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t Labyrinth the workshop led by Turkish ney master Ömer Erdog˘dular continues all day, endless group playing in a circle. This week there’s just the one workshop; during the summer there are often several running concurrently. Most of the students, from Greece and around the world, are already skilled players and some are professionals. One of those, Spanish multi-instrumental- ist, ex-L’Ham de Foc leader Efrén López, who began taking lessons from Ross in about 2000, played with the Labyrinth group and now also leads seminars, tells me “Often Turkish guys come for the Turkish music seminars because it’s really hard to catch those masters in Turkey so it’s easy for people to come here for a week in Greece.” Efrén rejoins Ömer’s seminar and I walk up through narrow alleys between the white-painted houses, trees laden with lemons and oranges, to the surrounding green hills speckled with spring flowers and dotted with almond and olive trees against a backdrop of the snow-capped mountains to the east.
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I spend the rest of the day interviewing more musicians that David has lined up, to get a sense of Labyrinth’s role in their lives. When Ross and Kelly arrive the following day he and I spend a long time talking of many things – he’s very thoughtful and articu- late, and I learned a lot; this piece only has space for some of it.
Ross is of Irish parentage: he was born in Norfolk, but only spent twenty days there. His family moved around the world, so he was brought up in the USA, Canada and Japan.
“I wasn’t born and raised in one place, so I really don’t feel myself to have an ethnic identity at all. And that is actually extremely convenient for me, because it meant I was able to adapt to a new environ ment rather quickly.”
Having already done considerable exploration of the sort of music that can be described as ‘modal’ – the wide sweep of linear, non-chordal music of the Middle-Eastern, Balkan and oriental world, Ross arrived in Crete in the 1970s.
“I used to fish for swordfish, and I ran this sort of café. We did-
n’t have much in the way of coffee, it was mostly raki and that sort of thing, big barrels. And I and my friends would be playing music; it was just a hang-out for musicians and people who liked music. People would come, and fill up a jug from a wine barrel, or raki, and drink and pay what they liked.”
After some time in Crete he lived for twelve years in Athens running a music school teaching modal musics. Kelly began taking lyra lessons there when she was seventeen, and is now herself a leading player and teacher, and Ross’s regular duo partner and in his various other projects.
“What I’d noticed in the Athens school”, Ross continues, “was that we had many students who would come every week for their lesson, but because I lived above the school there were certain people who would be in my house every day, and spend the evenings together playing. And these were the people who were learning; those who were just coming for their lessons once a week, it wasn’t really getting them anywhere. So I thought ‘OK, well, how did I learn?’ And I thought, all of my teachers were peo- ple I spent extended amounts of time with, on a day-to-day, sort of apprenticeship type of basis really.”
“So I decided what we were going to do was move the whole thing out of the city, where everyone has far too many distrac- tions, into an environment like this, where we can provide at least a little bit of living experience, a bit of experience of a proper apprenticeship. With my own teacher in Afghanistan, from whom I learned rubab, none of us were his formal students, we would all
Omer Erdogdular and students
Photo: Andrew Cronshaw
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