Artist: Alex Maguire & Nikolas Skordas
Title: Ships and Shepherds
Cat Number: SLAMCD582
Label, Year Released: SLAM Productions, 2017
Format: CD & all digital platforms
Barcode: 5028386701729
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The Alex Maguire/Nikolas Skordas Duo came out of a chance meeting at a gig when pianist Alex Maguire was playing in Athens, April 2016. Later the same year Alex returned to Greece to explore possibilities of the duo with saxophonist Nikolas Skordas; this CD, recorded live in Athens, is testament to its success.
Alex describes it: “Songs of the land and the sea, journeys from afar and journeys within are the themes of ‘Ships and Shepherds’, the debut recording of the Alex Maguire-Nikolas Skordas Duo. From Odysseus, the archetypal “man of twists and turns”, to the immovable monasteries and hermitages of Greek orthodoxy, a new voice emerges where ancient melodies and instruments join contemporary improvisatory models to forge a modern spiritual music which touches both the heart and mind.”
Alex Maguire: piano
Nikolas Skordas: tenor and soprano saxophones, gaida (bagpipe), tarogato, flutes, bells, whistles
Special guests:
Don Stavrinos: trumpet, flugelhorn (track 10)
Stathis Diamantidis: double bass (track 10)
“The music on the first of these 2 CDs is highly emotive, as is gathered from the album title. There is a romance, deeply expressed, though with sporadic steely edges. The music roils warmly. Both tracks 4 and 5 relax this, both less musically archaic and more contemporaneously abstract…Significantly, the tenor of the second CD is even more abstract, more incorporeal, the music ascending to a different plane of experimentation. Throughout CD1 there was an atmosphere of a close musical discourse between the two players and this even more remarkable in CD2…Ships and Shepherds has emerged from a close liaison between musicians with a common wish to express something of the heart of ancient Greek music, but in the manner of today’s idioms and genres.” – Ken Cheetham, Jazz Views
Recorded live on 22 & 23 November 2016 at Lizard Sound, Athens, Greece by Dimitris Karpouzas
Assistant engineering by Giannis Gargalakos
Mixed and mastered by Konstantinos Fragkopoulos 12 January 2017 at Shellac Studios , Thessaloniki, Greece