Sokratis Sinopoulos Quartet

Metamodal is the second ECM album by the Sokratis Sinopoulos Quartet, the Athens group that places the lyra, a small three-stringed bowed fiddle of Byzantine origin, inside a piano trio. Released four years after Eight Winds, it draws on folk forms, Byzantine and classical music and jazz improvisation. At its centre is a three-part suite in which Sinopoulos builds new modes out of the modal tradition of the Eastern Mediterranean.

Sokratis Sinopoulos, born in Athens in 1974, began playing the lyra in 1988 under Ross Daly. He had appeared on ECM with Eleni Karaindrou and Charles Lloyd before leading his own group. His partners are Yann Keerim on piano, Dimitris Tsekouras on double bass and Dimitris Emmanouil on drums. All three know the traditional music of the region from the inside, and Sinopoulos calls that shared knowledge the basis of their communication. The album was recorded at Sierra Studios in Athens in July 2018, with Giorgos Karyotis as engineer and Manfred Eicher producing. Most of it was cut in a single day.

Sinopoulos wrote every piece. Lament opens over an arco bass drone, the lyra tracing an aching line against Keerim's quiet chords. The three Metamodal pieces, subtitled Liquid, Illusions and Dimensions, start from the medieval modal system he knows best. He developed new modes until the music becomes, in his words, "quite abstract". He reads the title both as post-modal and through the Greek meta, which also means among, between and altered. The closing Mnemosyne was improvised on the second day at Eicher's suggestion, using material from Metamodal II. Sinopoulos describes it as "a memory, or an echo, of the whole recording session".

Critics heard a band that had grown since its debut. Chris Kilsby, writing for Bebop Spoken Here, called it "an intriguing and sophisticated album of chamber jazz with a distinctive Greek flavour". Mike Gates in UK Vibe singled out Tsekouras's bowed bass as a counterpoint to the lyra. Fritz Balwit gave the record five stars in Audiophile Audition in 2019. His verdict: "This is a great achievement by both the musicians and the label."

This is the CD edition, ECM 2631, first released on 15 March 2019.