Sokratis Sinopoulos, Yann Keerim

Topos is the first studio album by the Greek duo of lyra player Sokratis Sinopoulos and pianist Yann Keerim. At its centre are the six Romanian Folk Dances of Béla Bartók, taken apart and rebuilt as open frames for improvisation. Around them the two musicians place four pieces of their own, and the joins are hard to hear, so the album plays as one continuous dialogue between folk tradition and chamber jazz.

Sinopoulos was born in Athens in 1974, studied Byzantine music and classical guitar as a boy and took up the lyra, a bowed instrument going back to Byzantine times, in 1988. ECM listeners know him from his work with Charles Lloyd and Maria Farantouri on Athens Concert and with Eleni Karaindrou. Keerim has been the pianist of the Sokratis Sinopoulos Quartet since its formation in 2010, heard on Eight Winds and Metamodal. Here the duo is heard on its own for the first time. The album was recorded in February 2024 at Sierra Studios in Athens, with Giorgos Karyotis as engineer, and produced by Manfred Eicher.

The Bartók dances are slowed down and stretched rather than played as miniatures. In One Spot, usually a brief piece, opens into more than five minutes of close listening. Fast Dance, close to nine minutes long, is less a burst of speed than a ghostly version of its earthy model. Its pulse comes through the silences as much as the notes. The originals set the scene around them. The opening Vlachia rocks on gentle piano chords while the lyra hovers above, and Keerim's short Mountain Path adds a modal, faintly bluesy interlude. The record closes with Stick Dance, which goes back to the first of Bartók's set and leaves the circle open.

In the booklet the two players describe their title as a meeting point: "Our Topos is where tradition meets the present." Reviewing the album for ECM Reviews in October 2025, Tyran Grillo wrote that the lyra "exhales an ancient soul into the modern air". He heard in the nearly twenty years the two have played together an art of intuition. The ECM notes speak of conversations that interlock gracefully, with a keen sense of space and atmosphere.

This is the CD edition, ECM 2847, first released in October 2025.