — made by keening clarinets, frenzied fiddles, throbbing vocal polyphony, and a shrieking shepherd’s flute — remains profoundly affecting.
Don’t Trust Your Neighbors, Five Days Married, and King’s four-CD Beyond Rembetika set (released last month by JSP) could be considered correctives for the enduring emphasis placed on rebetika, the music of the urban Greek underworld, and, as such, they’re essential: there’s a hill-country wildness to these performances that are a welcome counterweight to the (ironically) more sober sounding singers of the cafés and hash dens of the cities. But this music isn’t remotely of value only because of what it’s not — each of the fourteen selections of Five Days Married is a bona fide masterpiece, some full of gasping longing, others of boundless joy, but all of them succeeding in reaching, in King’s words, “the very discreet act of catharsis as a collective whole and [converging] on a higher plateau of harmony and vitality.” This record features that rarest caliber of music: the music you had no idea existed, but that, now that you’ve heard it, you couldn’t bear to be without.